Once upon a time, a long time ago, my brother and I were young and dumb and dreadfully bored. At least that is the excuse I’m going to use. That must have been why we thought it would be fun to call bobwhite quail from our Grandmother’s front porch which overlooked a more than a hundred acres of Indiana farmland.
We are really good at imitating the bobwhite calls.
We should have been–as we practiced bird calls all the time.
It was our entertainment — not tv and definitely not the Lawrence Welk Show!
During the daytime, we’d call the birds into the front yard and watch them from the porch where we were partially hidden by a brick wall that was about waist high.
Our calls were very good.
A little too good.
Why?
Because one early evening instead of calling in the bobwhites, we called in a group of hungry coyotes looking for snack.
We didn’t realize what we had done until the coyotes started yipping at each other.
The coyotes were yipping — in a rather perfect triangle around us — with us at the center. (Remember we were young and in hindsight dreadfully dumb.)
When we heard the next yip come from the side of the front porch, we scrambled over the top of each other both of us trying to claw open the screen door at the same time. Finally flinging it open and tumbling into the living room with my Grandmother sitting in her Lay-Z-Boy recliner watching the Lawrence Welk show and looking at us like we had lost our minds.
We clamored for the light switch, flicked on the flood lights and then scrambled to the kitchen, grabbed some pots, raced back to the front door and started banging and clanging them together and shouting.
And, that is how I learned why you don’t make the sound of a prey animal during dusk.