Hong Kong is about 75% mountains/scrubland, so you get wild pigs, snakes, pangolins, etc. In the city itself (100% concrete) you often see large and occasionally colorful butterflies fluttering around in a crowded polluted street. And monkeys often wander into built up areas. A while back there was a monkey on HK Island - it’s thought to have climbed into a truck on Kowloon and been driven through the harbor tunnel. A few years back my neighbors (in a 25 story apartment block 400 yards from the central business district) kept live chickens in the hallway.
After heavy rain, they sometimes find a python in the harbor, washed from the hills of HK Island through the storm sewers. A friend of mine who lives in Northern Hong Kong took a lovely photo of a python squeezing a cat to death here…(scroll half way down)… www.geocities.com/hkhemlock/diary-22jun02.html
First, a geography lesson: Calgary is situated in an area much like Denver – in the foothills, about 60 minutes from the mountains and bordering on prairie flatlands to the east. Lots of open farmland in every direction for wildlife to wander through. So we get plenty of stuff in the city.
The common critters around here include gophers (aka Richardson’s ground squirrels), crows, sparrows, magpies, mice (but NO rats), doves, ducks, geese, and pigeons. With my own eyes I have also seen several beavers living on the river right next to downtown, innumerable deer (including a 10-point stag, again about 100 feet from the Centre St. bridge leading directly into the downtown core), several families of peregrine falcons (downtown and on the university campus), a several foxes, a coyote, and at least two bald eagles (living near the zoo, about a 15 minute walk from downtown – animals seem to understand the importance of a central location!). featherlou reports coming face-to-face with a badger within city limits (to which I replied “badgers? We don’t have no steenking badgers!” Ha Ha! I kill me!). She has also seen a flock of quayle. And every year or two there is a cougar sighting in an outlying community.
There is no sound as nostalgic for me as the call of the mourning dove.
In our neighborhood we have meerkats, gibbons, white tigers…but then, I’m two blocks from the zoo.
Just last week when it snowed here in Nashville, we discovered a red fox in our backyard. An opossum used to eat the cat food on the porch. Lots of gray squirrels and some rabbits. Deer are plentiful enough to cause problems. By inches, I missed having a buck with a nice-sized rack in my convertible with my grandchildren. Plenty of snakes but I’ve come nose to nose with only one poisonness one – a copperhead coiled and ready to strike.:eek:
Mockingbirds, mourning doves, sparrows, blue jays, a few bluebirds, crows, red-tailed hawks, cardinals and owls are welcome. But we have a terrible over-population of black birds.
Where I grew up there were white squirrels. Anyone familiar with them?
I have a passion for wolves and I wish they were still here – but not in the urban areas.
Blue Jays and squirrels! How could I forget the Blue Jays and squirrels? Used to feed ‘em peanuts on the porch of my parents’ last house. The squirrels got so friendly that they would run right up to the door and take the peanut right out of your hand.
Note to JillGat–I haven’t seen Don Schrader in a while, but I have seen plenty of prairie dogs, kestrels, ground squirrels, and crows in town. Plus the occasional coyotes or bears. No silvery minnows but if I got my fishtank up and running again I might be able to breed some.
My sister used to live in Brooklyn and there were quaker parakeets breeding in her neighborhood. She said they were very noisy and could attach their nests to the sides of apartment buildings.
Similarly to Greater Vancouver, Toronto has the ‘usual small stuff - crows, pigeons, lots of gulls, squirrels, skunks, raccoons’, plus rats, mice, coyotes and deer. No cougars or bears though, that I know of, though with the city’s many ravines, I wouldn’t be surprised if one wandered in occaisionally. Toronto is a lot firther from forested semi-wilderness than Vancouver though: too many hundreds if kilometres of farmland in between.
Oh, and Toronto also has weasels, er, I mean, intellectual-property lawyers.
My sister lives in Sault Ste. Marie, a city of sixty or seventy thousand, and every now and then, they’ll wake to find a moose ambling down the main street.
I personally have encountered an elk next to the road while waiting for a friend on a streetcorner in Banff. This was just after reading a sign that said something along the lines of ‘keep at least fifty metres away from the elk because it’s mating season and they’re a little trigger-happy’.
Besides the usual squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits, etc. we’ve got possums a plenty, raccoons, skunks and groundhogs. Including one particularly fat one that ate about ten pounds of tomatoes out of my garden last summer.
I forgot to mention an incident in Redondo Beach from the 60s. When I was a high-school senior, at Redondo High, I was rehearsing for the Senior Play. The band building was right next to the auditorium. Somehow a skunk got under the band building and died. (Dopers who know skunks can guess what [that smelled like.)
