Wildlife
This is my adopted brother-in-law. He's also named Zach. No relation.What is it with animals ending up in my path? You might remember the baby raccoon that I found and rehabilitated- it seems that I've spawned some more wildlife interaction. If you remember, my wife's parents have had a pretty steady number of squirrels visiting their back porch since I first began leaving peanuts there for them a couple years ago. Well, now there's a few larger, but no less grateful visitors: Didelphis viginiana, the friendly possum.
At first, there was just one- looked to be several months old, but had quite a healthy appetite for the peanuts and other treats that had been set out by my mother-in-law. It seemed even less bothered by human or feline presence than the squirrels- I damn near had my nose up against the glass, and the little beast kept on eating. My in-laws decided to name it "Zach", for whatever reason, and it's since been a regular visitor to their porch, even bringing along a couple of friends or relations.
Little known fact: true Kentucky bourbon is made from corn fermented in a stretched turkey gizzard.Then, on the way home from Detroit after the holidays, we stopped at a rest area halfway to Cincinnati- and were immediately beset by a flock of wild turkeys. There were about a half dozen hens and one tom, from what I could see. They were just milling around the parking lot- apparently they had come to expect travellers to bestow gifts of food to them. At least, that's the expectation that I seemed to detect in their beady little eyes.
Andrea was so shocked that she didn't really believe that they were turkeys until I assured her over and over again. None of them gave the distinctive 'gobble, gobble' call that I was hoping for, but there's really no mistaking a turkey once you've seen one before. They're really quite dumb- makes me wonder exactly what Ben Franklin was doing when he petitioned to make it our national bird.
Of course, bald eagles are opportunistic scavengers, so there's that.