So you know i love a silver lining. Amid this inescapable global crisis, one of the most amusing and wonderful things to me has been seeing 'wild' animals reclaiming their land; heards of goats walking down main streets, dolphins in canals and the like (this article has a bunch of good (to me) photos but then i'm not used to seeing raccoons, bears and stuff in our backyard). Apart from a fox, a local girl that i've occasionally seen riding a horse, and more people walking dogs than i've ever seen (and one cat on a leash! i didn't know people walked cats!), i'm yet to see anything like the scenes from that article but we're not exactly venturing far. Have you had any unexpected wild life encounters in your area or are you used to having wild visitors?
@bellbird Thankyou for sharing that link... great photos and very interesting. No strange wildlife in our town. But I will share a photo of someone I found in one our roses the other day.
great macro!! we have mini-frogs setting up house in our bromeliads quite often, it's like a waterfront vacation spot for them and they end up in the pool pretty regularly, enjoying the spoils of our urban paradise!
We had some wildlife excitement! We have a rather small pond right behind our house that is inhabited mostly by ducks. About 2 weeks ago, we spotted an alligator! The first picture is to show how close to our house the pond is. I got a few pictures of our intruder and you can see it's big ole snout sticking up. It took them 3 days to get it out!
@Cherylndesigns oh my gosh! do you have any kind of back fence between you and the pond? i hope the ducks are ok but i think i'd be putting up a' for sale' sign if i had a croc or gator in my backyard! (And this just shows how size is relative- we have a 'small pond' in our yard but it's like half a wine barrel size (or bottom half of a water tank actually), so your 'rather small pond' is massive to me (a baby croc wouldn't even fit in ours, but the goldfish in there are rather large for goldfish now, much closer to Koi fish size now, which is why you're never meant to flush goldfish down the loo or let them loose in waterways!)
We've had a few more deer in the yard than we normally do but nothing too unusual yet. We usually have some deer that visit along with raccoons, opossums, etc. My friend did have some cool visitors at her house a few days ago. They had a little play time in her yard before taking off.
Nothing unusual for me. Just the normal rabbits, squirrels and birds hanging around. I don't live that far from the river so in the past I have seen geese wandering around the neighborhood. I haven't seen any lately but in the past we have had raccoons in the area. I have had a rabbit hanging out under a bush in the flower beds by the picture window to get out of the rain lately... it is driving Peyton nuts. She gets on the back of the couch and looks out the window and sees it. Funny story about a raccoon. Back in the 80's we had a screened in porch on the back of our house. My parents loved to sit out there. There was a cable outlet right beside the sliding door so they could put a TV on a table for the summer months. They would sit there in the evenings with just the light of the TV. One night my mom turned and looked outside and saw these 2 huge eyes staring at her. She screamed and scared Dad. I was elsewhere in the house and went running. Dad got up and looked and it was a big old raccoon. It was sitting in the begging position about 8 inches away from the window. Only ever happened once but we talked about it until the day she died. @Cherylndesigns I have seen gators in ponds in Florida many times. My parents stayed at a trailer park in Ft Myers every winter that had ponds with a couple of gators. I don't remember them ever bothering the residents though and they never seemed to be that big.
Love that!! I don't think our visitors have anything to do with world situation, more the time of year. Yessssssssssssssssssssssss itssssssssssssssssss that time again! And after all this rain (6 days) I won't be hiking anytime soon. Once there while walking through a park in nearby city, there were some of these types hanging in the trees! Didn't get close enough to see if they were garter/yard snakes or not. Nope!
not near our home, we're near the middle of a big town. Don't really go to the outskirts or the countryside at the right time of the day to see much out of the norm.
Justine, there's a saying here "where there's water, there are gators". Some guy who has lived here for years said there had never been a gator in this pond. It's manmade and there aren't even any drainage pipes big enough for that one to get in. Like @HavaDrPepper said, they don't normally bother people. They're on golf courses quite often. They were here first and they have lost most of their habitats. Kinda sad, but still don't like them. We have a neighborhood watch on email and one of the residents right around from us reported that it tried to get in her lanai one of the nights it was here! That did scare me! We live in a fairly newly developed area and this was swampland ("typical Florida"). There are probably more wandering around than we know about. Where we used to live there were "Panther Crossing" signs all along the road. Oh and the ducks are fine. They all just sat on the banks of the pond the whole time the gator was in there.
Just the usual birds and occasional bunnies, raccoons, and opossums. I did see the neighborhood fox earlier this spring but he is rare. The deer sightings have gone way, way down. This is good as they tend to eat everything. In general, people in my neighborhood are out and about much, much more than before. Probably because their gyms are still closed. It has been nice seeing everyone saying hi and interacting with each other (although at a distance of course).
We have a lot of wildlife here where I live. We see them in our yard all the time. Right now we have a bear who has decided it loves our garbage dumpster. It's a smaller dumpster but still heavy and very sturdy and we have been chaining the lids down tight. But it has managed to pry the steel lids up in spite of the chain and it drags the garbage out. It was here again last night. That's three times now in the past few weeks. And twice it has tipped that dumpster over. Such a great adventure!! Yesterday it came between 9:30 AM and 11 AM. That's pretty bold. To come during daylight hours. And the lids no longer close all the way. They are bent all up after last night's visit. All of us are having to be super watchful right now. Especially since the bear seems to have no fear of when it comes around. That isn't good for us! But we love it here. This is just part of living in the mountains!
We live in the country about 15 minutes away from any town so we frequently see deers and turkeys. We recently started seeing some foxes & coyotes.
My mom has a family of foxes that live at the back of her property. I don't remember her saying that she's seen them this year or not though. They are cute, but I haven't been able to capture them on camera. Around our house, all we have are a variety of birds as well as squirrels. Jay's aunt (who lives two streets over from us) keeps having this little visitor come begging for cat food every evening. She does feed her cats outside, so I can see why the racoon is attracted to their back deck.
@gonewiththewind Your second photo is exactly how the raccoon was siting that scared my mom so bad all those years ago. All she could see was eyes because there was very little light on the screened in porch. It wasn't after food either. We had no pets at that time.
We see all kinds of wildlife out here on a normal basis - deer, raccoons, snakes, etc... @gonewiththewind - When we were in our rental house we had a raccoon visit us almost every night. He became like a little friend that we expected to see. Today we saw a black bear when driving over the mountain just a couple of miles from our house.
I live 15 min from the French Quarter in New Orleans, LA and I have seen pics and it is gross, but the heart of the French Quarter (Bourbon Street and closest streets) is filthy, smelly when everyone is in full force. Since late March when all traffic was banned from that area, it has been cleaned over and over and at first it brought out rats in full force looking for food that was easily available before. After a while, they realized there was no food, so they moved on, but it was a sight to see at first. I live in the city....nothing but a few egrets visit us here.
I can't really say that I've seen any more wildlife, but we live in a small town. We do have a lot of deer because we live near a ravine that runs all through our little town. So mostly it's just the birds, squirrels and deer. OH! I did see a hummingbird in my yard eating from my daffodils. I'd never see them in my yard before. And the neighbors across the street put our oranges in their backyard and I saw my first Oriole in person last week! So pretty!
Not any more wildlife than usual. I have seen bat droppings in our storage shed, but no bat sighting yet this year. They eat mosquitoes, so I don't mind them at all. A few weeks ago, we caught a raccoon eating our bird seed and suet at dusk, so now I bring in the bird seed nightly. I'd go broke feeding the raccoon. So far, this season, I've seen turkeys, songbirds, raccoons, chipmunks, squirrels, bunnies, deer, one snake, some geese, one frog, the neighbor's cat (we think).