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WILD ANIMAL ENCOUNTERS
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@tsar I have three cats that are constantly trying to kill me late at night when I’m walking to the bathroom in the dark.
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I used to live in the San Bernardino mountains, on a short street that had been washed out by water and ended in a shortcut down the hill I lived up on, but you had to pick your way through the broken part.
So I was walking my kids down to the bus stop that way, four ducklings + me, and I have a bad habit of looking at the ground when I walk, if the kids aren’t making strange and/or alarmed noises and I saw pawprints that didn’t really look like my dog’s feet. I spent the walk through the little washed-out canyon just kind of tripping on them, then we came out the end onto the main street which we had to follow to finish getting to said bus stop.
We’re tromping down that road when my youngest, kindergarten at the time, goes ‘MOMMY KITTY’ and I turn around and there’s a mountain lion casually strolling across the road back behind us, and she took up LIKE BOTH LANES. I kept us calmly moving forward as we were and the lioness took a left and started checking out another street while we finished our journey.
Turns out she was a regular visitor in the area, and nobody bothered telling me, with my four small children and having to walk everywhere. Whee, fun.
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A long time ago (hi everyone, I’m the lurking Arx-Alis-player ), we lived in a small town in the middle of the mountains that was only accessible by dirt road or helicopter.
And we used to be woken up at night from the sound of bears rummaging through the garbage bins outside the military apartment complexes. But ALSO, also!!! … one night I went up to the base cafeteria to pick up some food for my mother who was still working. And on the way back down to the library with her food, I heard a wildcat of some kind howl.
I never ever eeeeever volunteered to go get her food again cause I thought /I/ was gonna be cat food that night.
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@tsar we have a couple of neighbor bears that regularly drag out garbage cans away and break into them even though they are bungee corded shut and we pour a cap of bleach over every bag. Mr. Mietze recently watched one crinkle its nose at the bleach smell and keep on ripping into liberated bags. I dont have any good pics of this year’s bears but I do have of others.
We also have a pair of Barred Owls who are trying to launch the latest fledgling batch which means lots of hooting and screeching at night and young owls face planting onto firs trying to catch the douglas squirrels (we call them laser squirrels because they say PEW PEW PEW as they chuck pinecone at your head!)
My neighbor has gotten a picture of a mountain lion on his security camera! I’ve never seen them on our property but I really want a game cam because I’m sure they are.
We see bobcats, coyotes, bats, and deer on the regular. And we have tree frogs and hummingbirds. Occasionally a heron or an eagle flying overhead. I want us to have garter snakes so bad but I only find those at school.
I love to show wildlife pics on discord.
Back when we first bought our property like almost 25 years ago it was a rural-zoned part of the unincorporated county. Things have blown up since then but we are in a protected area bc there is a salmon creek that runs through our neighbor’s property. So while it is cool to see all the wildlife coming through it’s sad because it is largely because they’re stressed from habitat loss and our property is part of a link of undeveloped land plus modest sized old houses so there is space/hiding/safety as they follow the greenbelt.
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There’s a few foxes that visit our neighborhood late at night from time to time. We have a lot of bunnies and critters that just hang out cause it’s pretty green around here. A couple of times when I’ve been taking out our bins, I’ve heard them screaming through the streets. In the distance, from a block away, sometimes closer.
If you don’t know what a fox call sounds like, it’s absolutely terrifying to hear in the middle of the night. Listen to these first 30 seconds, then imagine being stood under a lone street lamp within sprinting distance of your front door.
Here’s a Blair Witch style picture I got of one that was scavenging our lawn and subsequently ran up on our porch after it caught the scent of our cats.
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If I ever figure out how to use picture sites, I will have to share some of my owl pics in particular, so pretty.
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Oh! I have another! We have coyotes that sometimes find their way to our neighborhood because there’s still some large areas of undeveloped land.
