It's a few minutes past 5 o'clock. In the morning.

The sky is light thanks to an almost full moon. The city lights help, too. When you live in the city the sky isn't nearly as dark as it is out in the country.

I walk. Quite a lot.

You'd think I'd look like it, but you'd be wrong.

No matter. I walk 4 to 6 miles every morning. Often before the sun is up. But not as often as I did before this pandemic. 3 am and 4 am were favorite times back before life was disrupted by COVID 19. I'm not sure why that changed my readiness to hit the streets in the middle of the night, but it did. I suppose I figured people were more uneasy so I just haven't wanted to risk it.

Part of my walking routine involves traipsing through a field near a densely wooded stretch filled with all sorts of critters. I've seen a coyote-type creature a few times. And a cat of some sort. Not the domestic kind either. But I'm not a wildlife expert. You won't ever see my on reality TV...especially one of those survivor type shows. Unless somebody produces one of those as a comedy where morons are dropped into the middle of nowhere so the audience can laugh maniacally at them.

Mostly, in this stretch of trees are cottontail rabbits. I attribute this to the reproductive reputations earned by rabbits. But I'm not complaining 'cause I rather love them. I just wish they'd stick around a bit longer.

The path I walk is about 15 to 20 yards from the tree line of the wooded area. By the time I get within 30 yards or so of them, they quickly scamper into the woods. You can see a handful of little holes that serve as their escape routes. Each hole has a nicely worn pathway as proof that they frequent these routes to dart in and out of the woods. I bent down and took the picture shown below. To give you some scale, that opening is about 10 inches wide. It's not very big. What you don't see is the density of the wall of growth where this opening exists.

On a typical morning, I'll spot 6 to 10 rabbits out foraging for food outside the woods, within 5 to 10 feet of their wooded home. They don't venture out too far. I'm supposing it's because of that coyote-type creature and the cat. But I'm sure there are other predators who'd love nothing more than a rabbit for breakfast, lunch or supper.

That's why there is no rabbit in that photograph. The little buggers are really camera shy. They're the perfect creature for zoom lens photography, but all I have is my phone.

In 1925 Hugh Harman drew a mouse around a photograph taken by Walt Disney. Walt was inspired by this tame mouse near his desk at Laugh-O-Gram Studio in Kansas City, Missouri. Mortimer Mouse was the name Disney gave the mouse until his wife, Lillian, talked him into changing it to the name we all know. Mickey Mouse.

From that cartoon began the modern small animal stories told in moving pictures. But the stories existed long before that.

Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities. Like rabbits. Or other animals.

Enter Aesop, a Greek storyteller credited with a number of fables. The timeframe? Around 564 BC is the date ascribed to his death. It's up for dispute whether there was a real person Aesop behind the fables. Somebody crafted the stories though. He was reputed to be a slave who passed from various owners until he was eventually freed. History or legend has it that he was executed by being thrown from a cliff after false charges were leveled against him because he had insulted powerful people.

No matter. Attributing human-like qualities to animals in his fables happened long before Walt ever imagined a mouse.

Frogs. Turtles. Birds. Foxes. I suppose somebody has anthropomorphized just about everything. Especially by Hollywood. I'm thinking of Ice Age, Bugs, The Secret Life of Pets and Toy Story. In Toy Story you don't even need a living creature. Toys will do. No big shock,