Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Blackberries and Iguanas

I basically live out in the country... there are pastures on all four sides of my house and you can't see it from the road. We get a lot of wildlife in the backyard, just yesterday a herd (?) of wild boars was running through the back pasture. Theres a gaggle of turkeys and a pack of coyotes (who we hear almost every night) as well. But we also have a lot of wild blackberry bushes. There is one big bush that sprang up in the yard, and there are also giant thickets of them out in the fields, especially since the cows have been gone a while. And although it has been somewhat dry here, we have been getting some showers of late- just enough rain to make them all plump and juicy. I keep going out and picking more, but not just so my mother can cook up some cobbler- I feed them to my iguana. It annoys my step dad, but when I rip my arms up picking the blackberries I'll give them to Biggy Bob if I feel like it! I named him that because when he was little, our 20lb tom cat sat on top of his cage and crashed through it during the day. When I got home I found the lizard a little more than half dead under a dresser. His tail was mostly ripped off, had a broken rib and a punctured lung, and had bites on his neck and belly, but after a trip to the vets he survived. Right now though when the temperature starts pushing 100 like it has been, he gets very active and when I open the door to his cage (His cage has wheels and we move him inside/outside with the seasons) holding a plate of blackberries he literally launches himself off the branch and onto my chest looking for them! He isn't all that bright either, when he gets like this you have to lure him to one side of the cage, open up the door and basically sling in the food before he tries to jump you again. Then you have to walk to the back of the cage and hide behind the food...... THEN he finds it. Main reason this is so bad is that the sucker is almost four feet long now!

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