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I've seen quite a bit of stuff while mowing hay over the years. We used to have NH 489 Haybines, and even crawling along with those, we'd hit hiding animals, like: ducks, skunks, geese, deer fawns, ground hogs, snakes, cats and hundreds of lil' bunny-wabbits. A few years back, the 489's were traded off for John Deere disc mowers that eat an 11.5' swath. I call these things the 'Salad Slayers', because it seems you can pull them as fast as you want, as long as your tractor has enough power to keep the PTO at operating speed. With our 4250 (15-speed Powershift), we can lay down a hay field in 13th gear. Apparently, that doesn't allow hiding critters sufficient time to decide if they're going to sit tight or run. I've even seen birds perch on top of the hay, watching me come at 'em, then try to fly at the last second and bounce off the hood that covers the front of the mower. Not to mention all those other critters we used to hit with the old machines. I considered making little stencils of critter silhouettes, and using them to paint symbols on the mower to represent 10 confirmed hits, like they used to do on WWII fighter planes, but that might be just a bit weird... I once saw a black snake I never want to see again. I'm marginally scared of snakes, in that, when I first spot them I'm usually startled. After I see 'em and adjust to them being there, I'm usually ok. I was tedding hay we had cut down earlier the same day. We made the windrows about 4' wide that day. Let's assume I'm overlapping enough so that our JD mower is only cutting an 11' swath. The windrows are centered, so that means there should be 7' between the windrows (4' windrows = 8', 7' between, 3.5' on the opposite side of each windrow = 7', 8' + 7' + 7' = 22' which is two swaths). Anyway... As I'm tedding, I see ahead to my left something moving quickly. As I'm going by, (windrows I had not yet gone over with the tedder yet) I see a black snake. Its head was beyond one windrow, and its tail was just vanishing into the next windrow closer to me. If you take the rough measurements I just listed, and do the math, the crawling critter was in excess of 15' long, because it wasn't stretched straight across the windrows, it was slithering. *cringe for a moment* Another snake sighting, unrelated to mowing, was in the woods. We had a few dusty round bales of hay, that we had nowhere to get rid of. We've got some woods that we intended to pull some trees out of later that summer, so we dumped the bales off by the side of the access road in the woods, figuring some deer might chew on it or whatever until it rotted away. (At least it was out of our way.) So late that summer, we went up to cut out the trees that had been marked and the bales were in the way again. Dad used the loader to push the bales further into the woods, away from the road. As soon as he did, two snakes came racing out and took off together down the road. I have never seen any animal such a bright shade of green in my life. We're in northeast Ohio, and I never heard of any snakes around here that are supposed to be bright neon green. To top it off, they were fast and slender, with big, arrow-point heads. What I've read about snakes is that a head of that shape can indicate a poisonous species. I was watching my feet a lot as we dragged the logs out of there. I too, have seen some of the weirdest insects, bugs and arachnids on the mowers after we've finished a field. The worst part is having them crawl all over you when you're changing a blade or section. I have no fear of bugs, its just annoying to feel them crawling all over. Another thought I've had is to get a box after I finish mowing a field, and sweep all the thousands of critters on the mower into it. Then get a marker and write "Live Animals" on the outside of the box, and ship it to the Smithsonian Institute with a note that just says, "Can you tell me what's in this box?" =) Just an example of how the mind can wander after staring at hay for several hours with only the tractor engine to listen to. There, enough tales from me. Hopefully someone else has more good ones.
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