I grew up reading J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. My dad read it to me when I was six, and I re-read it many, many times after that.
The impression I received from that work is that Men, humans that is, are clumsy, noisy creatures who stalk about the wilderness making a huge racket and every animal and elf can hear them coming for miles away. ZOMG we r not 1 wit teh Nature!!! I used to practice moving as silently as I could through the woods, so as not to be one of those awful, unmindful humans (this was before I learned that moving noisily is a good thing, letting snakes know to get out of your way). Such a contrast to those noble, quiet woodland creatures! They live so in harmony with their environment that they almost ne'er make a telltale sound to give their presence away!
Now that I am grown and have had many chances to observe animal behavior, I would like to call bullshit on that premise.
I have a poorly-sealed window in my bedroom.
From this window, I hear the little woodland creatures, going about their natural, morning things, one with Nature in every respect, living in harmony with their environment... AND MAKING A GODAWFUL RACKET!!!!!! O! M! G!!! I will hear the most HORRENDOUS RUSTLING in the bushes and think a PACK OF URBAN COYOTES must be trying to get into our trash cans!!! I flip up the curtain, only to see two teeny freakin' Carolina wrens hopping about. Yelling at each other. I cannot type their call. But I will try: MREEEEEECHHHHHHHHHHH MREEEEEEEEEECHHHHHHHH MREEEEEEEEEEEEECHHHHHHH is an approximation of the noise that greets me.
And the birds are not the worst offenders in the Lack O' Stealth department. Oh no.
That honor goes to... the squirrels.
Let me paraphrase Mark Twain and say that two squirrels amount to a permanent riot, and there ain't any real difference between three squirrels and an insurrection. They like to play on my roof. I say "play," but the fact is, I have NO IDEA WHAT they're doing up there. Playing squirrel rugby? Staging squirrel Civil War reinactments? Fighting for the rights of albino squirrels to get married? 'Cause if they're up there just hopping around from place to place, and managing to make THAT MUCH racket in the process, then these particular woodland creatures need remedial woodland creature lessons!
It's not the noise I mind, it's the not knowing what they're up to. In fact, it drives me to irrational acts in my own house. We have at least one mouse at the moment, and sometimes I think it is using construction equipment. When the noise gets to be just TOO MUCH, I feel dissed! It's like the mouse has NO RESPECT for the fact that I could eat him! "HEY! I am bigger than you!!! At least PRETEND to be scared of me!" Or, every now and then, I will just burst into the room whence the noise emanates and yell, "What ARE you DOING in there???" As if I expect an answer. I just want to SEE the construction equipment, that's all!
Now, I must state for the record that all our good foodstuffs are put away out of the reach of rodents, sealed in airtight ceramic or glass containers, or refrigerated-- all except for the junk food. Normally, after a bout of extreme noise, I will discover in the pantry that a tin of cocoa has been chewed through-- a little mouse-head-sized hole in the plastic top. One day I came in to find an ENTIRE BAG of chocolate-covered espresso beans emptied out. I had to dump the Halloween candy that had been stored in the pantry, because mice had found their way into the jack-o'-lantern and eaten an entire candy necklace, leaving the chewed-up bag behind. Those mice are NOT eating right, 's all I gotta say.
Perhaps I'm being unfair to the creatures of a true woodland. These birds and squirrels and mice I have the opportunity to observe close at hand have adapted to an urban environment where their only natural predators are house cats. If so, I'd say the cats have the advantage. Cats, at least, know how to be quiet!
Nowadays, when I read about those silent-footed Hobbits stealing through the woods without a rustle, I think, "OF COURSE they're quiet! All they have to do is be less LOUD than the other animals!!!"
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9 comments:
I really wish I could have seen the mouse that ate the chocolate-covered espresso beans. That would be hilarious and also a bit frightening.
Love this post and identify with it! My roof is metal, you know, which amplifies the sound of squirrels playing hockey up there with whatever falls off the trees and bounces on there.
Well-written and entertaining! Gotta get rid of that mouse. Set a trap. I made my son discard them. We have stories. Remember "men's work"? Good luck with the critters!
LMFAO!!!!!!!
I haven't laughed this hard at a blog posting in awhile!
One note for you though - cats are not fucking quiet. I have two. One scratches at anything made of glass for NO REASON and ONLY in the middle of the night (the glass doors on my bookcases are usually the subject of his paws)
And the OTHER one likes to steal lighters, but only at night after I've gone to bed. She steals them, paws them around on the floor and MEOWS her goddamn head off, again for NO REASON. I'll get up, stomp into the living room, and she just stares at me in silence. As soon as I get back into bed I hear "Meow....MEow.....MEOOOOOOWWWW"
LOL! I remember being similarly enthralled with the idea of moving silently through the woods. Dead on about the squirrels. I grew up to the sounds of those damn rodents playing Speed Racer across our roof, when they weren't busy breaking into our attic and bringing the noises even closer.
Our last house had mice. It also had two cats. 7 dead mice delivered to us later (and plugging up the holes where they were getting in) and we had no more mice. I was quite pleased to find that my cats could actually catch mice. Almost worth the allergy attack that resulted when one of them felt the need to sleep on my face at night ;-)
Oh my god. This is the most amazing and random rant ever.
Intrinsicallyknotted-- Seriously!!! I can't help but picture a tiny cartoon mouse with a hugely distended and lumpy belly the size of the bag... then his eyes go all hypno-swirly... then he goes into hyperspeed!
Joy-- ...Or we could get a cat. ;) Also, gah, you've got amplified squirrelsound!
JLK-- LOL, thanks! And... yes. Lest I romanticize life with cats to too great a degree, thank you for reminding me that the little bastards do, in fact, make teh crazy noise themselves when they feel like it!
Cyberlizard-- Ahhh, the thrill of those early days of wanting to be a Halfling Ranger IRL! :D Also, our last cat was a great mouser. She couldn't catch birds for anything, for which our other cat mocked her, but she kept our house mouse-free!
The Maze Monster-- Hee! Thanks! I aim to randomly please! :)
The only mice I've had in the house my cats brought IN! Then they wouldn't catch and take them out because they lost interest. I had to set traps. Cats aren't always the solution. Sometimes they cause more problems - for example, I identify with what JLK wrote!
Good try, though. It might work.
Back in the summer, I came out my front door to head to work, and there, perched insolently on the trunk of the giant maple in front of the house, were a pair of squirrels doing naughty squirrel things. I looked at the male squirrel. He looked at me, all but stuck his tongue out at me, and continued on with what he was doing. The female squirrel didn't seem to notice me at all.
That said, any time I go into the woods, I always get to see lots of animals (who are almost inevitably startled to see me) because I don't walk like (what they think of as) "a human being," so I usually don't startle them until they see me. Heh.
By the way, if you're plugging up holes where mice get in, steel wool works wonders, especially since they can't or won't chew through it.
In HS English, after reading Thoreau's Walden, we were assigned to write some kind of daily journal while sitting outside in nature. My teacher, when she passed them back, said she had never read so much about squirrels in her life. Yes, they are quite the conspicuous buggers, aren't they?
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