YShahar
Enthusiastic duct-tape engineer
Whoever coined that phrase "build it and they will come" really meant business! The other night, I had a really unexpected visitor. No, sadly I don't have any photos of it, as this was way past midnight, and had I so much as moved to get my phone, it would have vanished! Probably too dark to see it anyway...
Oh, you want to know what it was? Well, why didn't you say so! OK, here's what happened:
This week marks one of my favorite holidays in Israel, called Sukkot. It's a weeklong festival with a celebration at its beginning and end. We move our households outdoors for the week, eating and sleeping in temporary huts called "sukkot" (singular "sukkah"). Here's a photo of our sukkah, just for the fun of it:
So there I was sitting out in my reading chair in our sukkah, sipping a glass of arak over ice, and enjoying the play of moonlight on the pond. All the lights had long since been turned off by the automatic timers, and the candles had burned low. Because it was a holiday, when very few people drive anywhere, the night was all but silent--no distant rumble of traffic on the highway, no noise of planes taking off from the airport away to the south, just the sound of the waterfall and the burble of the stream.
Suddenly something caught my eye out by the stream. Maybe it was a hint of movement that my subconscious picked up on. I thought something was different, but couldn't quite put my finger on it. I looked more closely and realized that it was the vegetation itself that had changed; where there should be two large lavender bushes bordering the stream, there were now three!
My first incongruous thought was: "That bush just came and planted itself there! I didn't even know Ents came in that size!"
And then I realized what I was looking at: my moving "bush" was actually a large porcupine. It was drinking at the stream and its quills were all pointed skyward, giving it the appearance of a twiggy bush about the same size and shape as the nearby lavender. In a few moments, it turned and went back over the garden wall and into the wadi.
Moved pretty fast for a Bonsai Ent too!
Since I couldn't get a photo for you, I found a video of a similar critter (at 1:14 you can see the quills erect, giving it the appearance of a wandering bush):
Oh, you want to know what it was? Well, why didn't you say so! OK, here's what happened:
This week marks one of my favorite holidays in Israel, called Sukkot. It's a weeklong festival with a celebration at its beginning and end. We move our households outdoors for the week, eating and sleeping in temporary huts called "sukkot" (singular "sukkah"). Here's a photo of our sukkah, just for the fun of it:
So there I was sitting out in my reading chair in our sukkah, sipping a glass of arak over ice, and enjoying the play of moonlight on the pond. All the lights had long since been turned off by the automatic timers, and the candles had burned low. Because it was a holiday, when very few people drive anywhere, the night was all but silent--no distant rumble of traffic on the highway, no noise of planes taking off from the airport away to the south, just the sound of the waterfall and the burble of the stream.
Suddenly something caught my eye out by the stream. Maybe it was a hint of movement that my subconscious picked up on. I thought something was different, but couldn't quite put my finger on it. I looked more closely and realized that it was the vegetation itself that had changed; where there should be two large lavender bushes bordering the stream, there were now three!
My first incongruous thought was: "That bush just came and planted itself there! I didn't even know Ents came in that size!"
And then I realized what I was looking at: my moving "bush" was actually a large porcupine. It was drinking at the stream and its quills were all pointed skyward, giving it the appearance of a twiggy bush about the same size and shape as the nearby lavender. In a few moments, it turned and went back over the garden wall and into the wadi.
Moved pretty fast for a Bonsai Ent too!
Since I couldn't get a photo for you, I found a video of a similar critter (at 1:14 you can see the quills erect, giving it the appearance of a wandering bush):
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Some dogs learn on their first encounter and others never seem to