Out jogging at night on a lonely road, when suddenly I saw something crossing the road right in front of me.
Thought it was a largish dog at first.
It just passed in front of me and disappeared into the trees.
I immediately turned off the music I’d been jogging to (Chick Habit, played repeatedly), just in case I needed the hear the sound of charging trotters if it decided to come back, but it didn’t. Still, that got my pulse rate up for a bit.
They’re not all that uncommon in the hills around this area, and our town mascot is even an anthropomorphized boar, but you seldom actually see them.
Anyone else had any sudden encounters with wild animals recently?
. . . Awwww crap! I just remembered kaiwik has got a freaking BEAR story thread going. Never mind. (Mopes off dragging feet.)
I was climbing Guadalupe Peak, heard some rustling in the brush, got down on all fours and slowly crawled through to come upon a pack of foraging javalina. Twern’t recent but I remember it like it was yesterday.
I saw a bobcat in my driveway about 10 years ago. They’re common here, but rarely come in contact with humans unless they’re sick or something. I see coyotes far more often.
About 6 months ago I was staying in a hotel in Tucson. As I walked to a restaurant nearby I saw a big Javalina sauntering across a parking lot moving between two drainage draws full of scrub. He was a husky 80-100lbs.
We have 3+’ iguanas all over the place around here. Can’t go a day without seeing at least one.
In all the probably thousands of miles of hiking I’ve done in my life I’ve never seen a Big Scary Animal. Although I’ve seen bear and cougar scat, and rattlesnakes.
We did encounter a cow moose once in Colorado. That is probably the largest wild animal I have ever seen while hiking. We stopped and looked at her in awe and for a good ten seconds we had a stand-off from about 20 feet away. Then she turned and bounded off and I remember noting that for such a big animal, she was remarkably quiet as she hustled off through the trees.
Oh wait - crocodiles in Costa Rica. (Actually all sorts of cool wildlife and birds in CR.) But we were in a car and stopped on a bridge to watch the crocodiles in a river but they pretty much acted like logs, so neither sudden nor really interesting, actually.
A few weeks ago I got attacked by male cardinal. One of the nestlings had just fallen out of the nest and I got too close to it. Inadvertently. Damn thing pulled my hair.
Not “recently”, but I once nearly ran over (or into) a bear. The bear just jumped out of the bushes right in front of my car one night. Not sure which of us was more frightened - me or the bear. I hit the breaks, narrowly missing the beast. It took off like its ass was on fire.
Had my son and his little cousin in the back seat - they were both 6 at the time. The cousin mentioned this incident to his parents when I dropped him off at home - they thought he was fibbing, until I confirmed it.
If you played “Laisse tomber les filles”, you might’ve seen a sanglier instead.
I ran into a bobcat that was stuck in a trap, no more than 6 feet away. He looked pissed. My friend’s dog practically blundered into him, and didn’t seem too interested. I had always hoped that it was an active trap. I didn’t want him stuck in there indefinitely (the law defines a minimum check interval), but I didn’t have anything appropriate for a coup de grâce.
I’m a geocacher. On one of my caching hikes, I spooked a large boarhog. He was about the size of a VW, or maybe a Sherman tank. Big sumbitch.
I don’t know which one of us shit worse, but for the rest of that hike, I was singing and whistling and banging a big stick on trees, making sure he didn’t hole up on my path again.
I used to see Javalina all the time. They would run through the unfenced part of my yard to get to the street and savage the neighbor’s unfenced gardens. The babies are so ugly that they are cute.
Sadly, I must confess to killing an armadillo a couple of weeks ago. It was dark and I didn’t see it until it was too late.
I wouldn’t feel too bad about that. Judging from the couple of times we drove from PA to Florida, a dead armadillo is the official mascot of the interstate highway system.
Armadillos and squished nutria, down South. Up here in more Northern climes, spring heralds an explosion (sometimes literally) of dead deer and raccoons on the side of the freeway.
That once caused me to suddenly need a front end alignment on my car. Those suckers will do some damage to a sedan if you’re driving highway speed! (Actually, come to think of it, that repair cost more than when I hit a deer at highway speed in the pickup. But the truck has a bumper at pretty much the exact height to hit a deer, if you must do that sort of thing. My deer hit cracked a piece of plastic below the bumper. When Tony hit one a few months later, it broke a signal light. When I hit the armadillo with a Buick, the poor animal’s carapace struck just the right spot underneath the car to complete screw the alignment.)
I once had to brake suddenly for a bear in the middle of a country road - in south Georgia. Intellectually, I knew bears exist around here, but they’re so uncommon that I’d never seen one in the wild before.
When I was a kid, we lived in a very rural area off the Georgia coast, and it was fairly entertaining to sit on the second floor balcony and watch wild boar gallivant through the yard. Prior to that, we lived on the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp, and 'gators were a pretty common sight. Big snakes in both places, too.
And once, when I was a small child (five or six maybe?) a bobcat screaming under my window woke me up from a dead sleep and sent me straight to my parents’ room, to burrow under the covers (where my brother had already taken refuge.) If you’ve ever heard those things, you know what I mean. It sounds exactly like the loudest human scream you’ve ever heard.
