share your fun wildlife sighting

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Today, walking up to the office door, I saw a roadrunner wandering around the entrance. I tried to remain motionless and admired him for a few minutes before someone else showed up and asked me why I was standing there like a dummy (as if that were unusual behaviour for me.)

I mentioned this to a colleague, saying I’d never seen one this close to the ocean before, and thought they only lived in the desert (imagining Arizona in my mind, saguaro cactus and Wile E. Coyote). She said “I always see tons of them on the hill across the street”, which I took to be hyperbole, since a ton of roadrunners would be such a bio-mass that even absent-minded Arnold Winkelried couldn’t miss it. Imagine my surprise when I checked on the internet and saw that the Linnaeus classification name for the roadrunner is Geococcyx californianus. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised in seeing my new little feathered friend in Calfornia. Though of course the friendship was short-lived, he was gone when I looked at lunchtime.

So, what’s your unexpected recent wildlife encounter?

2

Well, a while ago I came into my office after a weekend and a small brown thing skittered under my desk. I know what you’re thinking–and I was, too. But it turned out to be a lizard. Very cute–only about an inch long or so. I managed to catch it and put it outside.

I work near the ocean and go for a walk along the shore almost every day. I regularly see quail, hawks, hummingbirds, sea lions and seals. You can also see whales in the right season, although I haven’t sighted one yet.

A couple of days ago a co-worker had to take a small detour around a baby rattlesnake during her walk.

3

Well, as a biologist, I’ve had lots of wildlife encounters. Not too many of them would be unexpected, however.

I saw a moray eel strike out from a crevice and nail a grunt. Boy, you should have seen the sand fly! I don’t know who was more surprised, me or the grunt.

I’ve had reef sharks and barracuda around me, but that’s no big deal for anyone who frequents reef areas. I once had a spotted eagle ray come right up to me at eye level; usually one only gets to see rays from above. I’ve actually fed stingrays.

When I was a kid, I saw my cat stalking in the backyard. Not unusual; she was quite the huntress. But this time she was stalking a peacock! In our backyard! I had no idea what she thought she would do with it if she caught it.

I’ve “moused” spotted owls. That’s a good way to determine where the nest is, and if there is a chick. Often, a male owl will take a mouse back to the nest to feed the female or chick. These owls are not afraid of humans, really. Many times, I had one fly up to me and take the mouse right out of my hand.

A little later, I’ll post my barracuda story that is not usual at all. The only time in my life I actually seriously feared for my life.

4

Being from northern Michigan (aka “The Boonies”), I’ve seen black bear a few times, and almost ran into an elk once.

But the coolest thing I ever saw out in the wild was once when I was interviewing this guy for a story in a newspaper I was writing for at the time. He was taking me around to some different places out in the sticks, and at one location, out pops this partridge. It struts right over to him, and he holds out his hand and the bird starts pecking at him, not in a mean way.

“There he is again,” the guy says. Turns out the partridge was wild, but for some reason, completely fearless. The guy had encountered it a few times.

5

I’ve spottedmy share of wildlife in my travels.

Probably the most “fun” one was the family of moose we saw right outside our motel in Anchorage. The guys in the motel office were so blase about it, and we were thinking, “wow, moose walking the city streets.”

Other than that, we’ve seen mountain goats in the Black Hills of South Dakota, bighorn sheep in Utah, a whale off the coast of Newfoundland and a roadrunner in Arizona. These are aside from the spotted deer that are pretty common around the U.S.

6

My favorite encounter was a while back, but I’ll never forget it. I was riding my horse down a back road out by the Black Hills in Novato, Ca., when I saw a veerryyy large bird cruising the field in front of me. It was an American bald eagle (I verified that later with a park ranger) and it was absolutely huge. An amazing thing to see casually fly by you.

