by Tony Hajek
Most of December, I avoided the hot tub fearing a cold night would bring on the flu and I’d miss my surgery. It is not so much missing the surgery as getting to pay the enormous deductible a self-employed person enjoys and losing time in the future. The surgery took 2.5 hours and was successful. Now, I am recovering and that doesn’t include hot tub time.
The hard freeze of December 4 was interesting. Many plants wilted or fell over. I’ll bet they come back. If not, the nurseries accept my money.
I encountered a young, thin, short rattlesnake in the garden at 3 PM on the fifth. Silly me, I thought it was too cold for those critters. Apparently, it was too cold for it to avoid a shovel.
As a Master Naturalist, I am always tortured when I take out a predator. My wife, raised to kill all snakes, begrudgingly accepts the survival of a few that I can proclaim non-venomous. I ask her when was the last time she knew of someone being bit, much less dying, from a rattlesnake. Even though she has no answer, she demands the death penalty. That she is a St. Mary’s graduate, home of the Rattlers, engenders no clemency.
I should probably get a pair of snake tongs (that I can locate and return with before the snake disappears) and just move the offensive snake to… how far? And would it survive? Maybe I can blame this on organized religion, as snakes have had bad PR since the Serpent in the Garden. Last summer, I was putting out mice and rat bait almost as fast as they could consume it. An unseen snake with a healthy appetite would have been welcome.
There must have been a gentle freeze earlier in the Hill Country that I missed, as a trip to find frost flowers was for naught. On the trip I saw only a young buck and a doe. The drought has decimated the deer herd. Hopefully, our recent rains will bam it back up in three years. After three years of writing about the drought, it is strange to deal with the wet and the mud. Driving the truck into the
field to dump deer carcasses is a challenge. The coyotes and caracaras don’t care if I slip, slide, or get stuck delivering the bones but my wife prefers the dump site to be far from the house.
The Master Naturalist program may be changing. Usually when reviewing class applications, we look for people to be worker bees or leaders. Both Calvin Finch and Richard Heilbrun suggested becoming a Master Naturalist just for the knowledge. Not that I think some folk don’t do just that. I just don’t want to promote the idea. However, that idea does present an opportunity for workshops, adult education classes, and perhaps even an organized speaker’s bureau.
How about that for a New Year’s project?
