Oxford Animal Tales
by Hoyt Oliver
Human life in Oxford is variable, comfortable, weird, painful, beautiful, and amusing in abundance. Another special blessing of Oxford is the wonderful community of non-human animal life. As a Tree City, U.S.A., we cherish our forested streets’ rights-of-way, our streams and rolling hills, our yards and gardens bright with flowers and vegetables, our nature trail, the Oxhouse outdoor learning center, and now, also the Oxford College Organic Farm. What a rich habitat for life, all interconnected!
Anecdotes of animals seem to bubble up naturally from my memory, while I’m getting more and more murky about remembering people and things. So, for this storybook, in celebration of the City of Oxford’s 175th Anniversary, I’ll share a mixed collection of animal tales, clumped for convenience sake into the several animal families.
Anecdotes of animals seem to bubble up naturally from my memory, while I’m getting more and more murky about remembering people and things. So, for this storybook, in celebration of the City of Oxford’s 175th Anniversary, I’ll share a mixed collection of animal tales, clumped for convenience sake into the several animal families.
Insects
It’s normal to get “bugged” in Oxford – ticks, chiggers, mosquitoes, gnats, flies, ants, and other stinging critters are ubiquitous. My grandson just got painfully stung by a yellow jacket from a nest in our yard. It’s near impossible to get rid of the fire ants – but my kids did some fine school science projects on fire ants!
The sound of cicadas is the quintessential sound of summer. The dragonflies lace the air over the pond. The moths and butterflies, fluttering scraps of colors, visit and pollinate the flowers. And, glorious creation, the web of a black-and-yellow “writing spider” sparkles with dew drops in early-morning sun!
Sometimes, though, it hurts when humans and insects occupy the same space. When the Seney Hall roof was being redone years ago, a workman slung on a rope was on the west tower and disturbed a whole swarm of bees nesting there!
I highly recommend getting to know the world of miniature life residing below our feet. Back when I was teaching religion, I would frequently take my students into the college forest and ask them to lie face-down on the fallen leaves and quietly observe the tiny beings they saw. Such a multitude of creatures – centipedes, pill bugs, beetles, spiders, worms, ants and all. Praise be, also, for the teeming life of the soil that makes my garden grow: bacteria, fungi, earthworms, nematodes -- outnumbering us by the trillions!
Reptiles and Amphibians
Lizards scurry all around. We had a seventeen-pound, six-toed golden cat named Purrpuss who collected a row of six skinks on our car port. And a special delight was looking out the workshop window to see an Anole lizard in his green state puffing out his scarlet throat in a mating call. Frogs are the choirs of warming weather – first the spring peepers, later the deeper croaks of bullfrogs. Every now and then it looks as though it has been raining toads – hundreds and hundreds of tiny toads bopping along.
I have always liked snakes. They were sometimes my childhood pets, along with box tortoises and baby turtles. My children and grandchildren have also enjoyed snakes, learning early on not to bother the poisonous ones. My wife, LaTrelle, once picked up a little copperhead in an armload of firewood – she dropped that in a hurry! Sometimes in the hottest summer weather a copperhead hangs out in the cooler containing my irrigation pump; I just bang on the box to ask him to go away. Black rat snakes are good helpers, living in our attics to help keep down the mice and squirrels – though it wasn’t pleasant when one died in the wall and we had to cut sheetrock to get it out.
When Representative David Scott was out campaigning he came by our place – and jumped back in consternation when my son, Erik, came around the corner wrapped in a six-foot black snake. Once, our neighbor, Mrs. Paine, called me because a snake was crawling up to get baby birds from a nest on her porch. I grabbed it, getting a few tooth-scratches on my hand. And Betty Claire Clark, living in the parsonage next to our back pasture, called our kids to show them what she had in alcohol -- a baby king snake, dead while trying to swallow a baby cottonmouth.
When Representative David Scott was out campaigning he came by our place – and jumped back in consternation when my son, Erik, came around the corner wrapped in a six-foot black snake. Once, our neighbor, Mrs. Paine, called me because a snake was crawling up to get baby birds from a nest on her porch. I grabbed it, getting a few tooth-scratches on my hand. And Betty Claire Clark, living in the parsonage next to our back pasture, called our kids to show them what she had in alcohol -- a baby king snake, dead while trying to swallow a baby cottonmouth.
There are lots of slider turtles and a few snapping turtles in our pond and in the Wattersons’s pond above us. About a year ago, the grandsons got to observe a turtle laying her eggs in a hole more than a hundred feet from the pond. When Erik was about eleven or twelve years old, he and young Kent Linville borrowed Dr. John Park’s aluminum boat and went hunting snapping turtles in the marsh on Soule Street behind the Dean’s house. They soon called me in dismay – Erik had shot one fifteen-pound snapper and had it in the boat. But it wasn’t quite dead; when it snapped toward his bare toe he shot it with his 410 – right through the bottom of the boat! He had to clean that turtle and stew it, but the stew was hardly worth the cost of welding the boat.
Birds
What an avian wonderland is our place in Oxford! Owls hoot in the woods; red-tailed hawks scream; mourning doves coo; blue jays raucously squawk; and mockingbirds tunefully and loudly lay claim to their territory.
Bluebirds raise families in boxes by the garden; the Carolina wren builds her nest every year in my workshop; hummingbirds happily feast on the flowers; and to the bird feeders come dozens of kinds of birds: chickadees, nuthatches, flickers, sparrows, cardinals, finches, cedar waxwings, warblers, and many whose names I don’t know.
Turkey buzzards (vultures) circle gracefully in the air currents above – and roost in numbers on the Oxford water tower – at least they did until Jody Reid got an artificial dead buzzard to scare them off! From time to time flocks of crows pepper the pasture; great hordes of starlings noisily infest the trees and feed in the grass, suddenly all taking flight like one organism.
