This is not about a particular event, but a chance to tell your story of someone who experienced a special and unique event, that’s actually totally commonplace.
#1, I was up with the Scouts at Scout Camp. This being a woodland setting, there are animals about, including the occasional deer. I live in northern NJ, and the deer in the suburbs here are a constant nuisance, people complain about the long legged pests eating their flowers or pooping in their backyard, etc. Back to camp, myself and other adults were sitting around the campsite when a Doe Eyed little camper from the next site over comes over the hill and says “look, there are deer here!” and our response was totally jaded like “Big deal, I see more deer than that in my yard”. Of course, he was probably from Brooklyn where deer are as common as unicorns. Eventually, one of the other leaders says “Boy, we were really jerks to that kid, weren’t we?”
#2 This was a few years back when I was a relatively new employee at my company. The offices are near the various waterways around NYC, and I looked out the window to see a barge crossing the water carrying about a half dozen rail cars. Like the old timey hobo riding rail cars, wheels and all. As if the train just pushed the cars onto the barge and off you go! I had never seen anything quite like that and said “huh, that’s not something you see every day.” My coworker looks at me and says “you do realize that barge runs multiple times a day every single day past this window.”
There’s this great drive-through fried chicken joint by where I live, and one day the cashier told me I got the last chicken for the night. They still had a half hour to closing. I was about to make a remark about a chicken joint running out of chicken but I realized it must happen quite often.
Yep.
We get comments from visitors about the amount of deer jumping in the road and the many they see in clearings browsing.
But…I was in town a few days ago. Driving in a business area and I’ll be danged if a deer wasn’t walking down the sidewalk. I realize there’s a big suburb behind this frontage road and assume the deer got turned around after eating someone’s petunias to the ground. But, still. That was odd.
I was in a hospital in Texarkana onetime and was able to go outside and sit in a park like place for a bit and looking up I saw a small black animal in a tree. I thought, oh no! Kitten in a tree. I remarked to a person sitting near me. They laughed and said “No, there’s a huge family of black squirrels who live here.”
That’s something you don’t see everyday.
ETA, don’t know why that paragraph bolded. Don’t be alarmed it was inadvertent.
We vacation in Georgia, close to a major seaport. There are shipping vessels coming in and out daily. They’re really quite unpleasant - they’re noisy, they pump out diesel fumes, and they block the view. We try to avoid that side of the island when we can. On the vacation community’s Facebook page a few weeks ago, someone posted a photo they’d taken from the bridge of one of these things in the distance with the caption, “we were lucky to see this on our way off the island to head back home today!”
Everyone commenting was like “is there a rare bird or something I can’t see in the picture?” “No, the barge! We were so excited to see the barge!!” Huh. Ok.
Along the lines of the OP, I was living in Albuquerque NM after college, and my then SO (And for several decades now wife) moved in with me. I’d been a resident of various parts of NM for over 10 years, but my wife had rarely been out of Colorado.
We were grilling food at the apartment complex public grills, along with two other groups, when a roadrunner ran by with a fence lizard in it’s mouth. My wife found it unspeakably cool, but the rest of us, NM semi-locals just nodded. The birds are everywhere, and I can’t recall how many times I’ve seen them run by with lizards, snakes, bugs, and even small birds.
And it didn’t give a damn about us either - it just looked at us and figured it’d move on, was probably much more interested in the water feature (actually a small puddle constantly refilled by a leaking sprinkler) next to the grills.
Visitors to my home get excited about deer, groundhogs, fox, herons, sandhill cranes, bald eagles, wild turkeys, coyotes, swans, pelicans and geese. We only get excited when the rare bear wanders by (it’s been about 10 years since the last one). Sturgeon and lamprey are also notable but rare.
Here’s a groundhog who was on my deck the other morning. He got trapped and rehomed.
The Mrs. still gets excited by turkeys, they just don’t come by often enough to get bored with them. Deer OTOH, she’s named them all and feeds them by hand. (You’ll get ticks!)
Groundhogs, we’ve trapped and rehomed 2 so far this summer.
I remember the first time I moved to the tropics, after having lived on the East Coast for pretty much my entire life. Every plant seemed AMAZING! We took photos of everything.
Fast forward two or three decades, when my mother visited me in Indonesia for the first time. She couldn’t believe the abundance of orchids - a million varieties everywhere, and dirt cheap to buy. Of course, I was like, “yeah, orchids, so what?”