Another memorable animal would be moose. In Montana there is wildlife galore. They run all over the place. You could just about pick the animal you want to see, and it will eventually appear (like deer,elk, wildcats, foxes, bison, the occasional bear, and now wolves). But a moose is something else. They run 7 to 9 feet tall, and will make a Surban feel small. Don’t ever hit one a moose with a car either, he will just fall over on you and crush the car like a soda can. :eek:

7

I’ll keep this brief. Mosselbaai, South Africa. Cage behind boat. Get in cage. Captain Nemo lookalike tosses pieces of bloody tuna in front of cage. 5 meter great white appears and eats tuna. Proceeds to bump into cage. At about 30 centimeters from my lovely face.

Only fun in hindsight, people. At the moment itself, you’re just looking death in the eye. Yet, it is so facinating and beautiful at the same time.

8

I have a few different types of bird feeders in my backyard to attract as many different types of birds as posible. Although sparrows, grackles and cowbirds dominate, I do get some interesting birds like cardinals, finches, chickadees and a few others. One day I saw a huge bird go across the window and went to take a look. A hawk had swooped into the backyard and got, I think, a sparrow. It flew about 10 feet away and held whatever it was between it’s feet for a couple of minutes and flew off. I managed to get a couple of pictures of it.

I also found a skunk in the backyard and tried, successfully, to keep the cats from pissing it off. I also found an opossum laying in the bottom of the garbage can on the patio. It was frozen with it’s mouth open. I figured taking the trashcan into the field behind the house and dumping it was a lot better idea than reaching in there and trying to get it out.

Those are my most recent encounters since being in the city, if you can count this place as city.

Jim

9

Ok, here’s my favorite.

It was when I was driving to my parents from college. I was of course watching out for deer, dogs, and other animals to run into the road since it was after dark. I came up on this strange looking German Shepherd in the ditch. I thought that the poor thing must be rabid or something because he was standing funny and he was all skinny and horrible looking. I just kept looking at him as I got closer. Then I realized that it was a fawn. I felt like, “Cool. A fawn right here where I can see it.” Then I realized the little guy was all slimy. Then I saw his mom lying in the ditch. I guess he was recently born. She was moving, but not standing. I suppose that it was possible that she had been hit by a car, but there didn’t seem to be any signs of an accident in the area. I always thought she picked a strange place to give birth.

There used to be a pair of roadrunners nesting on the land that my parents ended up building their home. This is in Arkansas. It was fun to turn into the lane and there they would be ready to run down the road in front of the car. Funny little birds.

10

When I run mist-nets to catch birds, I put up about 10 nets, and I usually try to place them in a row. One big giant wall (a couple hundred feet) to catch songbirds flying low enough. The nets are made of fine mesh, like old lady hairnets. They’ll stop small to medium-sized passerines but bigger things will go right through.

Like the black bear that went through one up at High Point State Park. This guy came out of the swamp, and began sniffing the nets. He was about 40 feet away and I was slowly reaching for my camera when he noticed movement and snapped his head around. Before I knew it, he ran through the net and was out of sight before I knew it. He ran through that net like a hot knife through summer butter. He went back through the swamp and disappeared before I could say “What the…?” Ran is not the right word for how fast this bear could travel - he was flying.

I thought he took the net with him, but he just left a big old hole the size of Rhode Island. I am thoroughly impressed with bear travel velocity now.

11

A couple quickies…

Last summer I was driving up to my parents place. They live in the middle of the mountains about four hours away from the big city and getting to their place requires driving on a very windy mountain road. Going around one blind turn I happened upon a mother brown bear and two cubs… in the middle of the road. It was an anxious few seconds to stop, juuuust before I smacked one of the cubs. They didn’t seem to phased though, just wandered past the car and up into the mountains.

Second one was in South Africa. I was driving through SA to Zimbabwe. In the middle of the drive along a very long straight section the monotony of the trip was broken by a HUGE lizard picking itself up off the road surface and flying off the concrete and into the scrub bushes. The thing was at least 5ft long from tip to tale and had the most hillarious gate you could imagine. Still don’t know what sort of lizard it was.

