Spring Has Arrived!

OH, sure, if you go by the calendar, it’s still nearly three weeks away.

Some wait until they see that the red, red robin has returned from her warm winter home in the south; others until the crocus and daffodils are pushing their way up through the soil. But here in the West San Fernando Valley, we have a different harbinger of the coming season. A most frightening omen indeed.

Last night I saw the first crane fly of spring.

Life size…? Not unless you’re somehow reading my blog on the screen of an IMAX theater.

There are those – renowned entomologists, smug Wikipedia editors, know-it-all neighborhood children, irritable 911 operators, and so on – who will naively insist to you that these obscene brutes are harmless. That the clumsy, nearly comical way they flap at you is merely due to their gangly limbs and weak wings and that they pose no danger to humans.

Don’t you believe it.

There’s a reason why the Mexican people have dubbed this creature chupacabra volando, literally “enormous evil flying goat-sucker from Hell.” Proof of the vicious, insatiable bloodlust of these demonic fiends? A distinct lack of goats in my neighborhood. 

Now if these beasts could just develop a taste for rooster, maybe we’d all be able to sleep past four a.m. and the local cock-fighting syndicato would move their operation to Tarzana.

Posted by Ted on March 1, 2013, 4:00 AM.