They are cute as hell and I love them out in the wild - but not in my home. And they WILL get into your home if they can, for warmth, a place to den, any food they can get into, etc. Also your trash. The wild ones carry parasites, in particular a species of roundworm that is potentially fatal to humans (the Baylisascaris genre mentioned by @Tamerlane) and along the road to that can cause brain and eye damage. They are enormously destructive. If they become aggressive you will discover a truly scary mouthful of teeth. The are both loud and nocturnal.
Some people do tame babies to keep as pets, which you can do, and those are accustomed to humans and treated to eliminate possible parasites.
The good thing is that they are not normally confrontational if they have a way to retreat from a situation and they have some smarts - a healthy raccoon that doesn’t feel trapped isn’t really inclined to take on a full grown human. Back it into a corner, though, and it will decide to go down fighting.
Around here they don’t often turn up with rabies (although it’s always a possibility), it’s more of a problem of them spreading distemper. There’s a half dozen other things they can carry and spread to humans and their domestic animals.
They are also hell on chickens and other fowl. Which is why henhouses in my area resemble little fortresses.
I just got an image of a Gary Larson-esque armed group of chickens, with helmets, recoilless rifles and hand (wing?) grenades clipped to their bandoliers, getting instructions from the chicken NCO as they stand in front of their fortress henhouse …
I was sitting outside today when a big Eyed Elater landed on the side of my phone, just barely above my fingers. I was worried it would fly out of my hand before I could get good photos of it but it chose the strategy of lying motionless instead. (Which foiled my attempt to video it doing a click flip.) It was willing to flex its jaws, though.
An absolute shed load, actually. We were on the Marais on the Cotenton Peninsula. When I get a chance I’ll do something for the Specialised Habitats thread, but today’s headlines:
On the coast we saw a group of about sixty seals dozing on the beach. This is only the second time I have found seals for myself, and it brings my lifetime total to… about sixty one. They were too far away to make out a lot of details but you could clearly distinguish adults and pups.
Then, on the inland side of the dyke, we saw two great white egrets. First time ever.
Later in the day, on a reserve, we found out that GWEs are as common as muck round here, and saw a load more; and also storks, frogs shouting their heads off, and also (feral) muskrats and coypu.
@Dung_Beetle Destructive or note, that is a very cute raccoon.
And @squeegee I envy you your hawk. I very rarely see raptors landed, and airborne of course they are almost impossible to photograph.
Yesterday, I saw red kites - at least four and maybe as many as six - circling over young corn at the Hughenden estate. One of made a low pass only a few feet above the ground but didn’t make a strike that I could see.
Today was the first swallows of summer, buzzing my head by the Lea valley lakes. I only got a quick glimpse of streamer tails as they vanished into the trees but any day when I see swallows is a good one.
The bluebells, wild garlic and primroses are all over and we’re into buttercups and briar roses. And yellow iris at the water’s edge and for some reason in the Lea valley, masses of comfrey. Purple-mauve flowers everywhere. The bees were taking full advantage.
The waterfowl have been making up for lost time - I saw ducklings, cootlings, goslings, and for the first time this year, cygnets. There was one family with six well-grown ones.
Further on, there was another pair with younger cygnets. At first I though there were only three:
But then I noticed that Mother Swan was carrying a passenger:
This weekend, The Boy and I went to the Montrose Bird Sanctuary to check out the birds and I was happy to see three plovers on the shore. Monty and Rose were a very popular piper couple who spent their summers here in Chicago at this spot. Monty just died last week and Rose hasn’t been seen in a couple weeks but Imani, one of their chicks from last year, was first found in MN and then back in Chicago this weekend. I don’t know if we saw Imani or not.
I find the behavior fascinating. I had stopped the bike and managed to get these snaps; then walked past them on the right hand side of the path, being watched and somewhat hissed at by the adults all the way. When I got past, I stopped, and got my phone out again; and the rear two adults came at me and properly saw me off, hissing spitefully. Never did get that extra photo.
See post 1433 for @merrick’s research on the phenomenon.
Another day, another…not kindergarten as it turns out but, rather, a crèche. I promise I’ll stop posting these, but this time it was Canada geese at the lake in our local park:
If you’re looking at a large enough version of that image, it’s also obvious that there are goslings of different ages in the crèche.
Canada geese are especially protective animals, and will sometimes attack any animal nearing their territory or offspring, including humans. Although parents are hostile to unfamiliar geese, they may form groups of a number of goslings and a few adults, called crèches.
Weeeell… it’s a lake in a town park, so you get a lot of families there (human families, I mean) and that inevitably leads to the kids feeding bread to the ducks, which in turn leads to pigeons. And, for that matter, rats.
So yes, a lot of pigeons (and the odd white dove) to be seen.
