As the Crow Flies

I am exhausted at the mere thought of writing about crows despite the fascination they hold for me. These intelligent, intriguing birds have been so thoroughly and splendidly covered in recent years, online and in books, by authors and scientists that I think the best thing to do is simply refer people to these sources and just add my own poor anecdotes and images to the growing body of literature and imagery.

It's almost impossible not to notice crows in late summer, autumn, and winter in our area: They appear as an endless frieze of silhouettes streaming across the sky at sunset to communal rookeries, where they settle in for the night while making a huge ruckus.

In Seattle, the crows flew east over our house in the evening en route to a rookery on Foster Island in the botanical gardens near the University of Washington. Here in the Woodinville area, more than 10,000 crows flock at the UW's Bothell campus. Clearly these are brainy birds if they feel most at home in the vicinity of institutions of higher learning. (Video here.)

I've noticed that crows in Seattle are much less suspicious of humans than crows here in rural King County. In Seattle my dog and I could stroll within five feet of a foraging crow and it would merely pause in its poking at the ground to keep an eye on us.

Crows in Cottage Lake, however, fly off when we're still 20 feet or so away. With fewer people per block, and even fewer walking on local streets, I guess the crows haven't had as many encounters with people as city crows. (It's not farm country, so it's not that they've learned to associate humans with gunshot.)

Just about everybody has a crow anecdote. My first one involved attempting to rescue a blue-eyed baby crow fledgling who was sitting in the road right under my friend C.'s car tire, gazing up at us trustingly as we tried to shoo him to safety while his parents screamed overhead. I finally had to scoop up the little guy to deposit him on the sidewalk.

My thank-you consisted of being dive-bombed by the furious pair of crows and having my head pecked and my hair pulled. Plus they yelled and cawed at me every time I returned to that spot, which I had to do just about every day since it was outside my kid's elementary school. (Crows have been shown to have keen facial recognition skills.)

Another story involves coming home to find about 75 crows perched on the roof of our Seattle house and in the branches of our trees, all hollering their heads off. Unfortunately, I eagerly shot pictures of the bald eagle sitting on a telephone pole across the street calmly eating a pigeon (the focus of the crows' fury) instead of the crows. Looking back, I think the mass of crows would've been a far better picture.

Just a scant few of the crows harassing the bald eagle.

Crows also enjoyed sipping water out of the gutters of our home and prying up wads of moss on the roof to eat the dainties hiding beneath it. They also discovered that the weephole in our curb, which channeled a rivulet from an underground stream into the street, was a great place to dip food items to soften them and congregated there regularly.

Crows are always on the lookout for easy pickings, and city crows learned long ago that local playgrounds are full of untidy children and untended picnics. When the Resident Teen was small, she stood aghast in the playground near the Woodland Park Zoo, watching as a crow grabbed our paper bag containing a bagel and flew off with it. Bagels are heavy, however, so I became the lunchtime hero by chasing the crow, which dropped the bag so it could gain elevation and escape.

This one seized upon some unguarded pizza at the playground
during an elementary-school picnic a few years ago.

Crows nested in our old neighborhood, and when their babies fledged and spent a few days shuffling around on the ground as they learned to fly, the parent birds would attack us in our garden. We learned to go outside holding a broom above our heads, not to swat the protective mom and dad but just to keep them at bay. Everybody was much happier when the youngsters learned to fly. Then they'd sit on the power lines, where the young birds would wail pathetically for food and generally torment their parents.

Junior is the blue-eyed bird on the right
with the gaping, insatiable red maw.

My most recent crow encounter was a bird who defied my earlier statement that Cottage Lake crows are more wary than Seattle crows (exception proves the rule, and all that). This one landed on the handle of my grocery cart when I returned to my car with my purchases.

"What did you get? Anything for me?"

Then he jumped into the back of the station wagon when I opened the hatchback to load it. He pecked up some spilled grain and then proceeded to try and open the grocery bags, at which point I shooed him out. He sat on the hood waiting for me to come back after returning my cart. Once I was in the car, he hopped on to the side mirror to pierce me with a gaze and see if he couldn't stare me into giving him some handouts.

