(HOST) Commentator Willem Lange has been getting in the wood, and he’s been finding all sorts of critters hiding in the woodpile.
(LANGE) The pile of firewood in my front yard wasn’t any great shakes: white pine, dozey popple, and ash. But to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you don’t burn the wood you want; you burn the wood you got. The pile had to be taken care of, anyway, and I wasn’t going to let it go to waste. Best I split it, bring it in, and let it provide what heat it could this winter.
But I’m loath to bring in the last bit of the pile. I discovered, as I tossed the split pieces aside, that I was destroying the habitat for a whole bunch of critters that we don’t see much, near the other end of the food chain. I call them cryptobytes, because of their hidden lives. If I bring in the rest of the pile, I don’t know what they’re going to do, with the cold weather coming on.
The first to appear were the snakes who’d been living in there. It was their skins I first spotted – long, gray, translucent sleeves lying among the unsplit bolts. Soon the snakes themselves began deserting the shelter as they felt it shifting. I wished them well, but I had to do this.
When I worked in the Texas hills many years ago, there were snakes everywhere, and every living thing seemed to have a bite, sting, or thorn. The snakes, until proven innocent, were assumed to be rattlers. As a result, many harmless ones died. We had a resident chicken snake named Oscar who lived in the barn and returned every time we caught him and carried him miles away in a burlap sack. Over six feet long and originally beneficial because of his diet of mice and rats in the grain room, he moved on to eating eggs and, finally, chickens. If I spotted him, I never grabbed him without backup. He was a constrictor, he had a very large mouth, and he hated to be picked up. Garter snakes don’t bother me; I like having ‘em around.
I have a soft spot in my heart for daddy longlegs, who fled by the dozen. They get a bad rap; people think they’re spiders. They’re not, though they do have eight legs. I always help them because I owe them: As a kid, I used to pull off a leg or two just to watch them keep twitching.
Night crawlers, spiders, red efts, and crickets fled as I approached. But the climax of the exodus came as I picked up a chunk of ash. A tiny gray body scuttled between my feet. I followed it across the yard. What was it? Short tail, pointed nose. A short-tailed shrew! One of the few poisonous mammals. Can’t kill people, but they say it smarts. I reached down for it, but just in time my instincts overcame my thirst for empirical knowledge. I bade it godspeed and instead picked up my maul.
This is Willem Lange in East Montpelier, and I gotta get back to work.