Fishing For Bugs!

Hi – today’s been a cold one; snow, sleet, rain and everything else related to freezing your socks off. Makes me wonder how birds survive – stuck outside with nothing more than a flimsy feather jacket and bare legs. In theory, their feet should freeze solid and snap off at the ankles, but they don’t. However, costs me a small fortune to keep them fed and warm via their calorie intake. Nuts, seed, fat-balls and crumbled up toast – and if they’re really lucky some chopped up bacon, all to keep their engines running. Even the crows drop in for a crust; guess they know I’m a soft touch. Oh, and the owls are back to decimate the local vole population.

 Stuck in a picture for you – handsome as ever in his winter plumage – the barn owl, not Jones, who just this minute whispered to me that none of you know what he looks like, so to make his day in it goes – another picture, one of the man himself, the Jones of Indiana. Drew the line at hat-and-whip though; told him you wouldn’t believe me.

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My Wanderings; an extract:

... Scorpions come out at night; they like the dark when no-one can see them stabbing their suppers to death. Baboons eat them, they flip over stones and when they find one, pull off the stinger bit and crunch up the rest, but that’s in the daytime. At night, the baboons are asleep and the scorpions know this so they all come out of their holes and, like I said, it’s their turn to crunch things up. Some of them are really big and black with big nippers; they look a bit like crabs with long tails. Uncle Ron told me it was the ones with small nippers that stung you the hardest – little nippers, more poison – big nippers, not so much. ‘The littlest bastards sting the hell out of you...’ I heard him tell my dad, ‘...and brown ones are the worst.’

Most scorpions like to make holes in the ground where they can sleep ‘til the sun goes down. Catching a live one was, to us kids, on a par with a Masai warrior initiate hunting his first lion. At the edge of our picnic site the ground was suited for just such an occasion. So, armed with glass jars and grass stalks, in we went.

The holes were sort of flat, oval shaped mini caves, dug at a shallow angle, that’s how we knew they were scorpion houses. They had to be oval and wider than they were tall because scorpions are flat-wide bug things and their stingers stick out straight when they crawl inside. Anyway, we selected the biggest hole and the biggest of us bullied his way to the front of the queue and claimed his rights to first go at scorpion fishing. I held the jar and with my heart up round my tonsils watched the big kid slide his piece of grass inside the devil’s lair.

‘Can you feel it?’

‘Dunno yet – not sure.’

‘Did you chew the end?’

‘He didn’t chew the end,’ another kid challenged. ‘It won’t grab hold if you don’t chew the end.’

Out came the grass, the end was chewed and back in it went.

He let go of the grass and we all watched and waited – hearts thumping – five kids in a clump.

Minutes later... ‘I saw it move.’

‘Nah, it didn’t.’

‘It did! I saw it move you had a bite.’

The big kid reached for the grass and like a fisherman sensing his line, held the stalk gently between his thumb and forefinger. He looked up and grinned.

‘I can feel him.’

‘Pull him out!’ the rest of us piped, ‘but slowly or you’ll break his legs off!’

Inch by inch, whatever had grabbed the grass stalk was towed from its burrow. Scratchy noises; bony needles on glass, then, like a cork from a bottle out it came and the arachnid from hell landed on my arm. The words ‘panic’ and ‘mayhem’ joined forces and all my supposedly, steadfast comrades legged it.

Petrified, I was left alone with my now redundant jar, thumping heart et al.  The big kid laughed, the littlest whimpered, one kid peed his pants and the other ran off yelling adult swearwords until he bumped into his dad’s leg.

At the tail-end of one extremely peed off scorpion, like a saddler’s curved needle the stinging bit arched above the creatures bony back; at its very tip, a jewel of bright, extruded venom hung there, trembling in the sunlight.

The creature’s eyes, I swear, were firmly locked to mine...

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