Spring has been cool this year. Not ‘cool’ as in ‘neato’ … just colder than we want. But the sunlight was dappling through this afternoon, and so I decided to go outside when I let Clementine into the back yard for her 2:00 Check Stuff Out duty.

Clementine has been getting more barky as she sheds a little of her puppyish dopey-ness and begins the business of being a dog, so she requires the occasional time outside to assure herself that all’s well. It’s not that rare for her to pick up the scent of something or other and start making a fuss at long-gone cats and other ne’er-do-wells, so I tuned her out when she started barking at the fence.

Besides, I had my own mystery going on.

As I did some pruning of some of the more ridiculously jungle-like shrubs near our big maple tree, the resident cardinals started ‘twip-twip’ing at me. Cardinals usually have a beautiful song — though sometimes a bit too repetitive — but this single note ‘twip’ call is saved for when they’re feeling aggressive. And since both the male and the female were directing it at me, I figured I must be coming close to a nest, but I couldn’t see how I could be when the nest was bound to be much higher than the shrubs.

Then I spied him. There was a little brown fledgling sitting at about eye level to me. He was looking kind of stoned, like baby birds always look, but also just a little concerned about all the fuss. He had probably been doing some of that Flying Thing that his folks made look so easy and was trying to shake off his latest miscalculation. He even stayed put long enough for me to go into the house, get the camera and take some pictures. (Leaves got in the way of every shot, so I ended up having to draw him later.)

So I considered it an eventful enough trip outside already when I stepped over to the fence to see why Clementine hadn’t stopped barking. I hardly needed to catch a quick flipping motion in the grass and find that I was about to step onto a very stressed-out-looking snake.

Now, luckily for me, snakes aren’t something that scare me in a big way. I’m not good with scurrying things, but I had lizards and such when I was a kid, and so skittering and slithering things don’t bother me. Besides, it was obvious that this ol’ boy wasn’t about to try a slither — Clem had worked him into such a snit that he was curled up as tight as a ball of yarn. (Snakes are deaf, by the way, but they can detect changes in heat and pressure by flicking their tongues, and this one was probably irritated by Clem’s barking.) He did try his best to strike me, but since he wasn’t very fast or very close, his best wasn’t all that good and I took a couple pictures between his feints.

In the end though, I couldn’t see leaving him on our side of the fence. I had no reason to think he was anything but a garter snake (which is what he turned out to be — an Eastern Garter Snake), but I didn’t want to worry about stepping on him again. So I found a long branch and used it to eventually shoo him back under the fence. He didn’t like the idea though. The brushes with the stick made him so mad he tried striking up at me and managed to get a good two feet or so up, to my surprise. (When I told Greg this part of the story later, he thought I was Sheena of the Jungle for hanging in there.)

So the lessons to this story are:

1. Be good to your feathered and scaled friends, even when they act like jerks
2. Keep a stick and a camera in close proximity
3. Pay attention to your dog occasionally