NATURE & YOU
With Halloween nearly upon us, my mind turns to pranks. Not the lowdown dirty rotten nasty kind, but the clever, well-thought-out variety that makes the target laugh, once they get it. I’m not talking monsters scarring their victims for life, just a momentary startle or bit of confusion until we realize we’ve been had.
As with all national cultures around the globe, we have our own brand of funny.
There’s the inadvertent prank like the one my brother, Mark, played on my husband the other day. Mark came back from a day of fishing with his grandkids while he and his wife, Catherine, were staying with us. He put his carton of worms into our fridge with my permission. But to Jeff, it looked like an ordinary yogurt carton. He went to help himself to some yogurt and opened a very unexpected can of worms.
My friend Sue Monson has a plastic skeleton that she poses around the house to surprise her husband. Sometimes Bones is on the pot with a book, in his closet styling a purse or waving cheerfully from the driver’s seat of his truck.
My sons also show pranking prowess by adding a dose of subtlety to magnify dramatic impact.
Once they stowed our youngest, Thomas, in the clothes dryer. Then Scott seemed to shower and then called for me to bring him a towel. I was busy writing, so I passed the request to one of the younger boys upstairs. My boys were pretty obedient, but this time, the child I asked refused.
“Please, Mom!” Scott begged. “I’m cold!” I marched upstairs, chastising the whole lot of them. In the laundry room, another son was flopped over the clean clothes, which made me even madder. I reached into the dryer, mid-scolding and Thomas grabbed my hand.
Oh the cheers and laughter that followed my scream! The boy who had requested the towel had secretly followed me up (fully dressed) to enjoy the full impact. That success set off a rash of harmless pranks around our house.
Another time, the two oldest boys set up a ladder outside the bathroom where our daughter, Tricia, soon would be starting her nightly face cleaning routine. All they did was look in the window and wait for her to notice their reflection in the mirror. When she did notice, her scream conjured visions of a murder scene.
Then there was the time my natal family was camping and my little brother, Jim, stood on a bluff above me while I sunbathed. It was chilly, yet I was suddenly showered with warm water. Across the lake, the fishermen heard a furious scream, an evil laugh, a resounding spank and a wail. That incident does NOT qualify as either harmless or funny.
Every year, it seems someone in the neighborhood will get ‘toilet papered’. The prank is to wait until the darkest night and unfurl miles of toilet paper over the victims’ house, and property.
The best prank in our family lore was a time the tables turned on the Toilet Paperers. On the night before Thanksgiving, our sons Daniel and Chris suspected a toilet papering event was planned for our house. The Toilet Paperers were known to be extremely thorough.
Just after midnight our boys watched two figures clad in black sneak into our front yard. They hauled two huge trashbags filled with toilet paper. Our boys eased the window open and slunk into the cover of the shrubs. Just as the visitors opened their sacks and flung the first rolls, our kids let fly with their paintball guns. Both visitors were full-grown but one was a 6’7” and 300 pounds, so they were easy targets.
There were a few moments of confusion, followed by terror. Paintballs sting, and the Paperers thought someone was shooting real ammo. The Bigger Intruder fled around the corner of the house where Daniel grabbed him from behind, pinning his arms, but not speaking. He wriggled free, and they fled up the street, leaving about 80 rolls of toilet paper behind.
A few days later, revenge was complete when our boys (unbeknownst to me) used the captured toilet paper to smother the master Toilet Paperer’s house.
Pranking American style: harmless, funny and clever.
Only in America. God bless it.
Did wild bird homes inspire ancient pottery-makers?
Each and every week, I admonish you to get up off the couch in order to venture outdoors for a nature hike.
This time, however, I am going to do something a bit different.
You’ll need to be inside your car, truck or minivan for this exercise.
When you drive down almost any major roadway, pay particular attention to the highway overpasses. For gosh sakes, keep attentive to the road ahead, but you can surely spare a snippet of time for some rubbernecking of the structure above your vehicle’s windshield.
Be on the lookout for mud nests that have been built by wild birds.
If you should, per chance, come upon them, they will be hard to miss because there will be a whole slug of them in one location.
You’ll want to find the mud nests of the cliff swallows. The undersides of highway overpass bridges function quite nicely (thank you very much!) as a man-made substitute for rocky cliff faces.
The cliff swallow nests are unique examples of avian architecture. Each nest resembles an earthen jug.
That, in and of itself, is quite a sight to see.
However, I cannot help but marvel at the astonishing fact that these wild birds build these nests on a smooth, vertical surface. One has to wonder what Old Mr. Gravity has to say about this incomprehensible act.
What kind of glue-substitute do you suppose something so simple as mud is sufficient to perform? It will make you scratch your head in awe.
Then there is the “what-came-first? ... the chicken? ... the egg?” question. Did ancient people draw inspiration from the earthen vessels that were fashioned by these feather-covered bird brains? Well, yeah, probably.
But still, the birds transport the pottery material there in their mouths.
That makes the swallows even more accomplished potters than any human copycat.
Ain’t Ma Nature grand?
— Neil Garrison, NewsOK Contributor
Neil Garrison was the longtime naturalist at a central Oklahoma nature center.