LauderBlog
Oct 3: Strange Days
Posted On: October 3, 2008 8:57 AM
Posted By: LauderBLOGGER
Related Subjects: Greater Fort Lauderdale
For all of us, these are strange days. I’m very optimistic about the future, even in the near term. But there’s no denying the wackiness floating through the air lately. Washington bickering, surreal political interviews and all the rest of it. Still, just about when I thought I’d seen nearly everything, I looked down from my third floor condo at the backyard pond early this morning and realized there’s still more strangeness to discover. Because I watched a line of three turtles and … How to put this? It seemed they were trying to mate with a coconut. Hey, what do I know? Maybe this is typical for turtles. Maybe it’s some autumnal turtle ritual. Maybe this was simply a stunningly sexy coconut. I don’t know.
It was one of those times when you really wish you had bought that video camera. Sometimes a picture, especially a moving picture, is worth a whole lot more than a thousand words. That’s certainly true of the attempted coconut mating I witnessed. Dsescription can’t quite do justice to what was going on down there. But I’ll try.
I first noticed all this when there was some unusual rippling on the water. My little lake is maybe 20 yards wide and maybe 40 yards long, one of those typical manmade deals you see at South Florida condos. I love this pond, though, because it’s fairly protected and we get everything from iguanas and herons to ibis and even a pelican. I watched an osprey dive at the surface one day and come out with a fish in its talons. But for sheer entertainment value, that was nothing compared to the turtles. These three turtles were lined up, one behind the other, chasing a floating coconut. Now that I think about it, I guess this was a fairly attractive coconut – a round green number with a fringe of brown along one edge. Anyway, the front turtle kept banging into this reluctant coconut and each time the coconut bobbed away. To the turtle, apparently, this was a fellow shelled creature playing hard to get. So he (or she?) kept swimming after it, each time knocking the coconut away again as the two other turtles blindly trailed, sometimes all of them going around in circles. I wondered if the other two turtles were would-be suitors or what. You know, kind of waiting to see if the coconut really was interested in the first guy or whatever. Nothing came of this courtship in the end, needless to say. I just peeked outside and the coconut is floating there, alone now, as virginal as it was an hour before. But wow, what can you say about something so bizarre, really? As John Lennon sang, “Strange days indeed.” Still the way I figure it is this: As long as the coconut doesn’t start looking irresistible to me, I’ll be ok.
It was one of those times when you really wish you had bought that video camera. Sometimes a picture, especially a moving picture, is worth a whole lot more than a thousand words. That’s certainly true of the attempted coconut mating I witnessed. Dsescription can’t quite do justice to what was going on down there. But I’ll try.
I first noticed all this when there was some unusual rippling on the water. My little lake is maybe 20 yards wide and maybe 40 yards long, one of those typical manmade deals you see at South Florida condos. I love this pond, though, because it’s fairly protected and we get everything from iguanas and herons to ibis and even a pelican. I watched an osprey dive at the surface one day and come out with a fish in its talons. But for sheer entertainment value, that was nothing compared to the turtles. These three turtles were lined up, one behind the other, chasing a floating coconut. Now that I think about it, I guess this was a fairly attractive coconut – a round green number with a fringe of brown along one edge. Anyway, the front turtle kept banging into this reluctant coconut and each time the coconut bobbed away. To the turtle, apparently, this was a fellow shelled creature playing hard to get. So he (or she?) kept swimming after it, each time knocking the coconut away again as the two other turtles blindly trailed, sometimes all of them going around in circles. I wondered if the other two turtles were would-be suitors or what. You know, kind of waiting to see if the coconut really was interested in the first guy or whatever. Nothing came of this courtship in the end, needless to say. I just peeked outside and the coconut is floating there, alone now, as virginal as it was an hour before. But wow, what can you say about something so bizarre, really? As John Lennon sang, “Strange days indeed.” Still the way I figure it is this: As long as the coconut doesn’t start looking irresistible to me, I’ll be ok.
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