Greedy chipmunks and hungry birds

Greedy chipmunks and hungry birds
25-June-05

Truckers are governed by many rules and regulations. Some say too many, but that's another essay here. One of the rules governs how much you can work. It takes many pages to list them all, but suffice it to say that you violate them at the risk of heavy fines and penalities. Plus, I work for the only company which utilizes electronic logging (a hint to those in the know!) so I can't even think about cheating on my log book to go just a little bit farther.

Yesterday I arrived at a shipper with only 4 hours left to work (drive or be "on duty") and it took them more than that long to get to me. So, when they finally finished loading me, the only thing I could do was pull away from the dock and park on the side of the street for my mandatory 10 hour break. To add insult to injury, this was out on the edge of town in an industrial park, so there wasn't anywhere to walk for a meal, which would have been my one and only meal of the day. That doesn't count the Coke or honey-buns about 11 hours before that. So, I walked inside and sweetly inquired of the shipping clerk if there was a local pizza (or other) establishment which delivered. Wouldn't you know it, she had the pamphlet in her desk and let me look. She then even dialed and ordered my meal from Mario's. Yep, you guessed it--Chinese food! No, I'm joking, I ordered the 10" All-Star Pizza which included green peppers, onions, pepperoni, mushrooms, and linguisa. Of course, I had to ask what it was. My first thought was that it was tongue (lingua being Latin for that anatomy as well as the root for language) and I have never eaten that meat before (make your own - http://www.emerils.com/recipes/by_name/linguisa_sausage.html). She didn't tell me what it contained, so I might have had tongue last night, but she did say it was a spicy Portuguese sausage loved by the area of South Massachusetts which has many of that ancestry. It wasn't too spicy, at least I could tolerate it. It was good even if slighly greasy. I could have eaten every crumb of it, but had been sitting watching a couple small birds scavenging the ditchline where I was parked, and one was even taking something to a baby sitting in the bushes. I'm compassionate (even if not conservative!) and thought I'd share the crust of one piece with the birds. So, when I finished all but that one crust, I stopped eating and placed the box on the ground next to the truck for the birds to eat. I was planning to retrieve it and deposit in the trash, but events to be told later prevented that.

It took only about 30 seconds for a previously unseen bird to fly in and start investigating. He (or she?) landed on the box which immediately tipped slightly and scared the bird off. It was about the size and shape of a robin, but was all gray except for a brown head and black tail feathers which shone slightly blue with irridescence in the setting sun. It returned almost at once and started pecking at the crust, gorging on the liberated crumbs. The smaller bird (wren or sparrow?) which had prompted me to make the sacrifice was watching and got impatient and flew down and alit next to the box. The gray bird squawked and spread its tail feathers in a display of dominance, making the smaller bird leave temporarily. When the gray bird finished, the small one went over and pecked loose crumbs several times, filled its bill and fed the baby, returning again and again.

All at once, something crawled out of the weeds and evicted the small bird! It took me a few seconds to realize that it was a chipmunk. I figured with the size of the crust and the size of the animal, he/she would eat a little bit and leave the rest for others. It sat there and ate quite a bit, then showed that we humans aren't the only ones with a propensity toward hoarding things we can't use now. It carefully tried picking up the entire crust in its mouth, having trouble until it happened to figure out the physics of the fulcrum point and bit it in the middle so the weight was evenly distributed and ran into the bushes with it. The small bird came back and pecked around on the cardboard for a few minutes, gleaning everything possible, then left. I was going to then get the carton and throw it away but as I neared, I noticed on closer examination that it was now covered with ants. Well, I'm no expert on them, but I know some of them bite and/or sting and it's painful, so I decided to leave it there. I normally don't litter, but if you had seen that ditch, you would have thought that it was on the same level leaving it there as throwing one grain of sand on a beach, so I didn't feel as badly about it.