We've had lots of lovely birds visit our new garden, but so far crows have only dropped in once. I hope they'll be paying us some more visits because I find them endlessly entertaining.

Crows bravely whooping it up at Woodland Park Zoo,
pilfering pumpkin right from under the noses of the grizzly bears

Some great crow books:
Bird Brains by Candace Savage
Gifts of the Crow by John Marzluff and Tony Angell
In the Company of Crows and Ravens by John Marzluff, Paul Ehrlich, and Tony Angell
Crows: Encounters with the Wise Guys by Candace Savage
Mind of the Raven [the crow's cousin] by Bernd Heinrich

Some cool crow videos:
National Geographic "Clever Crows" 2-minute film
Nature's "A Murder of Crows"
Crow fashions hook out of hairpin to get food from a tube

Crow winkling critters out of shells, Carkeek Park

Horses: Ridiculous Creatures, Really

"Ha, ha," says Avi.

Noble, beautiful, proud, powerful...yes, the horse can be all of these things.

"Hast thou given the horse strength? hast thou clothed his neck with thunder?" the King James Bible asks.

"When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk: he trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it," declaims the Dauphin of France in Shakespeare's Henry V.

But horses can also be awkward and just plain silly.

Granted, most of this ridiculousness is sort of inflicted on them, because we give them stalls to live in and make them wear funny things.

Still. Big teeth, bugging-out eyes, and a lack of self-consciousness do help set the stage.

Photographic evidence herewith.

Horses sometimes wear silly hats.
(This is actually a cribbing collar, to stop the horse from
grabbing a fence with its teeth, arching its neck,
then sucking in and swallowing big gulps of air--
an odd habit of some horses.)

"No, really. I'm a bunny."
(Actually, a practical bit of headgear:
it's a fly mask that keeps pesky
insects out of its ears and eyes.)

"My best friend is a sheep."

"Truth to tell, it's not a ba-a-a-a-d job at all."

Here's Avi, totally stylin' in some hip
mod duds. Woo hoo!

Let's make sure we get a closeup of that groovy pattern!

This fellow's discovered that you can
make a really glorious racket by running
your teeth up and down the metal bars
of a stall. 

Rapunzel, equine-style.

"Aww. Horses are so cute and pretty!"

Woolly Logic, Caterpillar Division

We found this guy on a path in Marymoor Park, Redmond, WA.

Just in time for Halloween, here's a caterpillar that dresses up as a tiger but is known as a woolly bear.

Woolly bears are found throughout North America, except in the most northern latitudes. They're one of the most familiar and well-liked caterpillars; it was fondly called a woolly bear even back in Colonial times. (Southerners, however, call them "woolly worms.") Thanks to its fuzz, this larva enjoys an affection not granted to its bare green and brown cousins.

Part of a woolly bear's appeal must also spring from its dogged caterpillar-on-a-mission behavior. Woolly bears catch our eye in autumn because that's when they trundle across sidewalks, paths, and roads, seriously boring ahead as if bearing important messages that must be delivered as soon as possible.

This woolly bear's curled-up self-defense certainly
dissuaded me from devouring it.

Nothing distracts a woolly bear from its task.

If you pick it up, it will coil tightly, under the assumption that you are a bird who wants to eat it but will give up once its potential meal turns into an unappetizing burl of bristles.

It will stay curled up until it figures the coast is clear, then will abruptly straighten out and resume its determined trek.

What these busy caterpillars are actually doing is looking for a safe place to hide for the winter. A woolly bear spends the cold months curled up under bark or tucked among rocks or logs. Its entire body shuts down, even its circulatory system. A natural antifreeze permeates its tissues, protecting it from damage in freezing temperatures.

Adult tiger moth, Wikipedia

In spring, the caterpillar emerges from this hibernation to spin a silken cocoon, shedding its bristles and incorporating them into the fabric, too. From this cocoon emerges the "tiger": a golden Isabella Tiger Moth.

The moth quickly finds a mate and lays eggs. In most of its range, this species hatches out into a spring generation of caterpillars that chow down on herbaceous plants (wild species, not garden plants or crops--probably another reason it's so well liked).

The spring generation then pupates, ultimately hatching into a second generation of moths that produces a second batch of caterpillars.

