Maggotcha

Well Dr. and Mr. Moo have done gone and bought themselves a house. It's actually house number two for Mr. Moo, who I soon expect to become the Donald Trump of Vermont. Though Dr. Moo tried to make me feel better about my own lack of husband, babies, home...assets...etc. by saying the house isn't that great, it is on 10 acres of land with views of the Green Mountains and you can only see one other house when you look out the window. Which would be how many other houses we could see out the windows of the house we were born in.

In other Dr. Moo news, she got called in to check a pair of eight-year-old ewes, one named Harriet. A fine name for a sheepy-deep. Unfortunately these ewes weren't able to stand up and when Dr. Moo looked at their hindquarters she discovered why: flystrike!

In a nutshell, flystrike=maggot infestation, and this one was a doozy. There were so many maggots munching away that Dr. Moo could feel the heat of their efforts and hear the sounds. There were thousands of maggots covering the hindquarters of both sheep. Moo carefully removed them, along with the filthy wool and affected flesh, and the sheep are recovering.

When Moo looked down much later in the day, she discovered some maggots clinging to the legs of her coveralls. They were still alive.

In city maggot news, there was a dead squirrel laying beneath the maple tree in front of my apartment building. The squirrels have been stripping mulberries off the mulberry trees on the front lawn Tarzan-style, swinging by their hind legs from the weeping-willow-like branches and sliding and nibbling their way down. I'm not sure what killed the squirrel under the tree as he looked whole and decent.

Well, except for the flies that were landing on him. I'd made a mental note to stop looking at the dead squirrel for the summer but a friend pointed him out yesterday and he wasn't looking as good as he had the day before. I told the friend I was half hoping for an intact squirrel skeleton at the end of the summer, because what in the city eats dead squirrels?

Well apparently something, because when I got home today, the squirrel-corpse was gone.