I love animal-watching in the city. It’s nice that it’s not just us humans who live here.
Toronto is always filled with seagulls, pigeons, sparrows, cardinals, finches, jays (etc), black and grey squirrels, chipmunks, and pesky but excessively clever racoons.
If you walk along the lakeshore you can see dead fish along the sidewalk or floating in the water. If you look very carefully you can see living ones in the lake.
I’m sure there are rats, but I’ve never seen one. Closest thing is the mice that live in the subway tracks.
Sometimes you can see a fox, if you’re near a park, and last week a coyote was running around biting people.
Coming out of the subway last week, right downtown, I looked up and caught a fleeting glimpse of a massive bird with talons and big feathery legs. Must have been a Peregrine Falcon, formerly endangered. Cool!
And in my new 'hood we have oppossums (which I have never heard of in T.O. before) and bats, many many bats.
I’m always very happy to see animal life in the city. Particularly impressive are racoons and pigeons, who have managed to thrive in an environment which is pretty hostile to them.
Rabbits, falcons, some bald eagles if I go a few minutes outside of town, turtles, squirrels, lotsa birds (including cardinals), the occasional raccoon, and Packer fans.
Well, I dunno if I count, because I kinda live in the wilderness… but we’ve had a cougar on our heating oil tank and roof, 4 bears that we know of, some caribou on our front porch(man do they ever crap allot!) a family of martins under one of our sheds, various squirels, many LOUD loons that enjoy keeping me awake at night, Porcupines, Jackfish, Trout, Whitefish, mice, woodpeckers… even swans. The list goes ON and ON and ON.
All this withing 20 feet of my front door.
I just remembered a news story from last week that there was a bear cub spotted wandering around in Woodbury, MN (in the Twin Cities). The PTB didn’t know where it was, and they weren’t looking to capture it, as it hadn’t done anything wrong… yet…
When I was growing up in the Berkely Hills, I found an ocelot in my attic once. It was an escaped pet, but hey. Ocelot.
Wow ! So cool. I wonder what it would be like to have a caribou on the porch.
One person’s commonplace city pest is another person’s exotic species!
… who has an Ocelot for a pet?
Just remembered a big turtle that turned up in my back yard in Bristol, England. Also an escaped pet. How can an turtle escape, I wonder? I pictured an open cage door, an opportunistic turtle making a dash for it, a heartbroken child giving chase and being outrun …
In New York City, there are, from time to time, illegal rodeos (I am not making this up). Once, a bull got loose and was wandering the streets of Queens.
We get coyotes every once in a while, but the whole “alligators” thing is bogus.
I live in Montgomery AL… we have a family of Racoons living in the storm in front of the office building where I work… in the middle of downtown. I saw one walk right through the middle of the “smokers area” right past 6-7 people… he seemed a little tense, but only a little.
Actually, around here (right on the other side of the river from DC), I don’t think the wildlife is all that exciting. There’s the occasional pretty bird, and there are some black squirrels that live in my neighborhood, and they look sort of neat, but they’re probably just some sort of preliminary recon squad in preperation of a mass assault. (Gives a whole new meaning to “black ops”, eh, eh? Alright, alright…)
BUT, here’s an interesting little story. When I was living not too far from here, but in a different, slightly less urban neighborhood, I stopped my car to let what at first I thought was a cat cross the road. But it was not a cat. I stared at it for a minute (it was really taking it’s sweet time getting across the road) and I was like “I SWEAR that’s an anteater!” It was dark, but I did get to look at it for a long time, and I don’t know what else it could have been.
As luck would have it, I was watching some show on Animal Planet that night that featured an Anteater, and the thing was a spitting image of what I saw in the street.
Never saw it again, but I’ve always wondered what the heck an anteater was doing in Northern Virginia. I assume that if it was an anteater, that it was somebody’s pet or something, but who the heck keeps an anteater as a pet?
I might keep an anteater for a pet, if I had a lot of ants to get rid of. They certainly don’t seem very cuddly … although, never having cuddled one, I wouldn’t know for sure.
Another endemic treasure is the Canada Goose, which we have by the sh*tload (literally!). In England they are a rarity, akin to swans (“OOOH! Look! A strange-looking Goose!” “That’s a Canada Goose.” “Are you sure, cowgirl?” “Yes. Quite sure.”). I note that there is a conservation society for them in the UK.