It's these summer caterpillars that chug across paths in fall, grabbing our attention with their cinnamon-and-black-velvet cloaks. They're also responsible for inspiring a charming bit of folklore: the width of a woolly bear's brown band is said to predict the severity of the upcoming winter. A wide band foretells a mild winter, while a narrow band warns of a harsh season ahead.

There's no scientific basis for this belief; studies haven't revealed any correlation between band width and weather. How much brown is on a caterpillar has more to do with its age: older caterpillars have wider brown bands. Caterpillars that feed in regions where fall weather has been damp tend to have narrower brown bands than caterpillars that frolicked in dry regions.

This woolly bear is not a woolly bear.

One of the first attempts at sussing out the relationship between bristles and blizzards took place in the 1940s and 1950s, when an entomologist named C.H. Curran spent some time collecting woolly bears, measuring their bands, and calculating the average.

According to the Old Farmer's Almanac, Curran was simply larking about while enjoying an excuse to take in the beauty of fall foliage in the Bear Mountain area of New York, knowing his sample sizes were too small to yield useful data. He, his wife, and his friends dubbed themselves "The Original Society of the Friends of the Woolly Bear." Apparently his caterpillars boasted relatively broad brown bands in those years, which were marked by winters that were milder than usual, confirming that the folklore was true in many people's estimations.

Of course, nothing (least of all scientific proof) will stop people from believing what they want to believe. Especially when it involves furry caterpillars. In some places it's thought that not only does the degree of brown banding foretell winter weather--the direction of caterpillar travel is a clue, too. A southbound caterpillar is telling you winter will be terrible, while a northbound one believes that winter will be mild. (That would mean peregrinations precisely prognosticate precipitation.)

"I'm heading south. No! North! No...wait..."

Although woolly bears are probably no better than TV meteorologists at predicting the weather, they're apparently aces at balancing their intake of toxic substances to rid themselves of parasites.

 A recent study showed that woolly bears infected with fly larvae (which rudely devour their host as they grow) increase their consumption of alkaloid-containing leaves, which kills off their unwanted guests.

If you just can't get enough of woolly bears, you can find woolly-bear festivals, complete with costume contests, woolly-bear races, and weather predicting, in several towns nationwide, including Vermilion, Ohio; Banner Elk, North Carolina; Beattyville, Kentucky; Lewisburg, Pennsylvania; and Oil City, Pennsylvania. Or start your own Society of the Friends of the Woolly Bear.

Top Ten Terrifying Terrors of Terror in Childhood (Mine)

There's no telling what's going to freak out a particular child.

For years, I had cartoonist Roz Chast's piece "On Display at the Children's House of Horrors" tacked to my bulletin board, which depicted these hair-raising things in her signature neurotic, quaky line: The Hall of Snowsuits, The Plate Where All the Different Foods Are Touching One Another, Live Demonstration of the Shampoo, and the Gallery of Inexplicable Fears, which included a butterfly, a pineapple, a kite, a fan, and a blow dryer.

The Resident Teen, not afraid of eventually hopping back on her horse even after falling this weekend and suffering a concussion, is scared of bees and wasps, and as a three-year-old developed a sudden fear of cows strolling into her bedroom at night. Cows are not legion on the streets of Seattle, but there you go. (Fortunately, a  hastily drawn sign declaring "Cows Not Allowed" with a cow depicted in the circle-and-slash "not allowed" logo made bedtime peaceful once again.)

Here, in one more Halloween Hurrah for the month of October, is my own list of the Top 10 Things that either scared the bejesus out of me as a child or induced extended anxiety (in addition to the more typical anxieties about the dark, loss of parents, school exams, gym class, clowns, and the like).

1. Strange Toilets

Aiiiieeeeee. There was nothing scarier than commodes not located at home or at least in a house. Public ones were large, loud, and much noisier. And you usually had to face a battalion of them, all hiding behind doors and just waiting to devour you.

I truly felt deep empathy for all the kids of today whom I've squired into modern public bathrooms with automatic-flush toilets. I learned to carry duct tape with me--armed with a piece of duct tape to place over the sensor, a child can ensure that he or she can use the privy in peace, without it flushing every two seconds, then, upon completion, rip off the duct tape and run like hell out the door.


