Small triumphs

It absolutely amazes us the way that wildlife seems to survive even in the face of our greatest efforts to obliterate it.  Perhaps we've all seen the picture that has been traversing the web for years now, showing a fawn carefully hidden by his mother on someone's deck that was littered with white blossoms?  Or the weeds that take hold the minute an ounce of soil shows through a crack in a sidewalk.  And no matter how hard we try, through pulling or even poisoning, those weeds keep coming back!  It's a sad plight that we have created for nature's wonders, and yet she continues to bless us with stolen moments.  We live in a tightly packed house farm, and the water we enjoy walking by is really a carefully laid out system of drainage ditches, yet we are treated nightly to sightings of rabbits, ducks, and a muskrat.  Sometimes we even get to see the Great Blue Heron, or a hawk, or the rare snake.  Tonight we were within a few yards of a Green Heron.  We have no idea how rare he is, but he was new to us and we spent a good 20 minutes watching him eat bugs.  Even Calvin watched him for a while, before returning to his terraforming project (read: moving grass).  It is likely to be both our most important and most difficult endeavor to teach him to love and respect this world that our kind has so mistreated.