-niggle

12

My favorite probably was from when I was on a conservation work crew in the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie NF in Washington. After work one afternoon I went off wandering a little bit by myself, and while walking around a curved trail across a large talus slope decided to drop down into a little grove of trees about 50-60 feet below me, at the edge of the rocks (don’t remember why). A little while later I started back up towards the trail, and I was just watching my feet on the talus, when I heard a sound above me. I looked up and there was a coyote standing above me on the trail. I just stood there, and he eventually started (or continued) walking down the trail towards the trees about 50 yards or so in front of him. He trotted off, stopping every 30 feet or so and looking back at me for a few seconds, until he was out of sight. Of all my animal encounters that was probably my favorite, since it was just me and him, fairly close, very calm, all that.

My favorite bear encounter was during a summer job in New Mexico a couple of summers ago. A couple of participants suddenly noticed a black bear about 50-60 yards up a steep hill behind us. We were supposed to try to scare bears away from the commonly inhabited sites whenever we could, so I grabbed a couple of other staff and we started up the hill, waving our arms and yelling. It was a very large bear–you could see the big rolls of fat around its legs and neck–and somewhere in the back of my head there was this little voice saying, “so what are you fools going to do if the bear decides not to move?” Fortunately, it (very reluctantly it seemed) started up the hill and eventually we lost sight of it.

My best recent animal encounters were just a few days ago (I’ll shut up soon, I promise). In all my time in the outdoors I’ve seen various deer, elk, bears, goats, porcupines, beavers, etc. etc., but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a raccoon in the wild. Then a few nights ago, in this, my first non-outdoors summer in 6 years or so, I saw one on the campus where I’m doing research for the summer. Then another one a couple days later, walking down the middle of a lit sidewalk and ignoring me completely. I’m sure they’re common in many urban areas, but there was some irony in seeing them now.

13

http://www.thefoxworthys.com/living_in_the_foothills.htm

14

I saw a pileated woodpecker a few weeks ago in my backyard. This thing was HUGE! It attacked a stump and then flew on. When it hit teh wood with it’s beak, it didn’t sound like a normal wood pecker. No rat-tat-tat here. This thing hit it with such a force, it sounded like a hammer. This was a big bird.

15

I’ve seen quite a lot of wildlife in and around the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley in California. But the one sighting that really sticks in my mind was when I spotted a California Mountain Lion in the Angeles Mountains when I was about 16 years old. Really cool.
Peace,
mangeorge.

16

I love giraffes, unfortunately I don’t have any thrilling story about seeing them in wild since they tend to hide among the tall trees… I do have some lion sightings and my favorite is:

My family and I are on the Tchad/CAR/Sudan border, riding in an open landrover convertible [top and sides cutoff] and driving on a narrow dirt road thru the toiche [swampy land with tuffs of steel hard mystery plants]. You cannot drive on the toiche itself because you’ll sink and mire in. We drive over a small pimp of a hill only to face four lions lying in the road. Mr Kiffa yells to the kids to move to the back – wwaaayyyy back and haul ass NOW! Two males and two females; old male looks back over his shoulder with the most golden eyes I have ever seen. We just missed running them over, but does he move? The two females moved on down the road about twenty feet. Young lion moves off the road and you can see him peeking thru the bush… my heart stopped as I was sure he was counting sweet succulent toes of our three kids. We couldn’t move over to the toiche because we would have gotten mired in the swamp. We couldn’t move back because we couldn’t see over the small hill and the road made a very sharp turn before rising up the hill. The driver pulled out the radio to contact base but no one answered. Then he pulled out the gun…

We sat there for some twenty minutes getting our best video shot of African wildlife. The older male finally got up and lumbered up the road. His balls were enormous. The younger lion walked alongside our landrover as he remained in the bush. The females scampered up the road with a lioness come hither look to the males. The older male finally stopped in the road, turned to look at us once more and lifted his leg slightly and pee-ed for what seemed like minutes. He scraped his heels at us and walked slowly away. Needless to say, this was the topic of conversation for days - it even outlasted the hippo gawhumphing on the cabin porch that night.

17

A couple of times I sat at the entrance of a cave with night vision goggles in order to count the bats (one of the endangered species) as they flew out to feed. Nothing like counting 1000s of bats!

