Photo Stories - Episode 3

The Great Hunter and the Mysterious Bird

Dex thinks he is a great defender of our, or shall I say, his yard.  In the mornings when I let him out for the day, sometimes I take a moment and watch him bolt off at lightning speed to run every single innocent little bird out of the yard, and if there happens to be a squirrel in a tree or on the fence, then he runs double time and acts twice as tough.  After they have all scattered, then he makes a full prancing lap with his head held high just to show those intruders that this is his yard, and not a buffet.  In reality, he isn't a fast runner and is a giant chicken, so this routine is especially comical.  I'm sure he actually thinks that someday he will catch one of these critters and live up to his name. Which leads me into the story behind this photo.

Two things your need to know first.  Number one, Dexter is a digger.  Digging a hole is to Dexter as watching baseball is to Kam.  And number two, Kam and I meet at home everyday at 1 for lunch.

So one random, nothing special day, we meet for lunch like always and just before we head back to work, we joined Dex in the back yard to just see what was going on.  Dex trots off, no big deal, goes over by the tree and just starts starring straight down at the ground.  Weird.  So Kam walk over to see what he's looking at, and there was his hole, about the size of a large bowl, and in that hole was a dead bird. Safe place too keep your dead bird, in a hole, right? He's a thinker. So, being me, I quickly ran into the house to get the camera because this was such a odd event, that I needed some documentation.  So I ran back outside and snapped a quick shot just in time for Dex to grab his bird and start swinging it around the yard.  About that time, he figured out that we didn't want him to have this bird, so now it has become a game of keep-a-way.  Kam goes one way, Dexter and the poor bird, which is obvious by this point that Dexter has been swinging him around the yard all morning, go another.  We finally get him to settle down and before Kam takes it from him, I get this one last photo.  Priceless.

Now we begin to question where this bird came from.  We know that there is no way that Dex caught the thing.  So did it land in the tree and die, did it run into the side of the house and die, did the neighbors on the other side of the back fence chuck it over?  How many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop?  The world may never know.