That's why he's a Boofus

Last night I was finishing up some blog reading/responding as Scrappy finished dinner.  He came up and put front paws in my lap with that "time to go out" look.  So I said to him the magic words:

"Do you wanna go out, or would you rather.."

At this point, the ears came to attention.

"...go for a walk?"

Have you ever seen a cartoon where a character kinda circles his head before dashing away?  This is just what he did- like a doggie double-take.  He then began barking at such a rate that the next bark was almost coming out before the last one was finished.

That would be a "yes".

So, off we go, and wouldn't you know:  the very day I told Bobby G how rare it is to see rabbits around here what with the cats and foxes and such,  What do we see on Ground Hog Road?

We were about 50 feet downwind, and we took several steps towards him before he took off, and Scrappy caught the scent.  And as usual when we got to where he was, Scrappy thoroughly sniffed the place he sat... and then tried to track him back to where he came from, instead of where he went.  Hence the title of this post.

He got redemption, though, as we moved south to the path between soccer fields.  As we approached one of the main den areas, he caught a whiff of something and charged full speed ahead.  It was hidden to me for a few seconds as it had been sunning on the other side of a patch of tall grass, but not from Scrappy- and soon he was in hot pursuit of a ground hog heading for his hole.  Perhaps if Scrappy was unleashed (which would be stupid in the extreme on my part) or I could move faster (like that's gonna happen), Scrappy would have certainly caught him.  But since I've seen him get in a stare-down with a ground hog and go "duh..."  (See "Once Upon A Time In The Forest" on the stories and poetry page), I have my doubts he'd know just what to do with him when he got there.

Soon later we're walking the loop trail in the woods when we see our two bucks disappearing towards the High Woods.  For those of you that haven't seen the horrible pictures of the "High Woods", here's the thumbnail:  it's a partially detached square of woods on the northwest corner of our woods.  Built on an old garbage dump, it sets above main woods level and basically is the separation between the medical park and the additon to our west.  It has no natural openings, no natural trails, and about double the fallen sticks the main woods has.  But we decided to take the trail down to where it leaves our woods, and double back along the edge of the medical park, to see if we could spot them in the High Woods.


Why not just go straight through, like the deer did?  Well, where the two woods touch, the north 1/4 is guarded by the wettest of the dry stream beds that lace that end of our woods- and it was pretty wet.  The remainder of their adjoinment is guarded by "that which man cannot pass through"- at least without a tank.  As it turned out, it was in just those thickets that they had found their shelter, and we ended a fruitless expedition by slogging through the far-from-dry stream bed.



Here are some more pics of earlier in the week adventures:

Another dip in the creek.

Yep, I crossed it successfully.

One whacked out bug... or was it two?  I never got close enough to figure it out.

And the day before with Laurie joining us, I saw something move way up at the other end of Dead Tree Road...

...and when I blew it up big enough, it was a deer!  I figured a fox from where we were...