Ok, I was on the RV Seward Johnson (the same vessel featured in the current Smithsonian feature “Galapagos 3-D”)one summer in the Bahamas. A colleague buddy of mine (Brian) and I took one of the Zodiacs out to a reef about 1/2 mile off the shore of a small, uninhabited island. The reef was shallow enough that we just had snorkel gear.

Anyway, we anchored out by the reef, we made our collections, and then I decided to snorkel over to the island while Brian continued exploring the reef.

Well, about halfway to the island, I came across the largest barracuda I’ve ever seen. Now, I’ve been around barracuda and never felt threatened. They are usually not aggressive (unless they want your spearfishing catch). However, this one probably had not seen too many humans, if any. It was obviously used to being “king of the grassbed” where I encountered him.

This huge fish (which is basically a tube with teeth–lots of teeth) decided it wanted me out of the area. It rushed at me with mouth open, peeled off at the last second, circled, and continued to repeat this pattern.

“Okay, don’t panic; don’t panic; don’t panic; just make it to shore, you can do it; don’t panic. Okay fish, I don’t want to be here–I get your point. Oh God, please don’t let me die like this out here. Okay, they say barracuda are attracted to shiny objects; okay, fish, I’m swimming with my arm (with shiny gold bracelet) out of the water–nothing to see here, nothing to see here…”

I was terrified, no other way to put it. I could see everything very well through the mask, and I honestly thought I was going to die. This big guy kept rushing me with mouth open. I had visions of a medivac situation with chopper, legs missing, or me bleeding to death before even getting back to the ship. (To top it off, I was “skinny-snorkling”–bare-assed naked except for the snorkel gear. I also had horrible thoughts of what the newspaper account would say.) I was about 1/4 mile from shore and 1/4 mile from the Zodiac.

I eventually got the attention of Brian when he popped up for a breath. I was yelling at him to “get your ass over here, now!!!” He brought the boat around, and I swear I don’t even remember getting from the water into the boat, it was that quick.

18

Here we go. More South Africa stories. I love that country.

We just went into the Kruger Park for the first time, with our rental Nissan Sentra. I know, not exactly a Land Rover, but we were planning on staying on the main paths anyway.

I’ve got two stories.

The first happened when we had only been in the park for about an hour. We had seen some impalas, but that was pretty much it. And what do tourists do when they don’t see animals? They start whining. So, being the adventurous types, we got off the main tarmac roads and hit the dirt roads, figuring we’d be more likely to see some interesting animals there.

Boy, were we right.

After driving for about 10 minutes without seeing a single road to the left nor right, we drive over a hill. My friend Louis is driving, and I’m fumbling about with my camera, getting it ready for some quality pics. Still bitching about the lack of animals, of course.

As we make it over the hill, we suddenly see a HUGE, old, grumpy male elephant right in front of us, in the middle of the road. Louis hits the brakes, and the car skids to a stop in a cloud of red dust. The elephant is at least 4 meters at the shoulder, about 10 meters away from our car, and obviously not pleased to meet us - as indicated by his ear movements.

In a hissing voice, I tell Louis to back the fuck up, and start making pictures. Then, another car approaches from the other side. Basically, the elephant is now looking back and forth between the two cars, and is obviously agitated.

He displays his dismay by PUSHING DOWN A 10 METER TREE by the side of the road. Louis uses this time to turn the car round, while I keep making pictures at the speed of light. All the while, the other car is still on the other side of the elephant.

Just as we’re facing away from the elephant, the other driver does the unthinkable. HE FLOORS HIS CAR AND DASHES PAST THE ELEPHANT AND US AT FULL REVS.

The elephant now goes COMPLETELY apeshit and starts running at the first thing he sees: our shitty Nissan Sentra.

I’m at this point sitting with my knees on the passenger chair, my upper body outside of the window making pictures. As I see the elephant approaching, I tell Louis to FLOOR IT, and quick!!

Lemme tell you, your heart skips a few beats when your mate doesn’t realise the car is in second gear, and almost stalls. Our acceleration was mediocre at best, and I’d say the elephant came as close as 5 meters from the back of the car as we were picking up speed.