And we used to have a pair of ducks that would land in the pond that formed in our poorly-drained, urban back yard every spring. They stayed for a few days and then went on their ducky way …
In this part of the U.S. they are protected as “migratory” birsds, but huge flocks of them refuse to migrate. Office parks, golf courses, and any other facilities with ponds are overrun by the creatures. It is illegal to hurt them. They leave great green gobs of greasy, grimy goose goo all over the place. The management where I work has hired someone with a dog to chase the geese away.
On a more pleasant note, in my yard, which is not so very far from town but has a couple of acres of woods next to it, we have the expected bunnies and squirrels, deer, geese (with fuzzy goslings right now), groundhogs and a big flock of wild turkeys. Around evening time it’s like being in a Disney movie.
I had wild horses on my lawn, wrecking it and eating all the other plants as well. I put up a fence to keep them out. We also have coyotes big time, jack rabbits, crows, rattle snakes, lizards and all kinda little birds. This weekend, I was disturbed to see PIDGENS in the yard.
I had to start shootin’ at them!
We have bears, cougars and 'coons in the general area, but not too close to the house. My wife has wallabies as pets.
Fagjunk Theology: Not just for sodomite propagandists anymore.
Not too long ago, our local news station ran promo ads all afternoon about a story which was going to air at five. “A local family had a terrifying encounter with a bear. * Right here in town!” *
I was interested, because bears around here are an extreme rarity, and wondered if the bear had attacked someone. When I saw the story, I laughed until I cried.
The picture over the newscaster’s shoulder showed a huge, roaring Kodiak bear, with the with the words, “Bear Encounter” written in jagged red letters. “A * wild * bear went on a rampage in the suburbs this afternoon,” she said. The scene switched to video showing a small * brown * bear (probably about forty pounds or so-- he looked like a yearling) abling peaceably down the street. He sat down at one point and scratched his ear with his back foot, like a dog. Oh, the horror of this viscious creature! An interview with a “terrified” resident then played, in which a woman talked about the fear she had felt for her children. Were they outside? No. But they do play outside * sometimes. * It came right into her lawn!
The newscaster then started talking about the bear’s “rampage.” On video, this rampage consisted of the bear sniffing a trashcan and knocking it over with his paw before moving on. More interviews with “terrified” people were played.
The wild bear rampage ended with the little fellow in a tree, bellowing in fear as he was prodded with some sort of pole. A “brave man” had clapped his hands and yelled at the bear, who ran in fear, and climbed up the tree.
The bear was captured by animal control who said that he would be moved away for release, something that one of the residents did not like. She insisted that this “dangerous” animal should be put down before someone was hurt.
A hawk and an owl live in my neighborhood, and I occasionally see raccoons and possums, but that’s about it. I’m quite envious of Francesca’s hedgehogs.
Here in the foothills of the Cascades we have bears and cougars, but you rarely see one. We do have an owl the size of a basketball that lands on our deck from time to time and the coyotes have huge yipping and howling parties at 4:00 in the morning - every morning.
I posted this picture in another thread. He is by far our most frequent visitor. He puts his hand on the window like a prisoner in a movie and waits for one of us to do the same on the other side. If the feeder is empty he knocks at the door. If no one responds, he climbs up to the second story and knocks on the balcony door.
And it all started with one crummy little bird feeder.
We live in an area known as Research Triangle Park, or RTP for short. There are some trees, but also many highways, roads and industrial areas. We don’t get too many exotic critters. We DO get:
Lots of birds- mainly sparrows, bluejays, cardinals and seagulls. Sometimes, typically in the fall, we see geese or ducks. The neatest birds that the area attracts are hummingbirds.
Rabbits
Deer (They have managed to survive in the few wooded areas, but we see fewer and fewer as more “Yuppy Ghettos” are built.)
VERY occasionally- small snakes.
Other than that, we mostly see stray dogs and cats. People around these parts don’t tie their pets or keep them in the house. Lots of people seem to abandon cats when they move as well.
In my neighborhood we have coyotes, opossums, rats, mice, racoons, skunks, snakes, salmanders, a couple different kinds of lizards, gophers, moles and a few species of birds. You would never guess that there would be so much wildlife just a couple miles from downtown.