2. Cement Mixers

Photo courtesy Wikipedia

Cement mixers were nothing more than supersized strange toilets set loose upon the world on gigantic wheels. They appeared arbitrarily, growling and grinding, and could make paste of you in the blink of a sparrow's eye.

At some point cement mixers began appearing in colors and patterns other than utilitarian gray--a cheerful rainbow-polka-dotted one prowled our neighborhood, but it did not fool me; I knew it was a wolf in sheep's clothing.


3. Cinder the Collie

Cinder was a lovely black and white collie owned by one of my mom's best friends. She was completely harmless, and I liked her. However, when you're small and eye to eye with a dog, they're pretty scary. Especially when you find yourself backed into a corner of the yard, pressed against a fence, weeping, while the dog barks at you and dances back and forth, darting toward you every time you try to get past it and run into the house.

My dog trainer friend D. loves this story. "She was just doing her job as a sheepdog," she told me. "She was herding a small, bleating object and making it stay in one place."


4. Disemboweling by Giraffe

I loved animals (despite the Cinder experience) and read about them voraciously. This pursuit frequently turned up alarming facts. Such as the one about how a giraffe's kick is enough to disembowel a lion. I had a nightmare one night in which a giraffe cornered my older brother in the house. The gory scene was thankfully hidden by a conveniently placed floral sofa. I forgot about this particular dread for decades, at least until I had to sign a waiver before working as a docent at a zoo that called for acknowledging that I wouldn't hold them liable if I were gored, bitten, trampled, or otherwise injured by an animal.

5. Madge

Oh, Madge, the wisecracking manicurist of Palmolive dish-washing liquid fame! Any 1960s kid who spent time watching afternoon reruns of "Bugs Bunny" cartoons took in dozens of repeat episodes involving Madge chatting to customers who were alarmed to find they were soaking their fingertips in dish soap.

Poor Madge; what was it about her that gave me the creeps? I vaguely recall feeling unsettled at these peeks into what adult life was supposedly like because I didn't know how you learned to do all those things; it was the same weird vibeI got from coffee commercials in which hostesses made terrible java and visitors made faces after one sip. What was I going to do? I didn't know how to make coffee.

Or maybe it was the thought of doing all those dishes. Luckily, somebody invented dishwashers in the meantime.


6. "How Dry I Am" Jug

This Stoneware Jug of Menace resided on a high shelf in the family room, along with other bric-a-brac. I don't know how it came into my parents' possession, as they were not drinkers, but I have a sneaking feeling it was given to them by my uncle, collector of truly weird things.

When you lifted it up, it began plunking out the tune "How Dry I Am" in deep, echoing notes. When I was tiny, this alarming sound was somehow connected to the idea that I could fall into the jug and disappear. (See also "Strange Toilets" and "Cement  Mixers.") Don't worry. I got over it. I wonder where this creepy object has gone.


7. Tornadoes

Photo courtesy Wikipedia

Tornadoes! Right! OK! There are many perfectly legitimate reasons to be afraid of tornadoes! Like, they destroy towns, carry cows for miles, drive straws through tree trunks, and stuff.

However, we did not live in Tornado Alley. Long Island didn't suffer many tornadoes. So there was no reason, really, to pore over the "tornado" entry in the World Book Encyclopedia, to figure out which corner of the basement was the safest one to be in based on the typical trajectory of a tornado, or to sit up in bed in the dark fretting that a tornado would suddenly roar out of a calm summer night sky and rampage down the street.

8. The Crescent Moon

The crescent moon? What could possibly be scary about that?

Well, nothing, really, except the crescent moon has a really sharp hook at both ends, and sometimes sits very low in the sky. There was the chance that if you went outside in the dark (a scary enough prospect in its own right), you could get hooked on the lower point and carried off into the sky. I mean, it could happen.

Especially when you don't know that the moon is actually about 239,000 miles away.


9. Lightning

So, again (see "Tornadoes") there are many perfectly good reasons to fear lightning. What's not to fear? It's huge, it's electrical, it's sizzling hot, and it's random. If it wants to crash through your bedroom window at night and zap you, it can--as witnessed firsthand by my own grandfather, who was sleeping in a hut at Rockaway Beach on a bed with an iron frame and was thrown from it when lightning entered the window and struck it.