Great pictures, but I almost shit my pants there.

OK, story number two. Elephants in the Kruger Park again.

This time it’s me at the wheel. On another dirt road, we spot a group of female and young elephants on the right of the road, some 30 meters into the bush. They’re eating off the trees, minding their own business. We drive by in first gear, at 5 km’s an hour to allow Louis to take some pictures. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eyes, I see another elephant on the LEFT of the road!!

It flashes through my mind: “Never get between an elephant and its calf”. By the rate of acceleration the left-side elephant is exercising, I’d say we did just that.

Instinctively, I floor the car. We’re speeding across the dirt road at some 70 km/h, as the elephant is making its way to the road diagonally.

We make it. But only by a small margin. Louis manages to get a beautiful backlit picture of the elephant that’s trumpeting its way towards our car at high speed. The backlight shows the crascks in the elephants’ ears, that’s how close it was! And the noise it made! Unbelievable.

We sped on, shouting maniacally: “Whooaahahahahaaa!!! That was TOO close!!”

Heartbeat 200, but we made it. Damn, that was some exiting stuff.

19

Well, once I was on this island! And there were these velociraptors! And a big ol’ T-Rex who was chasing our little car! And I was saying “go faster, go fast…”

Oh, wait. That wasn’t me. Never mind.

20

Hmmm, let’s see, guess i’ll do them in order. A little background info, i’m from the boonies of PA, growing up hunting and fishing like the good redneck son i am.

Around the age of 10, i’m sitting on a cut stream bank about 4 foot above the water, catching some sunfish/bluegills and putting them on a string to take home. I’m there for a while when i notice something tugging on my foot. I had tied the string to my sneaker so the fish could sit in the water. I look down to find a 4 foot black water snake proceeding to make lunch out of one of the fish on my stringer. Needless to say, i reached down real slow, untied the string, let it fall into the water and watched as said snake left with my catch. Prick! :smiley:
That one sticks in my memory more than the other 15 or so snake run-ins i’ve had over the years out fishing.

7 Years ago, on my Honeymoon in Cancun Mexico. My wife had the pleasure of swimming with the dolphins at one resort, while i mainly stuck to snorkling. I saw 2 different types of rays, and had the mispleasure of being stalked by a Barracuda. On the last day of our honeymoon, i decide to go out snorkling one last time and my wife comes out with me. We were about 100 yards off the shore when this huge school of fish goes flying by. I was wondering what got into them, when i spun around and was staring a 3 foot cuda right in the face about 2 feet away. First thing that ran through my mind was, “oh great, just my luck, gonna get fucked big time on my honeymoon”. Just then my wife taps me on the shoulder and tells me she is going back to shore. I say fine, and look under the water again for mr cuda. Yep, he’s still there looking me over, probably thinking, yeah i could take him. I remembered reading someplace that cuda like shiny things and that most people are attacked by cuda’s not sharks. So i took off my watch and stuffed it down my shorts. I figured if he was gonna take me, i might as well get a little closer to shore, so i turned and swam as fast as i could for about 15 yards, stopped and turned around and the bastard was still there. I did the same routine until i got to shore, and he followed me right up the beach.

2 years ago. Fishing in my 16 foot bass boat, which is designed not to sink even when cut in half, 1 mile off the beach in Barnegat Light NJ. A boat full of guys start yelling and pointing towards the back of my boat. I spin around and see this huge fin sticking up out of the water. The first thing to run through my mind is the Jaws theme. This fin keeps getting closer and closer to the boat and i start looking around for the closest boat just in case i need to take a swim. This fin comes right up to my boat and damn near rams me. Turns out, it was sea-turtle with a wing-span of about 7 feet. Coolest creature i ever saw up close. He swims by the boat, does a 180, and swims right under the boat close enough that i actually touched it. That was great. I later did a little research on the net trying to figure why mr turtle was swimming like that. Turns out that there were a bunch of jelly-fish around that day and he was swimming on his side pushing the jellies to his mouth having lunch.