The first time I remember it was in the 1970s and 1980s, when agricultural cooperatives were in operation. After the disintegration, small families contracted farmland production. At that time, the urban area was very small, with a large area of houses, dirt, old roads, mud and farmland, which provided a rich growth and reproduction chain for wild animals and wild grass trees at that time.
The old countryside, the old village houses in the old village street and the terrain around the village have all been passed down for hundreds of thousands of years. Therefore, old locust trees, old elms and old willows with a diameter of one, two or even three meters can be seen everywhere in the village. Whether it is an ancient tree or a tree that has been around for hundreds of years or decades, it has left a unique and unforgettable memory of trees for people who grew up around them. In the mid-1980s, with the unification of farmers' courtyard area and the straightening of village streets, as well as the neglect of the importance of ancient trees at that time, the thick ancient trees in most villages were cut down and dug up. Therefore, the living conditions in the village are much better, but many ancient houses, temples and ancient trees bearing the ancestral culture have disappeared.
Our Wulian Village is located in the north tableland of the west railway station of Diguo Town. Before the mid-1960s, adults said that there were still wild wolves around the village. In a year, I often heard that some people's pigs were killed by wolves, some people's sheep were dragged to the middle of the road and left there, and some people's red rooster was eaten by wolves outside the courtyard wall with only a chicken feather. Occasionally, some children play in the trenches outside the village and are suddenly taken away by wolves coming out of the depths of the grass. The other babies quickly called adults. The adults knocked on the washbasin with hoes on their shoulders and looked for help in the surrounding trenches. Most of the time, it can't be saved. Scaring the wolf away occasionally saves the child whose face was bitten by the wolf. So, the baby's life was saved, but this face bitten by a wolf will be accompanied by a life of shame. I remember that in the old society, I went to visit a temple fair in the countryside of the northern plateau, and a man with a broken face suddenly appeared among thousands of people, which startled everyone around me. The man's expression is shy and humble, and he must have suffered from humble life. Most of these sad people were rescued by villagers after being attacked by wolves. After 1970s, the production teams of agricultural cooperatives were in a period of high development. Every production team is engaged in the basic construction of farmland leveling, and the barren ditches and ponds around the farmland in each village have been dug up and filled by intense brigade labor for several months or even a year or two, leveling a large area of farmland. As a result, the northwest wolf, who has wandered in the northern plateau for tens of thousands of years, has no room for survival and hiding, but fled to South Qinling or North Yongshan. In the following years, in the long cold winter night, we slept on the hot kang in the house and heard several wolves howling from time to time. In a few years, there will be no trace of wolves.
Of course, wolves have long since disappeared from our memory, but pangolins, wild foxes and chickens and pythons entangled around Bai Ya are still frightened from time to time in remote barren ditches. These strange bugs basically disappeared in the late 1970s.
I remember that every autumn flood, we children go to the Weihe River beach to play. There are all kinds of strange green turtles, red-clawed shrimps, black crabs, black salamanders, water snakes and various fish crawling around in the water. At that time, the old Qin people, who had been vegetarian, did not capture the desires and thoughts of these animals. So, with these creatures, they have not been disturbed for thousands of years.
Old Qin people were most afraid of animals and snakes called bugs. Although it is rarely heard that people have long pests, the local people are naturally afraid of them. Maybe this thing often floats around in nightmares for many years, so when I meet green, hemp, black and all kinds of long and short insects on the road, I will be dizzy, dumbfounded and run away in panic. Anyone who can approach, tease with branches, or carry a long worm tail with his hand is a bold person. Usually, most of these people are tough guys who have no fear of ghosts and gods. When they see them, they swish away, that is, the locals often say that they dare to chase wolves to death.
I remember that the place with the most local insects is the Weihe levee, with lush weeds and wild trees. No matter in the pool under the embankment or on the branches on the embankment, you will encounter this thrilling strip-like object from time to time. 1975, I went to the riverbank occasionally in summer, and soon I met a dozen such scary things, and finally ran down the riverbank and came back.
This thing, the long worm, is rare in our Beiyuan village, and it is encountered three or two times a year, and it is rare. In recent years, it is rare for large tractors to plow deep pears.
