This article by Ray Spitzenberger first appeared in IMAGES for Nov. 17, 2021, East Bernard Express, East Bernard, Texas.
Last week, my friend Paula, who now owns the homeplace in Dime Box, reported that she saw a gray fox at the edge of the woods behind her house. Although the wooded area seems to be teeming with coyotes, this was the first fox she had seen since she moved there.
Her report naturally turned on the remembering button inside my head, especially considering the fondness I still feel for Dime Box and for wildlife. In the fourteen years that I lived in what my mother considered her Eden, I never saw a fox. Nor did I ever hear of anyone who did.
During those growing up years on the homeplace, I remember seeing, hearing about, or finding evidence of bobcats, coyotes, (in the woods behind our house), feral hogs, huge populations of squirrels robbing our pecans (many ending up on Daddy’s barbecue pit), skunks galore, possums, raccoons, cotton tail rabbits, communities of gophers decimating our garden, chicken hawks, and doves (also destined for the barbecue pit).
Also very common were copperheads, rattlesnakes, and water moccasins. And chicken snakes (rat snakes) were as common as grasshoppers and flies, and a constant threat to our egg production. My mother used to place white porcelain doorknobs (very common in those days) in the nests where our hens laid eggs. The low-IQ chicken snakes would swallow the doorknobs and crawl away to die. Sometime after it was swallowed, you could retrieve the doorknob from the snake’s skeleton.
Recently, Paula reported how many deer come out of the woods into their meadow, a fact which surprises me. In the 14 years I lived in Dime Box during the 1930’s and 1940’s, I never saw a deer, nor did I ever hear of anyone else who did. And my brother and I roamed the several miles of woods between our house and my grandparents’ farm almost daily, and we never got a glimpse of a deer. I wonder where they came from some 70 or 80 years later.
When my family moved from Dime Box to nearby Giddings in 1948, I encountered a new species of wildlife for the first time, — the horned toad. On our property in Giddings, these creatures were as prolific as red ants, which were everywhere. I don’t remember seeing horned toads in Dime Box. Years after leaving the nest, and going home to visit my parents in Giddings, I discovered that the huge horned toad population had disappeared! No one seemed to know what happened to them. I really missed them, — it was like our family cats or dogs had vanished!
Growing up in a rural area, as I did, I developed a love for wildlife, — true wildlife, the fauna of a region, — not “wild life,” as in “wild living,” lol. And I still do to this day. I was never a hunter like my father who had a different sort of appreciation of wild animals.
However, growing up a country boy and fond of wildlife. I grew up understanding why you had to destroy some fauna, especially when they stole your food supply and thus threatened your survival or endangered your life. In spite of that, I always had a great love of wildlife.
-o-
Ray Spitzenberger is a retired WCJC teacher, a retired LCMS pastor, and author of three books, It Must Be the Noodles, Open Prairies, and Tanka Schoen.