Grapefruit Trees and Rebar...The Odd Pair!

  The oddities found on the Bayou never fail to intrigue me.  By oddities, I am referring to things found where they do not belong.  Sure, I find the occasional trowel on a tree stump or perhaps part of my lawnmower in the bushes (different story but still interesting) but those are nothing compared to say a filet knife found on the rooftop!  I have yet to figure out how that got there and whether I have some unknown enemy out there threatening my wellbeing with a filet knife! Still, these things are interesting, to say the least.

  Today's find?  Well...a piece of rebar.  While that, in itself, is not the most unusual find, the whereabouts of said rebar is.  What in the world was a piece of rebar doing up in the top of the grapefruit tree???  That...my friends...is the question of the day!

  Mark finally took the notion to cut out the dead parts of the citrus trees.  Termites had taken up residence in the roots of the trees and pretty much killed the grapefruit trees.  (Who says that citrus oil helps prevents an infestation??  Yeah, I read that somewhere.  Definitely not true.)  Anyway, as he cut the thirty foot tall trees down, a piece of rebar came tumbling to the ground.  Thankfully, it did not hit anyone or anything as it plummeted to the ground.  

  The rebar is bent into a lovely hook-shape making me ponder if someone had tried to use it to shake down fruit at some point.  It is approximately twenty-one inches long so is quite large.  I asked Son, since he has always picked the fruit from these huge trees for us, but he says that he always just climbed the trees.  Yep, that is something that I can vouch for as I am the one to "catch" those hefty fruits as he tosses them from the treetops.  Mark said he did not attempt such a dangerous game of tossing a rebar thirty feet into the air and I know I could never heave that thing up there.  This leaves me one conclusion...perhaps the rebar was hung on a low limb when the tree was small and then hoisted as the tree grew?  Who knows???  Surely, it was not the same culprit that left the knife on the rooftop....you think?  

  All is well that ends well, however.  The grapefruit trees are thinned of dead wood and the danger of the rebar hook has now passed.  Still...lingering questions....always lingering questions!

Needing Answers To A Bayou Mystery

  Almost eight years ago, I had a rather chilling experience.  A tall pine tree next to the marsh edge had had been killed during Hurricane Katrina (some seven years earlier).  Since the tree was far away from the Little Bayou House and since we had so much else to worry about at that time, the tree was left to rot away on its own.  It was at the eight year mark after the tree's demise that I came across a rather unusual item in the middle of the tree's trunk.  A shard of bone had been obviously "preserved" by the tree's growth and was not revealed until the tree collapsed.  When I found the bone it was gleaming white in the late afternoon sun as if it was calling to me to examine it.  I picked up the bone not knowing whether it was of a bayou critter or if it was of a human.  Holding the bone shard, I had the intense feeling that I should not just toss it to the wayside.  My intentions were to let Darling Daughter, Elizabeth, look at the bone as she had taken courses in anthropology in college. She did not live on the Coast at the time but I felt perhaps she would be able to tell me a bit about my bone find when she made a visit.  Sad to say, in the hubbub of every day life, the bone was stowed away and promptly forgotten.  In a mass "spring" cleanup, I found the bone once again and still have questions.  It still feels wrong to toss the bone without at least making an attempt at identifying its source.

  When I found the bone this time, I asked Son since he was spearheading the cleanup of the storeroom where I had stashed the mystery piece.  He studied the piece for a while and made the remark that it honestly was the right size to be a bone from a human but he had no idea.  Of course, he is a math major and not an anthropologist so his guess was about as good as mine.  Now, that Elizabeth lives on the Coast, it will be far easier for her to examine the bone and steer me in the right direction but, being an old lady, the brain is a bit scattered.  She was actually here today and I forgot all about my questions about the mystery bone and why it was in a tree.  Bayou Mysteries abound and this has to be one of the most intriguing and in a way, gut-wrenching.  I guess I need to find someone that may do DNA testing on it to determine its origin.  Hopefully, it is a critter....hopefully. Why does this bone keep reappearing??

One Legged Birds?

  If you ever wander about a bayou like I often do, you start to ponder the whys and wherefores of a lot of things.  Just this morning, a questioned rambled about in the brain for a while even though I knew the "scientific" answer.  The mind-boggling part had nothing to do with the question of why shorebirds will stand on one leg but had everything to do with if they actually like standing on one leg.  It is a well-known fact that the herons, egrets and cranes around here stand on one leg to keep the other one snug up in their feathers.  Their long, spindly legs lose a lot of heat on these cold nights and mornings so standing on one while the other leg is tucked up under the feathers conserves a lot of heat...but do they like it?  Are they comfortable standing there for hours?  How do they not fall over?  (Think about it...would you be able to stand like that for hours?  I would not!)

  This morning, there were two birds on the end of the pier.  One was a tri-colored heron and the other a snowy egret.  Both were standing in their "unipedal" position, both were staring straight toward my brother's pier and both were oblivious to my presence.   There was just enough breeze to make the birds wobble a bit, now and again.  This is when the all-important question of whether they were happy started squirming its way into my mind.  Oh, how delightful it would be to converse with my fine feathered friends.  But, alas, that is not possible so the answer will never be known.

  I sat on the pier watching the birds for a good while.  Only once did they change positions and swap legs.  In fact, they did this in sync!  It was almost as if a timer was set and it was beeping a loud alarm saying "Time to swap legs!"  Watching them, I had to think how nice and warm their feather must feel to that cold leg! Speaking of warmth, it was time to head back inside.  It was, indeed, a bit chilly out and I do not plan on standing on one leg while tucking the other up in my jacket!