Well one night I was walking the dog when I look up and see a coyote silhouette right up the street from us, and it was lookin’ right at us. So I slowly picked up the dog (because he’s snack sized, yo) and calmly walked home as the coyote left because there was no longer a smol target for him to have to dinner. I bought a whistle after that, to use if I had to walk the dog at night again.
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@cornpopped said in WILD ANIMAL ENCOUNTERS:
Oh! I have another! We have coyotes that sometimes find their way to our neighborhood because there’s still some large areas of undeveloped land.
I was just telling someone today that Long Island doesn’t have a lot of very dangerous wildlife, but there were reports a few years ago about coyotes making their way down through NYC and living in old subways or something, IDK.
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We live near a beautiful pond that during springtime is full of adorable baby ducks and baby bunnies and baby goslings and baby cygnets. There’s one particular bench where if you sit they all just basically parade by you in the water and grass. As we were walking over to it one day there was a mother goose, a daddy goose, and three little goslings swimming in the water a couple yards off shore moving away from us.
We start being all ‘awwww babies!’ and I shit you not in .03 second that goose that was not at all near the shore in the water shot out of it and onto land, which it hit at a run, and nearly knocked my seven year old down. Thankfully it only knocked her a bit with one of its wings and we then grabbed her and moved back.
I still have no idea what its problem was. I can only assume that there might have been another gosling somewhere near us that we never saw, but the family itself wasn’t anywhere near the shore! I have never seen anything with wings move that fast and it was really big up close! And to this day she’s still very untrusting of any nearby geese.
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Our neighborhood pack of coyotes is known for having 1 or 2 that act friendly and try to either lure playful dogs or instigate a chase and then run them over to the pack. And then they’d be doing the super crazy eerie song for hours off and on. It has majorly cut down on the people letting their dogs off leash on the street or roaming unattended (roaming dogs used to be a big thing out here because it was more country culture until it gentrified like whoa) but its hard to hear when people see it happen because usually they’re not used to dealing with wildlife so they don’t know any better.
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I live in an apartment complex that is built around a sizeable artificial pond. So we see a fair amount of waterfowl on a daily basis: we have the ducks who rule the place, the tourist geese, the occasional swan, and even a couple of blue (or possibly gray) heron - the latter are not interested in having humans anywhere close.
Oh, and turtles. A metric fuckton of turtles. If you go out to the pond on any sunny day, you will see turtles stacked on top of each other on branches in the pond, sunning.
But what we also have are snakes. Harmless ones. But one day I’m in the clubhouse, working out, and I stop by the restroom. I go in, am taking care of my business, and this tiny little snake slithers out of the wall. We stare at each other, neither being particularly happy about this chance meeting. It’s a cute little thing, though; about as long as my finger, black, with a very tiny bit of reddish racing stripe on it.
Eventually, I’m in a place where I can move to try and pick the snake up and take it outside - but it was very much on the NO THANK YOU MA’AM side of this, and shot back into its hole in the wall.
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Man, I came in here all excited to tell people about TURKEYS walking DOWN THE ROAD and there are mountain lions and coyotes.
I’m a city Tez.
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@Tez said in WILD ANIMAL ENCOUNTERS:
Man, I came in here all excited to tell people about TURKEYS walking DOWN THE ROAD and there are mountain lions and coyotes.
I’m a city Tez.
Turkeys and geese are fucking terrifying.
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@DrQuinn said in WILD ANIMAL ENCOUNTERS:
We live near a beautiful pond that during springtime is full of adorable baby ducks and baby bunnies and baby goslings and baby cygnets. There’s one particular bench where if you sit they all just basically parade by you in the water and grass. As we were walking over to it one day there was a mother goose, a daddy goose, and three little goslings swimming in the water a couple yards off shore moving away from us.
We start being all ‘awwww babies!’ and I shit you not in .03 second that goose that was not at all near the shore in the water shot out of it and onto land, which it hit at a run, and nearly knocked my seven year old down. Thankfully it only knocked her a bit with one of its wings and we then grabbed her and moved back.
