Closest encounters with wildlife?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Lots of great stories here. I was going to mention visiting Banff where it is hard to avoid elk encounters sometimes.

I used to live in a cabin on a lake in Central Ontario. The most common critters to appear and to seem to loose their fear of humans were porcupines and racoons.

Getting provisions involved a 25 minute boat trip and 6 miles of bad road to get to the nearest village. After one shopping trip, we were loading the groceries into the pantry and fridge when a large racoon burst through the screen in the back door, went between my legs, directly to the open fridge and grabbed our only loaf of bread which had just been unpacked. In a few seconds he was gone with the bread, under the cabin. We made our next trip to town sooner than expected.

82

I’ve fed Chickadees from my hand. It took patience and being very still. this was at Mendon Ponds in New York.

While in Yellowstone we were stuck in many “bison jams” in Hayden Valley and I’ve had a number of bison so close I could hear them snorting and breathing. I could have reached out and touched them.

Two grizzly encounters with the bears far too close for comfort. The first involved a mama and two cubs. The second just a lone bear wandering just off the road.

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I was outrun by two fawns on the road this spring. A deer and her two fawns weere attempting to cross the road. They must’ve missed the trail they were aiming for because the two fawns started running down the road next to me in my car. They wanted to pass and cross in front of me back to where they came from. So I slowed way down and these little guys were hauling tail, white spots a blur. Then they cut in front of the car and dashed up into the woods. A close call, with a happy ending.

Even cooler was watching a bald eagle chase down a duck right in front of us. What a sight!The duckie escaped, remained highly upset cause she had chicks with her. That duck quacked non stop afterward, while the kids and I watched the eagle sitting up in our big pine tree. Preening, ruffling, wing flapping, for a good 15 minutes it rested up there and we had a primo view. Then it flew away and the duck squawked really loud then finally shut up as the eagle was no longer a threat. The eagle, the osprey and red tailed hawk have all been sighted this spring.

84

Add to the “thirty feet” list: an otter swimming about, while I was on shore about to have a dip myself.

Add to the “in the distance” list: a couple of otters sliding on a frozen pond, while I drove by the pond.

The bumping into a bear was due to my watching my foot placement while running across a beaver dam. As with most beaver dams, there were a lot of sticks pointing up that I didn’t want to get impaled upon, and a lot of holes that had not been filled by the beaver that I didn’t want to step into.

The black bear simply didn’t see me while it was ambling across the beaver dam. They don’t have the best eyesight for distance.

We collided in the middle of the beaver dam. I backed away, while it continued on. Once it was off the dam, it looked at me for a few seconds, then went off in another direction.

As far as the goth goes, I fed her by hand, and she bit my arm. Bit on and wouldn’t let go for over a minute. Hurt like hell, but didn’t break my skin.

I figure it was something to do with the room we were in, for several years earlier while in that same room, a drunk fellow with the munchies tried to take a bite out of me, mistakenly thinking that I was a Butterball turkey.

85

And mink under our canoe club and along shorelines. Cute little things – can’t see why one would want to wear dead mink.

86

At the Calgary Bird Sanctuary, you’re likely to attract chickadees who think you’ll have some food for them. You’re not supposed to feed them, but many do.

As a result, I’ve been able to pretty much call chickadees to my hand on my walks through the Sanctuary. They come, sit on my hand a while, realize I have no food, and sometimes chirp at me as if to ask “where’s lunch?” Then, they fly away. It’s kind of fun.

Another wildlife encounter I just thought of: On a local golf course, I had to wait to make my putt until a garter snake got out of the way.

87

Just so we’re on the same page, you are talking about a sullen-looking teenager who’s dressed all in black with her hair hanging down in front of her eyes, aren’t you? :confused:

88

You know about hitting birdies and eagles in golf. Well, I once accidentally hit a beaver that was waddling across the fairway when I teed off.

The next day the beaver dam on the golf course property breached, and flooded out the highway connecting Sudbury to Toronto. Logic suggests that it was a coincidence, but I have wonder if it was the result of a very pissed off beaver.

Come to think of it, there’s a lawyer in town who went golfing in Florida, where one of his testicles was crushed when a golf ball hit it while he was driving a golf cart. The pain was such that he lost control of the cart and drove in to a large pond, where there were alligators, causing a great panic among the foursome as his companions dragged him to shore with them.

Once out of the hospital and back in town, the poor fellow was still in a lot of pain for a few weeks, so we tried to keep straight faces when in his presence.

89

Yes, only in this case mid-twenties. Definitely non-domesticated wildlife.

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We were headed up Mt Evans in hopes of seeing Mountain Goat. We came around a corner and a handful of Ewes and their little ones were coming down the road. I was hoping to get a shot before they ran off but they came straight at us, came right up to the window. I guess they were used to feeding of tourist. Here is some of the video I grabbed.

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I’ve had quite a few good ones, but the most impressive encounter I’ve had I didn’t actually see:
While on a family holiday in Kenya as a teenager, we got a puncture in the Maasai Mara reserve. Now, my parents don’t believe in tours, so it was just me, them and my brother in the land rover, and we took a bit longer changing the tyre than expected, so we didn’t have quite enough time to leave the park and decided to go to a lodge.