We had an exchange student from India that year. He wasn’t in the play, or in the band, but he apparently watched the rehearsals and suggested to the band teacher that they burn incense sticks to drive away the smell. That’s what they did. (Ironically, the band building, the auditorium, and two or three other buildings at RUHS were condemned shortly after Christmas vacation, because of new structural standards. My graduating class was the last one to use that auditorium. A new one was opened a few years later.)
I’m glad you got the Don Shcrader reference (he’s a nutty, almost nude guy who carries anti-war and various other kinds of signs around Albuquerque, NM - for the rest of you). When I used to run down by the river in Albuquerque, I sometimes saw bald eagles, beavers, burrowing owls, always roadrunners and once a coyote carrying a jack rabbit in its mouth.
There’s a family of hawks that live somewhere near the parking garage of our building in the middle of Atlanta. It is very cool to see them soaring over the intersection outside my window.
The coolest thing I’ve seen recently re wildlife: I was heading into work one morning not too long ago. I was southbound, stopped at a traffic light. All of a sudden a pigeon crashes into the northbound lane near me (no traffic yet, they’re stopped at the light.) It’s followed almost immediately by the hawk that had knocked it out of the sky. WOW!.
About that time, the light changed. I had to move, but I was watching in my rearview mirror. The Northbound car slowed and waited for the hawk to fly away. I couldn’t tell if the hawk took the pigeon with it or not, but I was glad he didn’t get run over by the car.
Like Biggirl said, we have urban hawks here. I worked with a guy who watched a hawk pluck a pigeon out of the air over Madison Square Park a couple years back. But we don’t have enough of them. Yet.
Hell’s Kitchen (the neighborhood west of Times Square and the Theatre District) has lately developed, thanks to the misguided kindness of a handul of #%@#% idiots, a gigantic pigeon population. Between them and the rats, we could easily support a family of raptors. All I need now are tips on how get some to move in…
People in the UK will be familiar with what a raccoon looks like, but probably not a possum. Before I moved to Atlanta from England I thought that “possum” sounded like a cute name. How wrong can you be? For those not in the know, think “rat the size of a house cat.”
Atlanta gets about one black bear a year that comes down from the mountains as far as the suburbs. More commonly, we have raccoons, possum, the occasional deer and masses of gray squirrels.
Hey, wait a minute. I used to have a pet opossum. It wasn’t very bright, but it is the only marsupial and the only animal with a prehensile tail in North America, so it’s special.
When I lived in Albuquerque, there was a sign on the posts in our neighbourhood about a lost housecat. These people were convinced that someone was stealing cats (yeah, right). A couple of days later, we saw a Great Horned Owl in a neighbour’s tree. I looked them up on the internet to see what they eat, and guess what one of their primary foods in urban areas is?
This thread reminded me of something I saw around last Christmas; It was one of those normal traffic lights which have a little tubing protruding so you can only see the light from face-on (I presume to stop people getting confused from a different angle…).
Inside the cone of the amber light was a bird’s nest with several new-born mouths gaping over the edge. And then mum returned and dropped in a worm – all while I was waiting for the lights to change. I suppose it must be like having your bedroom kitted out with one huge disco light………birds are colour blind, aren’t they ?
Wowie, I wasn’t aware of raccoons living in England. It is true, you learn something new everyday. We also have the odd raven (think a very large, overgrown crow…and I mean very large) among other evil birds.
We have about 33 acres of open-space in this community by the Puget Sound. We’re also surrounded by deep ravines.
The deer and coyotes love the ravines, emerging from them to eat some of the landscaping. Last year we planted 150 firs, spruce and hemlocks. The deer nipped about two dozen of them right down to the base. But you have to catch the deer at dawn – they’re pretty shy.
The coyotes are bolder and will be out during the daylight. Often they’re visible on a nearby golf course. You know who to blame when the local cats disappear.
Here, the appearance of a cougar will set off alarms. Sometimes a big housecat has even set off the alarms. Generally they’re immature cougars forced out of a territory, who arrive in the suburbs via the railroad tracks.
Eagles and blue heron nest nearby, high in the trees. Eagles’ nest can weigh well over 1,000 pounds. Typically the couple will have several nests, leaving one when it becomes vermin-infested.
Nearby in the water, whales (usually grey whales or orcas) will swim by. And of course there are salmon, crabs, starfish, seals and octopus.
What else would I add to RJK’s list? The biggest darned moles I’ve ever seen. Garter snakes (but nothing poisonous). Lots of hummingbirds. Woodpeckers love this area; one even insisted on pecking a metal street sign nearby for some time. Canada geese; ducks.
Orlando has these incredible squirrels that are basically rats with afro tails. They are huge monstrous animals with big pointy teef and they are known to fight cats and win.
