At Least I Hope They’re Not

When people talk about enjoying Nature in “all its glory,” I doubt they’re picturing watching a bird brutally killing a mollusk for a light snack.

The Downed Goose Then Swam Away As If Nothing Had Happened

When people are contemplating Nature, I suspect they rarely, if at all, contemplate how animals can screw up too. But they really should, at least now and then, if only to prepare themselves for the sight I saw today:

One goose was pursuing another through the air, and the calls they were making sounded decidedly unfriendly to me. Perhaps that’s why the goose being pursued made a dive for the topmost branches of a tree before peeling away at the last second. The pursuing goose was . . . unprepared for this move, it seems, and plowed directly through the tree, causing the goose to dramatically spin out of control like a WWII fighter plane in a black and white movie until the goose hit the water nose first (also like a WWII fighter plane in a black and white movie).

I’m Still Looking For It Every Time I Go Outside Now

What made the other day even weirder though is that the day prior I had seen the iguana corpse in my front yard in the morning when I went to check the mail, but it was nowhere to be found when I went to dispose of it later. At the time I figured either the city or one of my neighbors had helpfully cleaned it up, so it was, to put it mildly, a “surprise” to see it return for a guest appearance in my own very special episode of Wild Kingdom the next day.

At least I was less surprised that it had vanished again the second time I tried to dispose of it.

That Was Weird

While I’m decidedly more chipper than I was last week, certain bits of last week keep coming back to mind.

Specifically, that’s it’s difficult to focus on writing when you look outside your window and see scavenger birds picking apart an iguana corpse in your driveway.