Victor Davis HansonA Child’s Garden of Animals Any more creative (i.e., stupid) ideas? In Fields Without Dreams I wrote about our Ruby Seedless vineyard fiasco in which our cutting-edge new vineyard variety of big beautiful red grapes rotted the moment they were ready to harvest (the Ag extension officer once told me the once supposedly […]
Victor Davis Hanson A Child’s Garden of Animals Each March swarms of blackbirds arrive in the yard to mate, nest, hatch their eggs—and make themselves detested. Life is quiet and clean until March and then again in late June when most disappear. But now they seem to believe they own the environs and will alter
Victor Davis Hanson A Child’s Garden of Animals In March if it had rained some, or a first irrigation had not dried out, and one tried to get in the vineyard and disc too early, he often got stuck. And then things got interesting…. If you were mired in the middle of a quarter-mile-long, 12-foot-wide
Victor Davis Hanson A Child’s Garden of Animals When growing up, not all our pets and wild animal encounters were live. I remember all the tractors on the farm. At six, I used to go into the old horse shed just to stare at and sit on them. Many were named as if they were
Victor Davis Hanson As I said, I used to hunt at the woodpile and usually at sunset. One early evening, a huge “thing” broke out of the woodpile. I assumed it was some sort of coyote (distance was only 40 yards, but the wood pile and lengthy shadows camouflaged the target.) I shot once and
Victor Davis Hanson A Child’s Garden I think I was six or seven before I fully realized the farm was swarming with opossums. Given they were nocturnal creatures, I never saw one—until one day sometime around 1960, my grandfather asked us to go the henhouse near the barn and collect eggs. This time I noticed
Victor Davis Hanson A Child’s Garden of Animals About 40 years ago, I visited a rural “pound” and adopted a Queensland Heeler (“blue”), or more properly an Australian Cattle Dog. I was confused what the strange, squealing, funny looking fox/wolf-like “wild” dog was—and had only seen one before owned by a Portuguese sheep herder who
Victor Davis Hanson A Child’s Garden of Animals In 1959 I first noticed that nesting high in the cottonwoods surrounding our artesian pond (long since dried up and in 2005 sold off) there were “big” birds. My father explained they were a pair of red-tailed hawks. My maternal grandfather added in details (he was born
Victor Davis HansonChild’s Garden Growing up in a rural multiethnic community, I remember all sorts of unfamiliar hysterias. Once a household by the local rural market about two miles from our home announced that the Virgin of Guadalupe had appeared on their shower door, etched in calcified sediment, as if on stained glass. Suddenly over
Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers Part One Barn Owls really do like barns. And they are invaluable predators of mice, squirrels, rats and such who all do their small part to wreck a barn and its environs. And yet they are not the fierce Great-Horned-Owls of six-foot wingspans that swooped just above the ground