I am quite possibly the only person in the world who has been bitten by a junco. For those unfamiliar with the word juncos, or snowbirds as they are often refered, are little wren-sized birds that barely weigh half an ounce. Feisty little things among themselves, but they are generally not known to attack humans...

This was another case of no good deed goes unpunished. I have this enclosed porch that unfortunately acts as a natural bird trap. I've rescued everything off of there, from hummingbirds to flickers. None of them ever attacked. In the case of the flicker, I'm rather glad it didn't seeing as it drills holes in trees with that beak!

The junco, however, decided I was the aggressor, and me being aproximately 7,000 times its size wasn't going to stop him from taking me down with him! However a junco's beak is barely big enough to handle the millet seeds they eat with such relish. I didn't realize I was being savagely bitten until I stepped off the porch, opened my hand - and saw the junco hanging from my finger by his beak, biting away as furiously as he could. Now, that's gratitude for you...

I am also quite possibly the only person in the world to have clobbered a bear with a 12-pack of Diet Coke. Now, this may not sound like a very wise thing to do, and in retrospect it probably wasn't. I wouldn't recommend it as a regular course of action.

This was the first bear to show up in the area in several years, years during which we added a fair number of new neighbors. I don't think that some of these new neighbors had fully adjusted to where they were, I think they thought they were living in something like Cherry Hills, but with actual real hills. I say this because - big surprise - the bear spent considerable time under my next door neighbors' apple trees, and some of these new neighbors wanted my next door neighbors to cut their apple trees down so they wouldn't attract bears. Never mind the ten billion chokecherry and sand plum bushes growing all over the area...

To be fair, the Dept of Wildlife was a little unnerved by this bear too, as it did not seem to be afraid of people. They advised us to try and make it afraid of people, before it became a problem bear and had to be destroyed.

One afternoon I heard some odd noises at the pantry door, which leads out onto the back deck. You know those movies where you yell "No, don't go down in the basement you idiot!", and the person goes down in the basement? I am that person. Well, you know what I found there. I stared stupidly at the bear for a moment; the bear stared stupidly at me for a moment, then the words of the DOW rang in my head - "Make it afraid of people". So I grabbed the first thing I could get both my hands on, and heaved it as hard as I could at the bear. I hit it hard enough to send Diet Coke spraying all over the deck and the bear, and the bear learned not to mess with the crazy person.

I am almost certainly the only Kevin Murcray in the world, what with "Murcray" being one of the rarest names in the world. This, I think, is a bad thing. It means I am extremely easy to google. True, this could be useful for old friends and classmates and whatnot to find me. But it also makes it easy for old enemies to find me, prospective new employers to learn about me (fortunately my current one already knows I'm crazy, and doesn't care), Potential girlfriends to find all sorts of reasons not to be potential girlfriends, and potential political opponents to find ammunition to use against me.

Not that I could run for any kind of office anyway, too many people already know me. And it's a sure bet one of them would spill the beans about how I won the coveted coconut.