Encountering the WILD!

  Mr. PJ, the dog that has come to stay with us a while, is a funny sort of critter.  Perhaps, I am just used to the way Ms. Ez, the Bayou Dog used to be.  When Ms. Ez was still alive and roaming the place she never met a critter that she did not like.  She was always trying to make friends with any and all wild things.  To her, they were just another "play friend" and she loved them.  Sometimes, this was not the best of ideas so I had to coax her not to befriend things like moccasins, alligators nor coyotes.  It mattered not to her that they could potentially harm her.  She just saw the opportunity to make a new friend so she tried.  There was the time when she found a baby possum and so wanted to adopt it.  We discouraged that since the possum was fully capable of being on its on and was better off being wild. Another time, she tried to play ball with a turtle.  The turtle did not appreciate a baseball being shoved at it so, once again, I discouraged the actions.  Ms. Ez befriended a pair of baby mockingbirds that I was fostering and became their protector.  The list goes on and on.  But Mr. PJ, on the other hand, is not too overly fond of the wild things that roam the Bayou.  He loves to watch them but does so from a distance.  

  The other day, Mr. PJ came running down the hillside to join me on the pier.  I watched as he loped down the board path then came to a dead stop by the base of an oak tree.  He seemed to be a mite jumpy so I figured I had better check out the problem.  As I drew near, the old dog jumped back a bit.  Uh, oh!  Perhaps a snake was coiled up near the roots of the tree.   I hustled over to where the dog was and found him a jittery mess!  Then, I spied the culprit.  A skink was by the palmettos near the tree trunk and the dog had invaded his space.  The lizard was not backing down and kept jumping at the dog.  PJ was not the happiest camper on the Bayou at that moment!  He did not know what to make of this striped thing jumping at him.  

  After a few moments of me trying to convince Mr. PJ that the lizard would not hurt him, the old dog skulked off to eat some cogon grass.  The skink took the opportunity to crawl up on a branch to sun himself.  Nice going, lizard!  Ok, Mr. PJ, we have to practice this good critter/bad critter thing a bit! You need to know that there are critters out here that can be friends.