I still have no idea what its problem was. I can only assume that there might have been another gosling somewhere near us that we never saw, but the family itself wasn’t anywhere near the shore! I have never seen anything with wings move that fast and it was really big up close! And to this day she’s still very untrusting of any nearby geese.
Oh man! Your poor kiddo. I have a water fowl story that’s similar.
We went to local preserve to walk around. My kid is three or four at the time. As we’re coasting around the path that borders this pond, a swan starts trailing us in the water. Ooooh. Ahhhh. Majestic swan!!! Eventually it goes back, I don’t think anything of it.
We circle the pond entirely and are back at the beginning. This mofo turns up again, but this time launches out of the water and charges us. I move between my kid and the swan, and I am now hitting it with my jacket. It does not care, because I’m really using zero force as I’m not only afraid of the bird but afraid of hurting it. Like, it’s big but it’s still just a bird and I don’t want to fuck it up.
At this point, a guy who had until this point been standing on a picnic table since our arrival (should have been a clue in hindsight), leaps off it and comes running to our rescue. He has a magazine or something in his hand and he’s like, “RUN, RUN, RUN!!!”
So we run. We don’t look back.
To this day I have no idea if he won or the swan won.
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I live very close to the Everglades and am on a small lake near a golf course, so lots of gator sightings. Like, we stopped doing Easter egg hunts in the backyard after the first year or so
Pelicans and other cool birds hang out in it during winter though.Right now, I have major stress about something apparently LIVING IN MY ATTIC and omfg it’s the worst while they try to figure out WHAT and HOW
she/her, them/they - not super particular
I have been here the whole time
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@Tori said in WILD ANIMAL ENCOUNTERS:
Right now, I have major stress about something apparently LIVING IN MY ATTIC and omfg it’s the worst while they try to figure out WHAT and HOW
Oh man, I want to know what it is!!
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@tsar I am UNSURE I DO haha. I heard it traipsing around overhead in the garage this morning and aaaaaaah. The cats are super confused. I just had a bunch of trees removed so THINGS can no longer pole-dance up to my roof but too late, too late apparently
The animal guy comes back tomorrow. STAY TUNED -
So I’ll give an actual wild encounter instead of implying that my cats are wild(they still are regardless of how lazy they all appear). This was a number of summers ago, at least ten if not 15 years ago if I recall, because I was still a smoker at that time and had just recently separated from the Air Force.
I’m out on the front porch of the house I was at that time living at. It’s in a new housing development area, so not a lot of trees. And I’m sitting there, smoking in the middle of the night. It’s quiet. When I think back, I think I heard some slight rustle, but didn’t really pay attention to it.
What did draw my attention was a sudden shrill shriek, which lasted for maybe a second, if that, before suddenly being cut-off. I’m all ‘wtf’ and doing a scan of the area, when I see in the front yard, the biggest fucking great horned owl standing there, having apparently caught some kind of rodent or other smaller animal. Maybe a rabbit? Too dark to tell. And I just stood there, watching it. Slowly, it does that thing with it’s head where it swivels almost all the way around to stare at me for a good three seconds before taking off to who knows where, whatever meal clenched in it’s claws.
I had no idea great horned owls were so fucking huge. And while I knew that I was many times this owl’s size, there was something supremely predatory in the way it was eyeballing me, as if it were sizing me up and doing a threat assessment.
It was thrilling, impressive, and somewhat terrifying all that once to watch something nature has honed into a expertly crafted hunting machine.
Owls are hardcore.
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My husband and I were on our honeymoon, driving into a national park. We came around the bend and, to our delight, saw up ahead a shadow in the road…with cute little ears! On closer inspection it turned out to be a black bear, which we had both been REALLY wanting to see on our trip.
Usually I’m pretty good about respecting-the-wildlife stuff but he reverses the car and I turn and stare at him and say, “WHY are you BACKING UP?”
He looks back at me and goes, “It’s. A. Fucking. Bear.”
And that’s how I married up.
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