Thunderstorms were frequent and fierce on Long Island in summer, so there was plenty of opportunity to cower in attempts to appease the weather gods. My grandmother (not the one married to the lightning-struck grandfather) told us about a brother back in Germany who had been killed by lightning (apparently while walking across a field with a metal farm implement over his shoulder--don't do this!) and would not allow us to handle metal cutlery or Matchbox cars in the house while a thunderstorm raged.

No wonder I seriously thought that turning on the bedroom light and lying stock-still for two hours straight would prevent my being struck at night during a storm.

10. Blitzableiters

A Blitzableiter is simply a lightning rod in German. So you'd think a lightning-loathing child would embrace a Blizableiter (not literally, but figuratively, especially during a storm). "Blitzableiter" is also a funny word to say.

I think that's how its frequent use got started in our family; my Dad was German, and my parents were good friends with a Swiss family, and the word got bandied about amongst them just because it was a funny word (another favorite was Schnabel, German for "spout," which cropped up in reference to a teapot and was jokingly pronounced "schnobbly").

I recall being told there was a Blitzableiter in a dark room in the back of our friends' house, and since I didn't know what one was, it could be anything, most likely a menacing anything. The phrase "Here comes der Blitzableiter!" uttered by an older brother sent shudders down my spine.

Happy Halloween--and watch out for that there moon.

Autumn in Cottage Lake

Azure skies alternate with heavy cloaks of fog. The valley between here and Duvall is often filled with a vanilla custard of mist. Webs made by spiders the size of dimes lace the trees, and fireworks of red and gold blaze against the stately darkness of the Douglas-firs and other evergreens. One of the prettiest autumns ever. I go around one corner and feel as if I'm back in the New England of my college years; I go down another street, shuffling through leaves, and am transported back to the Long Island suburb of my childhood, knowing that the cold, damp walk will end in a brightly lit and welcoming home.

Native vine maples and other species in a garden

On the neighborhood loop walk

Red plum and (possibly) aspen in fall color

A weeping species of Japanese maple

Aspen on bright, warm day early in the season

Morning dew nearly all gone

The Douglas-firs resemble Ents on the march on foggy mornings

The entire garden is filled with these pinwheels in the morning

Spirea dressing up already in Christmas colors

The rather saucy mushrooms springing up in the front yard

Blueberry bushes blaze

View from office window, red maple in foreground

A Dozen Scary Children's-Book Illustrations for October

I love autumn. I love the crisp air and the fiery foliage and even the ridiculousness of all the Halloween decor, the black arched-back cats and hollow-eyed pumpkins and beady-eyed bats. The images got me to thinking about children's-book illustrations that scared me when I was a kid, the kind of illustrations that forced me to look at them again and again, to revisit the scenes that gave me chills.

Of course, what's scary to one person is pablum to another. The Resident Teen, for example, is completely unafraid of the 1,100-pound, unpredictable beast that she rides, yet is terrified of bees. My husband will stride fearlessly through a field with a bull in it, but puppets give him the creeps. My dad was a soldier and the bravest man in the world, but he couldn't look at a diagram of an eyeball without fainting.

So Beware! Full disclosure is that my one dozen selected Scary Children's-Book Illustrations are exceedingly tame and are probably pretty unlikely to raise a single hair on your neck. But they gave me the shivers when I was little. Here they are, in no particular order:

1. The Giant Golden Book of Dinosaurs was my all-time favorite book between the ages of 3 and 7. I pored over the stunning images by illustrator Rudolph F. Zallinger. This scene, in which Allosaurus attacks my then-favorite dinosaur Brontosaurus, absolutely terrified me. This blurry reproduction of the painting spares you the sharp rawness of the wound and the blood flowing from it, but the poor Brontosaurus's grimace is evidence enough of its suffering. 

