The joint snake fantasy is known. The story goes that in the event you beat it with a stick, it’s going to break into a number of items, which independently crawl into the woods after which be a part of again collectively after sundown.
My father informed me the story, simply as his father had informed him. The fact is, there isn’t a such factor as a joint snake. The entire fantasy is predicated on a legless lizard, the glass lizard, which has a removable tail that continues to wiggle after it’s attacked by a predator. While the predator is fascinated with the wiggling tail, the glass lizard slithers off to security. It is believed that Benjamin Franklin’s provocative “Join or Die” woodcut cartoon revealed approach again in 1754 is predicated on the joint snake fantasy.
When I used to be about 14 and an aspiring squirrel hunter, I obtained fairly a little bit of sage recommendation from an erstwhile panel of wildlife specialists who got here by means of my father’s barber store. Often these veteran squirrel hunters would share with me their pearls of knowledge about squirrel conduct.
The one which caught the flamboyant of my young, impressionable thoughts went one thing like this: “Now Dennis, one thing about squirrels is that to keep from inbreeding and overpopulating, mama squirrels will cut the nuts out from all but one of the young male squirrels.”
Being possessed of an inquiring thoughts, I paid shut consideration to the primary few squirrels that I harvested, and positive sufficient, there have been a number of males that had no testicles. I keep in mind pondering, “This is amazing. These old fellows know what they’re talking about.”
I used to be an grownup and a severe pupil of nature earlier than I discovered there’s not a scintilla of fact in that old fantasy. Turns out, even in grownup male squirrels, the testicles are recessed again within the stomach for many of the 12 months. They solely descend into the scrotum in the course of the breeding seasons in midsummer and late winter. In young male squirrels, the testicles don’t descend throughout any season till after they’re 1 12 months old.
Finally, the spring wildflower Trillium erectum has lengthy been identified by the fairly odd widespread title “wake robin.” The title accrues from the mistaken perception that, throughout winter, robins hibernate in hole bushes, and the wildflower blooms about the identical time that robins “wake” from their lengthy winter’s nap.
This was a persistent fantasy the place robins disappeared in winter however have been the primary to reappear in spring. This is why robins are sometimes depicted getting the “early worm.”
Here’s the reality. While most robins relocate to Southern climes in winter, some stick round their home vary year-round, as far north as New England. In winter, they collect, largely unseen, in flocks and relocate from cities and cities into the deep woods. They survive on wild fruits and crawling bugs they discover by clearing small patches of the leaf litter. I’ve personally witnessed this phenomenon many occasions. We now know that robins don’t hibernate in hole bushes, and one other old fantasy bites the mud.
The ethical of those tales: Things are usually not at all times as they seem, and two plus two doesn’t equal 5.
Dennis Chastain is a Pickens County naturalist, historian and former tour information. He has been writing function articles for South Carolina Wildlife journal and different out of doors publications since 1989.
