Sneaky Stinky Sticks, Mysterious Marsh Mammals, Light Nights and Dadblamed Disillusioned Daughter

Throwing caution (and concern about gas prices) to the wind, Daughter and I decided to take a roadtrip yesterday to the bustling metropolis of Bangor. Home to Stephen King, a huge statue of Paul Bunyan and a pretty nice Annual Folk Festival, Bangor is also home to over 31,000 people. They're sprawled out all over Bangor's 34 square miles and - as far as I can tell - every one of them keeps their yard light on all night. What is this with the yard lights? I'm lucky in that I live in a very isolated spot with no neighbors nearer than a half mile through heavy woods, so it's nothing to me if my neighbors want to mount klieg lights on their sheds.

But for those who pile into neighborhoods together, it's getting so that night time is bright time, instead of when our eyes and bodies get a much-needed respite from bright lights. Research has shown that breast cancer rates are lower for women who sleep in darkened rooms and it just makes sense that, as mammals, we're programmed to thrive with sunny days and dark nights. Else, why would the human race have survived this far? How much longer we'll survive is anyone's guess if we keep behaving like those early humans who huddled around the fire, or kids who are afraid of the dark. Turn the lights off and go to bed, I say, and let everyone else have some restorative darkness.

But I digress. I was talking about stick insects. Well, okay, I was GOING to talk about stick insects. They're sneaky, folks, make no mistake. Did you know that they drop their eggs onto the ground where ants mistake them for seeds, carry them to their nests and eat the outsides, so that the little stick insect can get out and start a family in a new place? Yup. This may be why there are stick insects on every continent except Antartica. (And I think they just haven't looked in the right place there. They're probably lurking in one of those old boats the early explorers left behind. Take another look, scientists, and get back to us.)

Many stick insects are also stinky if you disturb them when they're dropping eggs or give them the hairy eyeball or something. The common Walking Stick, for instance, can release a toxic spray that will temporarily blind an adult. Who knew? Do you know how many of the little critters I've let walk over my arm over the years? Too many, now that I know what I know about their sneaky ways. I should have realized that anything that cons you into thinking it's part of a branch is capable of anything.

I call the marsh mammal mysterious, because it showed up outside the window of the Bangor Borders Bookstore, in a little pool. Daughter and I looked out the window to check the sky, because it looked thundery, and there was this little brown head poking out of the water. We watched, trying to figure out if it was a muskrat or a beaver, as the animal swam around, . Why a beaver should be in an area where the nearest trees are saplings is beyond me, but it looked like a beaver. The pool had an outlet that led under the road, and from there to another little drainage area that eventually hooks up with the Penjajawoc Marsh, which runs into the City Forest. (I think every city should have a forest, but, surprisingly, many don't.)

Daughter and I theorized that this might be a young, callow male beaver who was kicked out of the family home in the marsh and was trying to establish a home territory as best he could. (We're good at coming up with possible scenarios, no matter how farfetched. It's a knack we have.) Then, we saw another beaver, if beavers they were, swimming near the first one, so it looks like beavers are thriving in Bangor. That's good, because they're often chivvied from pillar to post (or aspen to apple tree, I guess would be a better analogy) when they flood roads or cut down trees people don't want cut down. Apparently, they're also prone to falling down wells (who knew?) and fall prey to birds of prey (apt, that, though unfortunate) and get run over crossing roads.

If you're ever confronted with beavers in your backyard, cutting down your Japanese Maples and flooding the veggie garden, don't panic. And, whatever you do, don't buy one of the popular but ineffective "Beaver Bafflers" or "Beaver Deceivers" that you've heard so much about. (I believe I saw William Shatner touting them on an infomercial, but it could have been something else.) No, walk right back into the house and call your local Wildlife Service or whatever you have where you live and tell them that you have a Problem Beaver. They can help you install a flow device to unflood the garden while leaving enough water around their lodge to keep the beavers happy. Relocating isn't a good idea, because other beavers will just move in or the local beaver population will explode (beavers self-regulate their numbers depending on food and nearby beaver populations), so they'll move in as fast as you move them out. Sort of the beaver version of the old game, Space Invaders. (I bet you didn't know that one Native American name for the beaver also means affable. Neither did I, but it does, which shows you what Native Americans thought of them.)

When watching marsh mammals palled, Daughter perused the books and chose one by Daisy Meadows, who is reputed to be the hottest of hot stuff with girls 8-12, who are heavily into fairy stories. I read one and it didn't do much for me. I found the writing very simple and the plot thin, not to mention that I'm not big on fairies. (If daughter knew what I know about REAL fairies like you find in Terry Pratchett books and old Celtic tales, she'd drop Daisy like a dead duck, but I figure she doesn't need to know that stuff right now.) However, I don't censor what Daughter reads and we always discuss the books, so we talked about Daisy Meadows' ouvre on the way home.

This morning, Daughter googled Daisy Meadows to find her web site and was not amused by what she found. The yowls brought me up from my basement study. (Let's not forget that Daughter is the child who suffers from Dramatic Fever from time to time.) She was yowling because she found out that "Daisy Meadows" doesn't exist. Four authors, including the woman who wrote "Bend It Like Beckham" of all people, write the books. That doesn't surprise me. I figure they saw a chance to grab a piece of the pre-teen fairy lovers market, probably when they were having coffee in their publisher's cafeteria, and ran with it. However, now Daughter isn't sure that she wants to read any more Daisy Meadows books, so they may have lost a reader who buys a lot of their books. Or not. The pull of fairies is strong. Oddly enough, it's the same in Pratchett novels, only he writes much better than Daisy Meadows, even with the beginnings of Early-Onset Alzheimer's. But that's another, and much sadder, story.






 

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