Critters on My Counter

This morning I came down to the kitchen to the excited cries of my children.  "Mom, come see this giant bug.  It was in the cat's food bowl."  There on the table stood a canning jar, (thankfully they had put a lid on it) containing a giant bug.  It had to be at least an inch and a half long.  It's back end was huge and striped like a bee or wasp, and yet it was definitely not one of those.  Nathan got out the field guide and identified it for us.  It was a Jerusalem Cricket.  In all my years of living here I've never seen one.  It was huge and looked nothing like the little black crickets you see all the time.  Our find sat on the kitchen table as we ate breakfast and started our day.  He was obviously upset about being contained in a mason jar so before long we let him go in the backyard. 

That is not the first time we've had critters in our kitchen.  Over the years we've had all kinds of creatures spend time on our kitchen table or counter.  Why in the kitchen you ask?  Because I'd rather they were in the kitchen where I can make the sure the lid stays on tight, than in the bedrooms where some interested child might try to take the lid off to get a better look and then….the critter is now loose in the house.  We've done the typical ant farms and "sea monkies" but my children especially seem to like to catch the critters in the wild to bring in to observe for a day or two.  Those kind of critters are better off where I can keep an eye on them.

A couple of weeks ago Emily found a tarantula outside which we brought in to watch for a while.  We've raised tadpoles into toads in our kitchen.  We've raised a tomato hornworm into a gigantic moth.  He sat in a canning jar buried in dirt through an entire winter then finally emerged as a moth.  We even once had a rattlesnake in our kitchen.  That one deserves a little explanation.  We hadn't been living out here in the country for more than a couple of weeks.  In that time we'd had a pig on our front porch, and a peacock on our patio.  One cool fall morning one of the children came in and told me that there was a baby snake on our driveway.  He said it wasn't moving and he wasn't even sure if it was alive.  I went out armed with the ever useful canning jar and scooped up a very small, very slow moving snake.  I clapped the lid on the jar and we took him inside.  What a great opportunity to talk about reptiles and how being cold blooded affects their energy levels.  We put the snake on the kitchen table, ate breakfast and watched him warm up.  He became more active as he got warmer.  I picked up the jar to get a better look at him and got the surprise of my life.  I heard that buzzing sort of "rattlesnake" sound coming from our little friend.  Guess what we had unknowingly captured and now had sitting on our kitchen table?  OOPS! 

We've had more than bugs in our kitchen.  Once in a while our expert hunter (our cat, Baby) will injure, but not kill, a bird.  Sometimes one of the children will find this poor bird and bring it in.  Twice, we've let a bird rest up in the kitchen and after a few hours it has been ready to fly away.  Once we found a baby whippoorwill on our front sidewalk after a storm.  We kept it safe in the kitchen until we found a woman who takes care of little orphan birds like this and releases them back into the wild. 

Another time, we were the ones who had an opportunity to take care of a baby bird.  Our neighbor found a baby yellow-bellied flycatcher on the road after a windy night.  It was pretty young and could not fly yet.  He'd been feeding it grasshoppers but the job was getting a little overwhelming for him.  He wondered if our children might like to help out.  We kept this baby bird in a cage in the house for a number of weeks.  Our neighbor named him Nathan (not after our son Nathan though).  Nathan needed five grasshoppers every half an hour to an hour.  It was a lot of work.  Armed with flyswatters, the kids would stun, but not kill the immature grasshoppers (he could not eat full size ones) and then hold them by a leg and feed them to him live.  Fortunately (can't believe I'm saying this) we were experiencing a biblical size grasshopper plague that summer.  I had never seen so many grasshoppers before and have never seen so many since.  They were so thick that you couldn't walk in the backyard without stepping on them with every step.  They were eating the stucco off of peoples' homes, the screens off their windows, and gardens and plants and trees were all being eaten to death.  But it was easy to find the grasshoppers we needed to feed our little orphan bird.  Frankly, I do not know that we could have kept him alive if it weren't for the plague.  Even I did my share of grasshopper "stunning" and "feeding" whenever the children were at taekwondo and couldn't do it themselves.  Eventually, we started taking Nathan outside so he could practice flying.  He would sit on our heads or shoulders, take a flight about the yard, them come back and land on our heads again.  One day we let him fly off and didn't bring him back in the house.  Our neighbor noticed him for much of the rest of the summer hanging around in the trees in his yard.  We were pretty proud of ourselves at helping this little bird to make it on his own.