This column originally appeared in The Times and The News-Star July 28, 2019.

Those of a certain age will remember Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. It was heady fare.

It ran on television in the 1960s when I was growing up and was a must-see on Sunday nights. It won Emmys — I didn’t know that at the time or what an Emmy was. I just knew that Marlin Perkins and stud hoss in-the-field Jim Fowler would be tracking a bear or sticking their hands into an eagle’s nest or fording a swamp so we could get our wildlife fix for the week to counter the sad fact that Monday, we were going to have to learn how to use a compass, and I’m not talking about the kind of compass that Fowler surely carried to get both himself and some daring cameraman into and out of the nether regions and badlands of this most spectacular world we share.

Big doings for little kids. I think Jim got sunburn once on the Serengeti. Maybe a hangnail. Otherwise, invincible. And big TV doings for little guys like me.

When Jim was on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and brought along a bird or a monkey or a panda, that was fine television too.

Now the show has been rebooted and is on Animal Planet.

Which is what my backyard has become.

Welcome to my world. Probably to yours too.

It started in the spring with The Plague of the Toads. Late spring actually. Seems like nature in the form of “the birds and the bees” arrived about six weeks late over here.

These are baby toads. Two could have coffee, comfortably, on a penny.

They are not big animals.

When you see a long black string in a body of water, that is probably a long, long string of frog eggs. At some point, they become the baby toads. How they get out of the pool is something Mother Nature knows but I do not.

Hundreds, hopping around. For weeks, our backyard earth would move with tiny black hopping dots. What a BB could do if it had hips.

They are gone now. Maybe eight frogs came of the entire batch and hung around. Things did not go well for us or for them.

They’d hop into the pool but could not get out. They’d ride the cord of the little cleaning machine. They’d get into the skimmer and either meet their watery doom or I would find them and dump them out.

They’d hop back in.

Somehow, a couple got onto the top of this little waterfall thing and — this is true as we saw it twice — cannonballed into the deep end. Jump, count to three, and splat! But then they were in Water Jail.

Twice I plucked three out and took them in a bucket down to a nearby pond so they could live regular frog lives. The one toad I have not been able to locate is the one who sings bass by the back window each night. That guy…

But then came the birds. Thank you Lord, for the birds.

This giant bush called a Katrina Rose grows in our yard hooked onto porch walls and roof in an upside down U. In the precise middle, 10 feet off the ground, the first nest was built. Two baby doves were born there. A week after they were on their own — and they’re still hanging around, just not there — two other doves, who I guess had sublet the nest, moved in and had two more baby doves came along. And now they are grown and gone but still hanging around.

Then in the west half of the same rose, five feet from the first nest, a second nest was built. After watching dozens of mom/dad shift changes through the weeks, two Cardinals were born there. They’ve moved along, possibly to other yards, maybe to the National League.

And that was it until I saw the nest way up in the parasol tree, 18 feet off the ground. Bigtime, penthouse birds. Those ended up being robins and by far the noisiest babies. But now they have flown the coop too, and Marlin and Jim missed it all.

Now, we are literally empty nesters.

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