Whenever I read this book, I alternated between staring at this page in fascinated horror and skipping past it with my eyes shut. The obliviousness of the other dinosaurs in the background disturbed me, too: Why didn't they step in to help? (Clearly I hadn't yet understood that that was Not the Dinosaur Way.) There was another picture at the end of the book, of a small, grinning ratlike critter that was about to gnaw on some dinosaur eggs, juxtaposed with some text pondering the possibility that dinosaurs' extinction was hastened by hungry mammals. I wanted to yell at that little beast and tell it, "Stop! You have no idea what you're doing! You're going to make the dinosaurs extinct! Don't eat that!!"

2. The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss was chock-full of images designed to turn a child prone to anxiety into a cyclone of worry. The Cat was messing up the house! Anarchy ruled! Everything was out of control! And look--here comes Mom!!

Her foot got closer and closer on each of the last few pages...there would never be enough time to put things back in order before she burst through the door, and then there'd be heck to pay. Tick, tock, tick, tock. 

The anxiety was fanned to fever pitch by the rattled, panicky fish who chastised the cat and urged the children to hurry and clean up before their misdeeds were discouraged. Nowadays I realize that I have always had a lot in common with that fish, who would have nibbled his fingernails to the quick if he'd had fingers or nails.

3. Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi, published by Caxton House, Inc., in 1939. This edition was owned by my mother and my uncle as children growing up in Queens, New York, and passed along to us when we were little. It's cram-packed with illustrations to give a kid the heebie-jeebies. 

They're starkly black and white, with a spidery, spindly, stiff quality to the lines that gave me the same uneasy feeling that was spiked by the jagged theme music of "The Twilight Zone." Most of the characters Pinocchio meets are also rogues and ruffians, so most of the figures in the scenes are likewise indifferent to his plight, adding the chill of emotional coldness to the pictures.

The fact that the text attending the illustration was alarming no doubt added to my morbid fascination with it: "The Serpent...laughed, and laughed, and laughed, until from the violence of his laughter he broke a blood-vessel in this chest and died."

4. This picture of a spoiled picnic is from Summer by Alice Low, illustrated by the wonderful Roy McKie. I loved this book as a kid and still love it, as it captures the essence of the timeless, hot, humid days of a Long Island summer back in a time when you were told to go play outside, unfettered by small hand-held electronic devices. 

The ants on this spread, however, made me squirm, probably because in proportion to the kids, they're really quite alarmingly large. Whenever I got to this page, I was always exceedingly careful not to touch any part of the paper other than the large white space on the lower right, where the "47" is. I see that nowadays this book is still published, though it's been cut to bits to shorten it and to take out anything that could possibly make even a child with the most delicate of nerves feel the slightest twinge of discomfort. 

5. Two carriages hurtle toward each other and an inevitable collision on a narrow road in the Whitman edition of Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, published in 1965. Black Beauty survives unharmed, but Rory, the horse he's teamed up with, suffers a ghastly chest wound. 

The imminent-catastrophe aspect of the picture combined with the gaping mouths and the lack of eyes on the horses, due to the blinkers, made this image a veritable Guernica to me as a kid. This impression was surely enhanced because the text notes that poor Rory, once healed, was sent off to a miserable life as a coal-carter's horse afterward. Everything about this scene from the story injected a little bit of dread about the random unfairness of life, something that I'd had the good fortune not to experience in my secure, predictable 1960s suburban childhood.

6. Struwwelpeter ("Shock-headed Peter") by Heinrich Hoffman! The epitome of freak-you-out pictures!! The Scissor-man cutting off a thumbsucker's thumb! Girl Who Plays With Matches going up in flames! They were all scary, but the boy Kaspar who refuses to eat his dinner and wastes away into this stringy thing before finally starving to death scared the bejesus out of me. I've read that Hoffman wrote this book as a spoof of the moralistic, lecturing fare that was published for kids in his time (the mid-1800s), though many sources state he wrote it because he couldn't find any decent children's books for his kids. The stories are so over the top I tend to think the first reason is the real one.

7. Walter Crane's illustrations for Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm (Macmillan, 1927) are lavish, detailed, and often beautiful. Many of them also capture the cruelty inherent in the stories. This particular bit of spot art embellished the final page of the story "Prudent Hans," illustrating a section in which Hans is said to respond to his mother's instruction to "cast sheep's eyes" at the lovely Grethel by taking the eyes out of the sheep and throwing them in Grethel's face. Ugh! 

