Kennewick's Creatures - Fall 2000
Josiah said that for no particular reason one afternoon, even though the show had been replaced by “Zoboomafoo” on PBS for the past couple of months. Josiah also likes to watch that one and also the GeoKids series of videos, of which there are a few at the local library. Occasionally there are some other animal videos or TV shows to watch. Yes, there is more to television than home repair shows and construction videos.
“I love Kratt’s Creatures” 
The animal world we live in here is not so diverse and the soundtrack is only ducks and birds. In the spring, the ducks in the pond had their mating season, with agile females often being chased by three or four clumsy males. The result was as many as eight or nine fuzzy brown or yellow waddling tennis balls following a mother duck, slowly decreasing in number to as few as two juvenile ducklings. We have never seen the culprit(s) even after seeing about four families this year. Some of our neighbors suspect prowling cats, and the manager Ernie has suggested there may be a few that have been pulled under by a pike in the pond.
Along Edison St and also 10th Avenue we frequently drive by homes with large enough acreage to have horses. A few other spots in Kennewick have sheep as well, and one home not far from us has goats and chickens. Squirrels are common anywhere there are trees. Gilbert will occasionally see a gray rabbit around where he works, but they are not around in large numbers despite their reputation. He once saw a coyote dash across the road into the scrub brush area near work after dark, which may account for that. A second-hand report is occasional snakes seen around the edge of town, including rattlesnakes (there is a Rattlesnake Mountain to the west that may have been more typical of the area before it was so populated).
Down by the river in the several parks are gaggles of year-round geese as well as ducks and seagulls. Once Gilbert saw about thirty crossing the road in single file. A car paused to let them cross, but one was “chicken” and stopped, along with the rest behind it, leaving the other half of the parade to continue across the road and leave a gap for the car. During the late fall to early spring there will be traveling ones honking in the sky.
A few small birds frequent the bird feeder Winnie made from a water bottle with a hole in the bottom that leaks seeds into a margarine dish that serves as the bowl. It is suspended from a hook above our patio, and a pencil poking through the dish and bottle hold them together and serve as a perch for the customers (some can hang onto the bowl itself and eat, so instead of a maximum capacity of two we have seen transient conditions of as many as five. The ducks come under the fence surrounding the patio to eat what the birds spill. Sometimes one of us will open the gate from outside and surprise them enough that they fly over the fence instead of sneak back under it.
It took us awhile to notice the other residents of the pond. Sometimes when we would try to feed the ducks or the swan, pieces of bread would disappear with a bubble. When the sunlight struck the murky pond at the right angle, usually in the afternoon, you may see that under the surface are dozens of small catfish, maybe four inches long, and hundreds of tiny fry. Maybe a foot deep you will see a moving shadow of a full-grown fish. They will come right up to the edge to grab a bread bit, and must be able to see out of the water at some times. One day there were two boys looking in after throwing in a bit and there were about twenty small fish lined up in parallel with their faces toward the edge, like metal shavings lined up in a magnetic field. We discovered that they do not eat toasted oat cereal, however. One day we threw in a couple of stale o’s. As expected, the fish made a dash for it and gulped each in. After a couple of seconds we saw one floating on the surface. Another fish would grab it, then a couple of seconds later we would see it floating up to the surface again as each found it unappetizing.
You may have wondered when we would get around to cats. There are a few strays that have been born within the complex, mostly black or black with white markings. So far none have been friendly, not like at the other apartments we lived at before. There used to be some non-black cats, possibly visitors from the complexes on either side that do allow pets. When Grandma Chu visited the first winter, she discovered a “pretty orange cat” that we also saw from time to time, along with a shaggy gray one that would sometimes visit our patio. There was a summer litter of kittens that had a gray striped one along with the assorted black ones, but the black cats have since become the only ones. One day Gilbert saw six black cats in the juniper bushes and under a car, and the next day our family came back and saw five in the sun.
Another common but less popular creature is the spider. Thankfully, we don’t have an ant problem, but both at work and at the apartments, management has had to bring in an exterminator for spiders. Other people we have met also comment on the quantity of spiders, and some buildings with wood siding seem to have gray vertical stripes because of all the old cobwebs in the grooves. Because some of them get carried in the wind, there are bits of cobweb between buildings or trees that could never catch an insect (or if it did would find the web’s maker too far away to ever retrieve its catch). One family we met caught a spider and put it in a jar, then put in other caught spiders that would get eaten by the original resident. Possibly many of them eat each other as there don’t seem to be many other insects for them to eat.