{"id":456,"date":"2011-05-15T19:11:35","date_gmt":"2011-05-15T19:11:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fanagrams.net\/blog\/?p=456"},"modified":"2011-05-15T19:22:13","modified_gmt":"2011-05-15T19:22:13","slug":"life-at-the-bottom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/life-at-the-bottom\/","title":{"rendered":"Life at the Bottom"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the past three years, I have had the great privilege of working in a home office that overlooks several hundred acres of prairie.\u00a0 As I gnash my teeth over the struggles of my professional life, I can look up and watch the very real life and death gnashing of my prairie neighbors as they struggle to survive the winter.\u00a0 Coyotes and deer routinely lope by.\u00a0 A variety of hawks \u2013 red-tailed, rough legged and Harrier – also make their living on this prairie, and at night I can occasionally hear the great horned owl.\u00a0 While the coyotes may occasionally get lucky and bag a feeble deer, all of these predators rely on voles as their \"\"<\/a>preeminent food group.\u00a0 These voles and other field mice are the lowliest of mammals, residing at the very bottom of the food chain.\u00a0 Coyotes will sniff along the snow and\"\"<\/a> then make a little leap, pounce and when they stand up I can see the small vole briefly squirming in its grip.\u00a0 The coyote then puts his head back and swallows the doomed vole in toto.\u00a0 Red tailed hawks swoop down grab a vole and carry it back to the tree and then proceed to rip it to shreds.\u00a0 Even without binoculars you can see the fur flying.\u00a0<\/p>\n

These daily dramas made me wonder what life would be like at the bottom of the food chain.\u00a0 Voles have a life with absolutely no hope for the future with the sure knowledge that inevitably they will be snatched and crushed to death with one clench of the jaws.\u00a0 As we move up the food chain, we begin to value animals as individuals.\u00a0 Two years ago, I was delighted to see the three legged coyote again and again and cheered on his gritty survival.\u00a0 I also remember the international incident several years ago when a seal had somehow been trapped in some ice floes, and the rescue of this individual animal became a nightly news event as multiple nations achieved a momentary d\u00e9tente to collectively break open the ice to create a passage for the seal to reach open water.\u00a0 Such glories were ridiculously out of reach of the lowly vole, which exists not as an individual, but only collectively as a species, whose primary function was to feed those above them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Our two suburban dogs have been largely oblivious to voles, preferring the ridiculous futility of chasing squirrels.\u00a0 However, one day a vole somehow got into our basement, giving the dogs a sustained hunting opportunity.\u00a0 For several days they ineptly ran around the basement trying to capture the poor creature.\u00a0 Finally Fred seized the vole and brought it upstairs, dumped it on the rug and triumphantly looked around soaking in the expected adulation.\u00a0 This modest success seemed to reawaken their long dormant hunting skills and ever since, the dogs have become blood thirsty hunters on their walks.\u00a0 They began to hunt like coyotes, using the sniff and pounce method, but found limited success, particularly since they were on a leash.<\/p>\n

I have steadfastly shirked any responsibility for these dogs, announcing early and often that they are, in fact, not my dogs, but rather belong to the rest of the family.\u00a0 One day no one else was around so by default I became the dog walker.\u00a0 We headed outside in the bitterly cold wind, and the dogs immediately started sniffing and straining against the leash along the brush at the edge of the driveway.\u00a0 Fred pawed at the ground, jumped up and pounced.\u00a0 At first I thought that this was a cute imitation of his long lost coyote cousins, but then to my horror realized that he had actually bagged a vole.\u00a0 I was thrown into a quandary regarding my conflicting roles as guardian of defenseless creatures vs. letting Fred claim his right to his kill.\u00a0 And a kill it was.\u00a0 There was no struggle; the limp head of the vole hung out of Fred\u2019s mouth.\u00a0 It was as if the vole was embracing its role as a nameless victim, raising the white flag as soon it was grabbed, saying \u201cGo ahead eat me for lunch, I\u2019m happy to take one for the circle of life team.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

I was in the midst of reading the book, \u201cThe Omnivore\u2019s Dilemma,\u201d which dissects humans\u2019 complicated food chains, which are largely hidden from view by a pervasive industrial agriculture.\u00a0 The author Michael Pollan explores his conflicted carnivority by becoming a hunter and stalking a wild pig in the California brush.\u00a0 To his shock, he finds that he thrills to the chase and exults in his kill.\u00a0 He reconciles his disturbing stirrings of innate predatory behavior by drawing the line between pure recreational bloodlust and putting food on the table.\u00a0 These thoughts were semi-coherently ricocheting through my mind as I grabbed the vole\u2019s head and tried to yank it out of Fred\u2019s mouth.\u00a0 Clearly Fred was lusting for the kill as he tugged back.\u00a0 We have dutifully provided him with three squares a day and the occasional table scrap, therefore I made the judgment that Fred\u2019s resistance represented the inappropriate joys of purely recreational sport hunting.\u00a0 At the same time I had to admit that Fred\u2019s diet consisted of EXACTLY the same meal every day of his life.\u00a0 While I think that I could survive on a steady diet of BLTs, I must admit that I might appreciate an occasional spice in the variety of life.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Suddenly I felt a give in my tugging.\u00a0 I noticed that Fred had not eased up, and could only imagine that I was about to yank the head off of this poor vole in the name of some sort of confused stewardship.\u00a0 Fred had caught the vole fair and square, rejecting his identity as a pampered pet, and establishing himself, however briefly as a real player in the prairie food chain.\u00a0 If Fred wanted to eat the vole, who was I to interfere?\u00a0 I let go and in one gulp the vole was gone.\u00a0 We finished our walk, came inside and Fred immediately reverted back his original identity – a pampered pet with unlimited spare time, sunning himself on the cozy couch overlooking the prairie, occasionally looking up to vicariously bark at a passing deer.\u00a0 Later on, I found a totally intact vole that had been upchucked on our dining room rug.<\/p>\n

The missing words in the following poem are anagrams (i.e. like spot, post, stop) and the number of dashes indicates the the number of letters.\u00a0 One of the words will rhyme with the preceding or following line.\u00a0 Your job is to solve the puzzle using the above rules and context of the poem.\u00a0 Scroll down for answers.<\/h6>\n

It would be nice if Mother Nature could make a master —- chart<\/p>\n

That way everybody could tell predator and prey apart.<\/p>\n

Alas, it might come as disturbing news for voles and various —-\u00a0<\/p>\n

To learn that they are no more than a meal to the hungry owl.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But when chasing a deer a —- could explain,\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t take it personally, it\u2019s just the food chain.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Answers:\u00a0 flow, fowl, wolf<\/p>\nFollow Liza Blue on: \"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>Share: \"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"reddit\"<\/a>\"pinterest\"<\/a>\"linkedin\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the past three years, I have had the great privilege of working in a home office that overlooks several hundred acres of prairie.\u00a0 As I gnash my teeth over the struggles of my professional life, I can look up … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[33,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nature","category-such-is-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iVc8-7m","post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=456"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":458,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456\/revisions\/458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}