I vividly remember asking my mom why his mom would tell him to do something like that, and my mom informing me that to cast sheep's eyes meant to make flirtatious faces at someone--what you'd call "batting the eyes" or "making cow's eyes" at someone.

Not surprisingly, the text reports that Grethel "ran away and became the bride of another."

8. Anyone who accuses Beatrix Potter of being sentimental and twee has never really read Potter's stories.

Her animals, despite wearing frock coats and pantaloons, are animals through and through. Dim-witted geese have their eggs devoured by dogs; rabbits get put into pies; a bully bunny is shot by a hunter; and squirrels happily pay protection money to owls in the form of dead mice. 

This illustration from The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin was a real cliffhanger...Nutkin is absolutely powerless in the clenches of the owl, who bides his time deciding what do to with the impertinent squirrel who's been taunting him for pages (much to the growing alarm of the reader).

9. Another Potter illustration, this time from The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Peter has disobeyed his mother by larking about in the garden where his father was caught and later baked into a pie, stuffing himself with food and losing all his clothes and narrowly escaping capture himself. 

Now he's too plump to get out of the garden by slipping under the gate, and the mouse with the pea in her mouth is mute and unable to give him advice. 

This picture of Peter, totally lost, totally full of regret and fear, and surrounded by uncaring strangers is the essence of being a very young child who's lost Mom in a big department store.

Peter Rabbit, the Existentialist Lagomorph!

10. Hmm, I'm sensing a running theme of alienation and panic in my childhood fears here; perhaps the idea of anything happening to disrupt the loving security of my home and family was far more frightening to me than any monster, bogeyman, or zombie could ever be. Because if I ever wanted to feel desolate, all I had to do was turn to this page in Rich Cat, Poor Cat by Bernard Waber. 

This lovely book, which contrasts the life of poor, feral Scat with that of rich, pampered city kitties and winds up with the happiest of endings, has long been out of print and isn't easy to find in libraries--I have no idea why, as it's a wonderful story, simply told, with beautiful, vivid illustrations. Scat's lonely days, summed up in this image of her as an unwanted, sick kitty with nobody to say bless you when she sneezes in the midst of a crowded, noisy, unfeeling city, give the reader just enough of a shiver and feeling of desolation while knowing that soon Scat will find a loving home. The child's anxiety about nobody being in control and being unloved is nicely rounded by this touchdown in a comfortable, safe place. It's much like Max's safe-harbor experience in Where the Wild Things Are, when he wakes up to find a hot meal waiting for him.

11. I always loved the illustrations done by Louis Darling for Beverly Cleary's books, especially Ribsy. Darling's illustrations were anything but darling--Ribsy was a bony, ugly mutt, and Cleary's wonderful girl-terror Ramona was a skinny, scraped-knees, messy child. In Ribsy, the dog gets lost and there are multiple near-misses in which he's almost reunited with his owner, Henry Huggins. The suspense is unbearable for a kid and maintained right up to the last chapter. 

This little spot art of Ribsy is nothing more than an adornment for the end of a chapter, but it captures how forlorn Ribsy is. I guess I found it particularly evocative when I was a kid because of the text it related to: Ribsy, after behaving badly in an elementary school classroom, is evicted from his position as school mascot and told to "go home" by the principal.

"After one more sad backward glance Ribsy started walking. He wanted to obey the man. He wanted to go home, but he did not know where home was, and there was no way he could make the man understand."

12. The scary picture I just couldn't get enough of, however, was tucked away in a little paperback storybook purchased through one of those classroom book-ordering schemes. It was called Rabbit and Skunk and the Scary Rock by Carla Stevens, illustrated by Robert Kraus. Throughout the book, the animals shudder in fear because of horrible noises, such as "Gruummch!", coming from behind the big scary rock. 

I liked this illustration a lot even though Rabbit is clearly so very frightened partly because he was safe (I knew the thing behind the rock wasn't that scary, plus he was being tightly held by his protective friend Skunk, who wouldn't let anything bad happen), but mostly because whenever we got to this part of the story, my grandma would always pause at my request to give me a big, squashy hug just like the one Rabbit was getting, before we turned the page to confront what lurked behind the rock. And that, to me, is the whole point of scary images and scenes in picture books.