They’re still sorta rare to see here in Northern Illinois, and their lack of shyness around people gives a lot of us a thrill – easily the largest bird I’ve seen up close in the wild. A few weeks ago, a couple were hanging around a popular lakefront biergarten near us and people were captivated.
We’ve got sandhill cranes out the wazoo, but truthfully I still think they’re pretty neat.
A little while ago in the things I saw in nature thread, I expressed appreciation for someone’s picture of Canada geese. A lot of other folks have apparently had all the Canada geese they want in their lives, but I still think they’re sharp-looking birds. I’ll settle for seeing them during our rare travels though!
Melanistic squirrels must not be that uncommon because some lived on my road in the Santa Cruz mountains in California and now some live on my road in Massachusetts.
When I was a kid in Cleveland, the only squirrels we got were the large orange ones. I was quite surprised when I went off to Philadelphia to go to college to see the small grey ones-- I had taken it for granted that squirrels were squirrels.
Since then, the small grey ones have moved into the area, followed by the small black ones. If anything, now it’s the orange ones that are relatively uncommon.
For my contribution: In The Hobbit, there’s mention of a particular date on the Dwarvish calendar, and a mention that when, on that date, the Sun and Moon happen to both be in the sky at the same time, it’s referred to as Durin’s Day… but none yet have the scholarship to know when that will be. Well, it’s easy: On any day other than the full moon, there will be some time when the Sun and Moon are both up.
We had a family from Africa move in, and their seven year old son came home all excited:
Mum, mum! I saw a squirrel, mum! Itwasonalawnandthenitranacrossthe sidewalkrightinfrontofus! RIghtinfront,mum,liketwometersfromus! Andthen,mum,andthenandthenitRANupaTREE,mum!
When the other kids started cracking up at every time he went wild over a squirrel, he told us about back home where monkeys would swoop down from trees and swipe any coin they’d see, “like right out of your hand!” All the kids agreed they’d go crazy over that.
When Bayliss the dog first came here it was apparent he hadn’t seen much wildlife. Squirrels flummoxed him. He would run out to go have a romp and they’d run up a tree. It upset him deeply, I believe.
Birds interested him as well. He caught two. I had to unlearn him of that trick.
Clarence the possum was a giant curiosity to all the pets. Bayliss bit his tail. Once. The vision of a mad possum grin, turning on him, unlearned him of that.
Now he don’t give 2 craps what walks or flies up here. He’s currently indoctrinated.
We were driving around the park lake the other day. Lots of Canada Geese. Two of them were very placidly crossing the road in front of us - in the crosswalk.
My kids former highschool has a big pond.
Some smartass thought it would be great to have nice Canada geese swimming and being all cute and stuff. They started walking around the campus.
A couple got in, encouraged by ne’er-do-wells, I’m sure, and wandered the halls. Pooping all way.
They fenced the pond (so much for my educational taxes) the geese escaped regularly.
Oh, and made baby geese in alarming numbers.
Never migrated. Ever.
They are there now.
The big problem was the football stadium. Close in proximity to the pond. The geese really liked that turf. The athletic department spend wads of cash keeping it nice. Geese pooped on it like there was no tomorrow.
It’s very sad to see a cheerleader jumping up and slipping on goose poop. Not to mention college athletic hopefuls ruining a perfectly good knee on it.
The school hired some special landscape professionals(pooper scoopers). They are on the job every Friday.
Geese poop a lot and apparently non-stop.
I live in an area that also has a lot of black squirrels, which are about 2/3 the size of “regular” brown squirrels, and I’ve been asked more than once if those were “real.”
No, they’re not; scientists back in the 1960s killed all of them and replaced them with robots. (Ba-dump)
I had a similar reaction when I visited my sister in San Diego and saw plants that we raise as houseplants in the Midwest just growing wild outside. Spider plants, bird-of-paradise, citrus trees, etc.
When we visited relatives in the Phoenix area in the 1980s, my dad was very fascinated by the cholla cactus (pronounced choy-ya), which look hairy from the road and reproduce by “jumping” onto anything that brushes it, including my pant leg at one point, and he took a handkerchief out of his pocket, got one, and asked if it would root if he put it in sand. They told him to get rid of that thing. (And the hole in my knee took about a YEAR to fully heal.)
