LeRoy Pennysaver & News

LE ROY PENNYSAVER & NEWS - APRIL 1, 2018 The Queens’ Birds by Lynne Belluscio In 1951, my parents took me to see Walt Disney’s Alice in Wonderland. I remem- ber enjoying the movie, (which was in sharp contrast to my vis- it to see Bambi, which resulted in an early exit, because after the tragic scene, when Bambi’s mother is killed, I would not stop crying, and my father had to carry me out of the theater.) Alice in Wonderland was great fun – the Cheshire Cat and the Rabbit. And who can forget the Queen’s garden, where the cards are painting the white roses red, and the Queen holds a croquet match. The story is taken from Lewis Carrolls’ book , “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, which was written in 1865: Alice thought she had never seen such a curious cro- quet-ground in her life; it was all ridges and furrows; the balls were live hedgehogs, the mal- lets live flamingoes, and the sol- diers had to double themselves up and stand on their hands and feet, to make the arches. The chief difficulty Alice found at first was inmanaging her flamin- go: she succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm, with its legs hanging down, but general- ly, just as she had got its neck nicely straightened out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it would twist itself round and look up in her face, with such a puzzled expression that she could not help bursting out laughing: and when she had got its head down, and was going to begin again, it was very provoking to find that the hedgehog had unrolled it- self, and was in the act of crawl- ing away: besides all this, there was generally a ridge or furrow in the way wherever she wanted to send the hedgehog to, and, as the doubled-up soldiers were al- ways getting up and walking off to other parts of the ground, Al- ice soon came to the conclusion that it was a very difficult game indeed.” I just recently heard about another queen’s flamin- go story. I was watching PBS and a story about the Bucking- ham Palace gardens and I was astounded to learn that at one time, Queen Elizabeth II had a small flock of flamingoes. So I googled the story and dis- covered that in 1959, the Lon- don Zoo gave Queen Elizabeth a small flock of flamingoes. They apparently thrived and were fed shrimp and cockles in order to keep their pink col- or. (No, I’m not making this story up. It’s true.) But in 1996, the Queen’s flamingoes met an untimely death, when a fox killed six of them, and the one sole survivor died of shock. I was particularly interested in the story, because it seems that the pond where the flamingos congregated, had frozen over during an unseasonably winter freeze. The pond gave the fla- mingos protection from the fox, but with the pond frozen, they were not able to find refuge and were easy prey. Keeping that in mind, for this Sunday, April 1, I have been watching the weath- er forecast for LeRoy. It looks like 39 degrees with a chance of snow and going down Sunday night to a dangerous 26. We will put a out a few of our pink decoys on Sunday morning, but hope that the creek doesn’t ice over, just in case the flamingos decide to fly in on Easter morn- ing. We would certainly hate to see them become fox food. The illustrations in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, were done by John Tenniel. Alice is shown holding one of the flamingoes.