At the pond, often a Great Blue Heron stands patiently fishing, then flies majestically into the forest. The Canada Geese trumpet in the sky, and once a pair landed in our pond and grabbed most of the food I had thrown to the fish and turtles.
The pigeons have probably now been excluded from the attic of Seney Hall; but when the building was being remodeled years ago I got several hundred pounds of dried pigeon manure for my garden, along with a pigeon skeleton that I presented to Dooley on his birthday visit.
Bluebirds raise families in boxes by the garden; the Carolina wren builds her nest every year in my workshop; hummingbirds happily feast on the flowers; and to the bird feeders come dozens of kinds of birds: chickadees, nuthatches, flickers, sparrows, cardinals, finches, cedar waxwings, warblers, and many whose names I don’t know.
Turkey buzzards (vultures) circle gracefully in the air currents above – and roost in numbers on the Oxford water tower – at least they did until Jody Reid got an artificial dead buzzard to scare them off! From time to time flocks of crows pepper the pasture; great hordes of starlings noisily infest the trees and feed in the grass, suddenly all taking flight like one organism.
At the pond, often a Great Blue Heron stands patiently fishing, then flies majestically into the forest. The Canada Geese trumpet in the sky, and once a pair landed in our pond and grabbed most of the food I had thrown to the fish and turtles.
The pigeons have probably now been excluded from the attic of Seney Hall; but when the building was being remodeled years ago I got several hundred pounds of dried pigeon manure for my garden, along with a pigeon skeleton that I presented to Dooley on his birthday visit.
Mammals
When our daughter, Laurie, was a toddler she had a pet white rat, Gianni Scicci. Unlike mice, rats are friendly companions. What fun it was to observe the look on the mother-in-law’s face when she saw the baby kissing the rat! One time, playing in the yard, Gianni chased our huge cat up a tree.
Some other rodents I could live without! The cheery chipmunks are okay, but those ubiquitous tree-rats, the squirrels, are annoying. Would you believe that until a few years ago, Oxford ordinances proclaimed the town a Squirrel Sanctuary? And we can’t shoot firearms at them now; Terry Smith claims he has trapped well over a hundred of them, but my skill or luck is not that good. I wonder whether anyone has calculated the cost of squirrel damage to our electrical system? They’re always shorting out transformers, and once even blew a major fuse in the transfer station, blacking out most of Oxford.
Some other rodents I could live without! The cheery chipmunks are okay, but those ubiquitous tree-rats, the squirrels, are annoying. Would you believe that until a few years ago, Oxford ordinances proclaimed the town a Squirrel Sanctuary? And we can’t shoot firearms at them now; Terry Smith claims he has trapped well over a hundred of them, but my skill or luck is not that good. I wonder whether anyone has calculated the cost of squirrel damage to our electrical system? They’re always shorting out transformers, and once even blew a major fuse in the transfer station, blacking out most of Oxford.
Continuing the tale of animal invasion, the number of deer now in Oxford is indeed impressive. Perhaps the build-out of western Newton County has driven them in numbers to our mostly-forested city. They’re a pleasure to see now and then, but they surely do like to eat garden plants. I had to put a nine-foot mesh fence around the vegetable garden to deter them. Maybe some of their predators will increase; LaTrelle looked out of our kitchen window one morning to see in our pasture a coyote feasting on a fawn it had killed.
There are still a few cows in Oxford, on the Ballards’ farm. Back in 1908 my grandfather, Hoyt P. Oliver, was a student at Emory College. He, my grandmother, and my infant father, Young J. Allen Oliver, lived in a cottage on Wesley Street. They kept a cow and sold milk to the boys in Florida Hall, the “Helping Hall” that now is our family residence!
Why, now that the elevator would make it so much easier, have the students abandoned the custom of putting a cow on the second floor of Seney Hall? Yes, I know … they did bring us a moment of notoriety by putting Curtis Jackson’s zebra in Seney. And I have heard that one year in mid-twentieth-century, there was no cow available, so the students locked a mule in a first-floor Seney classroom. When Professor Walton Strozier came for class he exclaimed, “Some jackass has locked the door!” When he got the key and opened the door, the jackass bowled him over.
Why, now that the elevator would make it so much easier, have the students abandoned the custom of putting a cow on the second floor of Seney Hall? Yes, I know … they did bring us a moment of notoriety by putting Curtis Jackson’s zebra in Seney. And I have heard that one year in mid-twentieth-century, there was no cow available, so the students locked a mule in a first-floor Seney classroom. When Professor Walton Strozier came for class he exclaimed, “Some jackass has locked the door!” When he got the key and opened the door, the jackass bowled him over.
What would we have been without the faithful mules of yesteryear? They plowed the extensive fields that once surrounded us; they pulled the street car that connected Oxford and Covington; they provided the power to build homes and college buildings. It’s great that Roscoe Womack, Jr., former long-time supervisor of Oxford public works, still keeps the mules for which he is well-known. He, the mules, and Dr. Homer Sharp, dressed up as Uncle Sam in Roscoe’s beautiful hand-crafted wagon, were a splendid part of the Fourth of July Parade in 2014, our 175th Anniversary year.
Armadillos? Well, I can’t say much about these recent invasive critters, because I have yet to see a live one here, only evidence of their scratching in the mulch all around. But I can tell you that if you go to Cumberland Island, you can easily meet them face-to-face!
Armadillos? Well, I can’t say much about these recent invasive critters, because I have yet to see a live one here, only evidence of their scratching in the mulch all around. But I can tell you that if you go to Cumberland Island, you can easily meet them face-to-face!