That’s how the husband of a friend was decapitated. A moose wandered out onto the highway in Thunder Bay. He hit it while driving his pick-up truck. It came through the window and took his head off. His daughter, who was sitting beside him, was physically OK, but it was one hell of a thing for her to witness.
Moose are the worst - just the right height to come right in through the window.
A couple weeks ago, I saw a coyote in Chicago. I was talking with a woman who was walking her dog and the coyote crossed the street right in front of where we were standing. Once the coyote appeared on the sidewalk, after walking around a parked car, her dog saw it and started the chase. The coyote eventually jumped a fence the dog wouldn’t try. For those interested in the location, the fence surrounded a yard that I think is owned by St. Michael’s church in Old Town Triangle. The address would be about 1700 N. St. Michaels Court. The dog owner said she had seen two coyotes in Lincoln Park (the park not the neighborhood).
A bunch of years ago, I lived in an apartment that was on the second floor of a commercial building with two stores and three flats above one of the stores. So all three flats looked over the roof of the second store, and we could go out our windows onto the roof.
Being in my 20’s and single, I was well aware of the possibility of someone breaking into the apartments by coming up the back access stairs. One night around 2am I was asleep when sounds of scrabbling and scratching at the screen of my roof-side bedroom window woke me up. I leaped out of bed at full-alert mode, naked as could be, and grabbed a 3-foot-long 2x4 that was in the kitchen.
The scrabbling at the screen was still going on, and I hadn’t grabbed my glasses, so I was half-blind. I could see a shadow through the blinds, thrown by streetlamps outside, and I thought it could be someone’s head. I crept up to the window, 2x4 raised in my left hand, and ripped the blinds up as fast as I could, and someone was there!
We both yelled. He let out a yell that sounded small and strange. And then I realized it was a very young raccoon, with his claws stuck in the screen. I fell back onto the bed, laughing my ass off at myself, and then laughing at the poor raccoon, who had managed to free himself from the old metal screen and run off to who knows where.
Other than that little guy (who isn’t un-urban anyway) I haven’t run across anything I wouldn’t think of as animals that may be found in a city. Coyotes, red foxes, opossums, enormous rats, tiny mice, rabbits, geese, etc, etc. My closest encounter with an opossum was last summer. I was walking home when the biggest opossum I’ve ever seen crossed my path about 15 feet from me. He had to weigh 20 pounds, mature male, and fat. He looked at me and decided I was nothing to worry about, apparently. He took his sweet time and sauntered down the sidewalk away from me. He stopped to sniff at the corner of my building and then pissed on it. He proceeded to saunter across the street, pausing at the El overpass supports, pissing on each one as he crossed, and then disappeared into the shadows. He was a really impressive sight!