I think, among our animals, the most pitiful thing is the rabbit, that's right, the wild rabbit. This is a kind, soft and lovely creature, wild, ephedra. It doesn't bite, hurt, frighten or make any noise. It only eats grass and corn kernels. But people dare not provoke anything, and light can bully a rabbit. Whenever people in the field find wild rabbits, they are very excited, get up and clap their legs to catch them, shouting and beating all the way. Of course, with human running ability, the rabbit will slip away in nine cases out of ten. Of course, half the time, the rabbit will accidentally touch the stump, faint and be caught. Of course, people will take rabbits back to have a good meal. So for millions of years, rabbits have been born three times a year, giving birth to more than a dozen cubs at a time, trying to preserve their bloodline. Instead, I practice flying and running skills and run as fast as possible to avoid being caught.
The rabbit's ecology experienced a devastating catastrophe four or five years ago. In the previous summer harvest season and autumn harvest season, most of them were cultivated with cattle or small tractors, which was very slow. During the ten-day and twenty-day grain harvest season, there is enough time and space for children to escape. However, in view of the large-scale rapid harvesting and ploughing of large-scale agricultural machinery, the fields were blank for three or two days, which made seeds and many creatures lose the time and space for survival, so wild species suddenly decreased or became extinct. Of course, it is a group of hateful and shameless rabbit catchers who have accelerated the disappearance of rabbits in recent years. These guys, who were idle at last, raised a group of pointed dogs with thin legs and long legs. This dog specializes in catching rabbits because it runs much faster than rabbits. So the coward drives a tricycle every day, pulling four or five bony dogs and catching poor rabbits in the surrounding fields. In recent years, I have caught all the rabbits and eaten them in my stomach. They only think about their appetite and pleasure, and never want a species that has existed for tens of thousands of years to quickly turn to dust. So kind and gentle savages have become historical memories!
Sparrow, commonly known locally as shh. As the saying goes, although the sparrow is small, it has everything. In fact, this bird, a clever elf, is sensitive. In my memory, there were many sparrows in the 1970s. Often a corner of the wheat field or a piece of ancient emperor, when crows fall, there are hundreds of them, flying in groups and eating intensively. This little guy is always hungry and has been pecking. In those days, the grain output in the fields was not high, and people were always hungry. But this kind of bird is not smart enough to compete with others for food, which makes people jealous. At that time, many aggressive people had old-fashioned soil guns at home. This man sometimes gets up at leisure, pulls out a soil gun, takes it to the wild, loads black foam powder and iron bead sand into the barrel, and then clamps a medicine-introducing cover button with a small fingernail size called Huasi on the percussion head. So the gunman quietly approached the sparrow group and pointed his gun at it, a bolt machine. There was a huge explosion and a cloud of yellow smoke came out. The smoke cleared, and there were more than thirty sparrows screaming and rolling on the ground. The man picked up sparrows one by one and took them home, saying they were for cats. Everybody knows that this guy is stewing for his wife.
At that time, as soon as autumn came, the millet with big ears began to turn yellow. That tiny millet is the favorite that sparrows desperately eat. In order to protect Xiaomi from birds, the production team specially sent people to bomb sparrows all day, and the locals called it hush. Generally speaking, this man shouted his distorted version around Gu, or flapped his whip to scare away the sheep. But after a long time, sparrows get used to it, so they don't call it a line name, just ignore it. No matter how you shout or smoke, my bird will eat it. This bird trap is so popular that it flies into a rage. Then it took a soil gun and aimed the explosive charge at it. Bang, dozens of sparrows fell into the ears of grain. These sparrows will be scared and scream before they all fly away. This is Xiaomi field, which will stop for a while. After a morning, the sparrows remembered whether to eat or not, but they couldn't help eating and flew back.
The time lasted until the early 1980s. I don't know why, maybe it was a bad environment at that time. Sparrows suddenly disappeared, and branches and wheat fields were rare. It's a pity that people can't see this annoying bird. The middle and late 1990s have passed 14 and 15 years, and the sparrow flew back from nowhere. Careful people find that the sparrow that will come back is a little different from the previous shape. In the past, the head was big and fat, and it was jute-colored. Now the tip of the head is thin and black. When the sparrow comes back this time, there is food everywhere. People don't care how much you eat. So no matter you, sparrows can eat on an empty stomach. Of course, the number of sparrows coming back this time is not very large, with a dozen scattered in groups, unlike the huge group of hundreds in the old society. Until these years, the number of sparrows has remained stable and sparse. Alas, not much is not much. As long as there is this sparrow, it is a symbol of good ecology.