Just another odd moment in the Ozarks

On the bench there was a jumble of oddments such as are to be found in every workshop, bits of cord, wire, metal tools, some bread and cheese which the mice had been at, a leather bottle…

The Wart was familiar with the nests of Spar-hark and Gos, the crazy conglomerations of sticks and oddments which had been taken over from squirrels or crows…

The Sword in the Stone, T.H. White.

When I decided I was tired of the name I had given this blog when I first started writing it, I knew I wanted to include “Ozarks” to reflect the south central area in Missouri where we live (very close to the Arkansas border), but I wasn’t sure what else to add. My friend Judy suggested the word “Oddments.” She and her husband owned a used book store, and when they went to book fairs, they would set up a table with the sign “Oddments,” indicating “these were unusual things that caught our eye that we thought would also catch somebody’s eye and think ‘well, this looks interesting’ and buy them.”

I was familiar with the word “oddment”, which the author T.H. White seems to find quite useful in the first part of his epic, The Once and Future King,  which I confess I have tried to read several times but can’t seem to get past the first 100 pages, despite colorful characters and delightful writing, but never thought to use it myself.

At any rate, all that to say this… I had one of those “odd moments” the other morning that brought home just how appropriate the word is.

I was walking the church loop when I saw something twinkling green on the barbed wire fence separating the asphalt from the goats. Of course I had to see what that was. And what a surprising thing it was!

I did not think this Japanese beetle (and another one I saw further along the wire) accidentally impaled itself or that it decided to sacrifice itself, as did the kamikaze pilots in WWII, as a way to atone for the damage it had caused in peoples’ gardens.

Nope. This is the work of a bird—the Shrike—which impales the prey it catches on barbed wire or thorns. I have never seen a Shrike on the wing, but I did find a dead one that had crashed into our plate glass window, so I knew a little bit about the bird and its habits.

I was just surprised to learn that they also catch and impale insects.

I don’t think anyone is going to shed a tear for these dead beetles.