When we got there, my parents discovered the price and declared that we were camping. The lodge did claim to have camping facilities, so we followed the directions and reached the five star camping ground, consisting of a clearing some distance away from the lodge, with a open topped water tank connected up to a basin, and a circle of stones that had evidently once been used for fires. We set up the three tents, mine and my brothers on one side of the fireplace, my parents on the other next to the land rover, made up a fire, and went to bed.

I was woken once in the dark by a crashing noise, thought ‘Are Mum and Dad still up? Why are they getting more firewood? Weird’, rolled over and went back to sleep.

The second time I was woken was around dawn by my frantic mother telling me there was an elephant, and get up NOW. Which I did, and blearily scrambled into the land rover (to listen to her trying to wake my brother up to responses of ‘yeah, we saw elephants yesterday, what’s the big deal, I’ll be up in a bit…’)

Turns out a big bull tusker had been wandering around the camp half the night, including between my and my brother’s tent, which meant he was less than a foot away through the canvas from my sleeping head. My parents had woken up, and had spend a sleepless night watching him, between them and us two, pulling down acacia scrub and ripping up grass and ever so carefully stepping over the guy ropes.

As it happens, my Dad used to work in a zoo which had elephants, and one of his friends had actually been killed by one, so hell yes they knew how bad this could be, but thought turning the car lights on or trying to make it move off could startle it into trampling one or both of us.
They watched it for a few hours, drifting silently in front of them, until it moved out of sight and they figured it was worth the risk of waking us, then we packed up as fast as we possibly could and just gibbered slightly for the rest of the day.
I never did see the elephant.

92

We see a lot of deer and turkey in the back yard, and I’ve been within a few feet of them when they’ve come begging for corn. We sometimes get raccoon on the back deck checking for food; one evening I saw a youngster peering in the back door, and I opened the door and handed him a cookie.

A lot of you have mentioned running into wildlife; I once had wildlife run into me. I was walking across a parking lot and Bam! a sparrow hit my shoulder. He bounced off and flew away, leaving me with a sparrow-sized dust mark on my shirt. It was spring, and I think he was chasing a female when I got in the way.

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Either that, or you didn’t get in the way and the sparrow was kinky. Gotta watch out for those sparrows.

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I was taking pictures of a group of mountain goats at Logan Pass at Glacier National Park–they seem to like hanging out right by the parking area there. I tried to stay a reasonable distance away so as not to spook them. That strategy failed miserably as they kept coming in my direction and soon I was surrounded by the whole flock. I just sat still until they moseyed up the hill; I could have easily reached out and touched them.

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Whatever you do, if you go to Estonia beware of the evil squirrels in Kadriorg park in Tallinn.

Imgur

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I’ve had many encounters from inside a vehicle, from lions outside the van in Africa to a bear pressing its nose against the car window in Yellowstone. A wolf loped across the road in front of me when I was driving to work one day. Living in Montana, we’ve seen a lot of animals on our own property, including foxes, skunks, deer, raccoons, moose, deer, beavers, mountain lion, deer, sandhill cranes, bald eagles, deer, bats, rabbits, and deer. And did I mention deer?

As for “up close and personal in the wild with no glass between us”:

[ul]
[li]I was eating a cracker in Kenya and a small monkey ran up, leaped against me, grabbed my belt with one hand, grabbed my cracker with the other, and took off.[/li][li]I tried to feed a squirrel from my hand on the University of Colorado campus one time. It bit me.[/li][li]I took a picture of an elk in Yellowstone using a camera with a flash. It startled the elk, which chased me up a tree. We never made physical contact, but those antlers were frighteningly close to my feet as I sat in the tree for 10 minutes waiting for it to leave.[/li][li]My wife went out to feed the horses one night and thought she saw our big tabby cat sitting on a bale of hay in the dark barn. She reached out to pet it, and it turned out to be a very frightened raccoon. She didn’t feed the horses. I went out to do it and the raccoon was still there. He hissed and snarled at me while I got hay from the bale right next to him.[/li][li]I was cleaning up the campground before bed when we took a bunch of 5th-graders on a camping trip. I went to pick up one of the garbage bags and it rustled. A skunk stuck its head out of the bag and I backed away very slowly. “The bag’s all yours, dude.”[/li][li]I’ve been less than 50 yards from a grizzly on a kill. That was very frightening. Trivia point: did you know that on average more people are killed by elk, moose, and bison every year than by bears, wolves, and mountain lions?[/li][/ul]

That is astoundingly similar to something that happened to me. I was on horseback alone about 12 years ago or so, and just as I went into a clearing I heard that crunching and crashing sound in the bush. I reined in and backed my horse into the trees. A deer exploded out of the bush right in front of me with a HUGE bobcat in hot pursuit (that bobcat must have weighed 50 pounds!). They dashed across the clearing and I lost track of them quickly.