Sounds of Spring

The sun warms the grass and the buds. I stumble over furniture for lack of sleep. I set my clocks forward yesterday and I will adjust for a couple of weeks.

Not really that big of a change, the daylight savings time affects me mightily every year. It honestly is my least favorite day of the year. I have a suspicion sleep means way too much to me. I won’t bother quoting the Proverbs about laziness. Because truly, when I’m awake I use my time fairly productively. I just like sleep!

The buzz of crickets hums a little louder every night. The bullfrogs are croaking. Spring sounds are my favorite. Though fall thrills me more than any other season, cold weather drives a silence ahead of it.

Birds make up the majority of the music I hear from my back porch. (Three mourning doves are eating birdseed just outside my window as I write.) However, one sound makes me smile more than any other – a yodel deep from my coonhound’s throat when she sees her first spring rabbit.

A coonhound on the scent in the woods will bark, bawl, chop bark and finally bay when it trees its prey. I know my coonhound’s got it in her, but I’m not in a hurry for her to discover all those voices, nor are my neighbors.

But the rabbits in our neighborhood have elaborate plans to draw her out. When we think they’re burrowed down in a hole somewhere away from the cold night air, they’re actually leaning over blueprints spread out on a stump in the woods.

Chloe has a round electronic parameter. She knows her limits and she doesn’t push them. The rabbits know them as well. They come as far as the edge and wiggle their eyebrows and ears at her. She’ll stand taunting from other dogs, golf carts and squirrels, but the rabbits test her dignity.

They generally hang out in the azaleas across the back of the yard. And that’s where she heads when I open the door. I love to watch her run after them. She comes close, until she has to skid into the bushes because she can’t go any farther.

Will she ever catch one? I suspect not. Only once did she get the opportunity. Before the electronic parameter, we would put her out on a lead. One time she broke out of her collar and took off after a rabbit. He ran; she chased, around and around a group of three neighboring houses, until Steve interfered with a golf cart. I’m absolutely certain that’s what she’s reliving when she’s napping and whimpering with all four legs running.

(If you’d like to read more, see “Life in the Wild” from July 2009.)