But foxen are lovely. Wish I could see one of those rather than a mean, hissing, green tail whippy giganto lizard thingy!
We have had deer, foxes, coyotes, mice, rabbits, stray dogs, stray cats, snakes, turkeys, and some racoons once and well come through our yard. Oh, and we had a couple horses come through our yard onces to. Lol, Banzai, my grandma used to have a Artic Fox for a pet. That little thing was so cute. tehe. His name was Foxy and he was my pal but he kept getting out of the yard at my grandparents house. So we gave him to a farmer who let him run loose in the country.
We have a big family of ground hogs in our back yard. My favorite is a big fat one we call grandpa groundhog. I swear he gets fatter every year. They are really cute…until they chew the heads off all my tulips. Happens every year.
Last month we had warnings about a black bear wandering through yards in the next town to the south. I've had to stop quite a few times on back roads to wait for turkeys or geese to cross. And deer sightings (and collisions with cars) are fairly common. Possums, rabbits, skunks, squirrels, and grounhogs (woodchucks) are pretty common roadkill. Foxes are on the shy side, but there are some in the area. We actually have quite a lot of wildlife around here. I live less than a mile from a state forest, too, so I see more when I go there for an afternoon hike.
Oh, I forgot! When I lived in Wisconsin, we were all outside doing yard work, and then all of a sudden a big white turkey came along and jumped on top of our roof. I remember thinking, "White turkey? Sweet." We caught it and kept it in our chicken pen until the turkey's owners came and found it, but they let us keep it since they didn't have a place for it. It was interesting because around that time, in typical ten-year-old fashion, I had been begging my parents to buy me a white turkey to go with all the chickens we had.
cute!... a lot bigger than any wildlife we have here... ours runs to jungle rats and shrews, on the mammal/rodent side of things, the biggest reptilians being cute little house geckos [topping out at only a few inches, nose to tail-tip]... and no snakes... but flying cockroaches are 2-3 inches long and the spiders can be as big as saucers!
Interesting that you mention geckos. We have them here as well, in a number of varieties. Due to a mistranslation (who knows when that happened) they are referred to locally as salamanders. The mistranslation comes complete with the incorrect belief that these harmless creatures have the ability to sting and burn you. p.s. We also get the flying cockroaches that appear to have been made by Grumman Northrop!
I was riding horses one day and my horse kept stopping at this one post, and my dogs were circling it, and so i got off my horse, and went to see what they were looking at. I found two baby raccoons there hissing at my dogs. We had found two others dead in our yard the preceding days, so i took them in a cat carrier up to my mom. AFter a day or two, they were the sweetest things i'd ever seen. They would sleep in my lap and eat out of my hand. But they were sickly and died within two weeks. We named them Sly and Bandit. and other than that, about 12 years ago, before i lived here, a cougar got hit by a car on my street. They found it dead on the side of the road. And we also have deer and wild turkeys, and squirrels, and snakes, and wild chickens. That sort of thing. In case you can't tell, i live in a very wooded area.
Wild life? Well, when it's really warm sometimes we get dolphins...and the occasional seal...does that count?
Blue Tongue lizards are the most common critters I find in my back yard. My neighbours are scared of them so they always call someone in to re-locate them. I also see the occasional bat and possum.
I remember visiting a friend as a kid, and she lived near this river in South Carolina. Anyway her family had these huge roaches and I do mean huge (I can’t stress this enough) eww, thinking about it still gives me the willies. I remember that they flew…usually at me. Were they flying cockroaches? Or were they just your regular run of the mill roaches hopped up on miracle grow or something.
Thanks for posting that picture largeman I'm going to have nightmares for a while. Time to scrub out the eyeballs with some lye.
we have monkeys and apes..I don't mind the apes that much, but one once jumped on my back, before sprinting, so I'm scared...but monkeys terrify me..!!
WOW! Love this thread. My husband and I bought our first house, only to discover that it wasn't ours alone, but was infested with rats. Our lovely, sunny new home (and workspace) was crawling with them; dead or alive. Don't get me started about the smell and the **** and piss-soaked nests. Toxic. I can't tell you what was worse; dealing with the rats (discovery, extermination, tearing up the house), or the lawyers. We will finally have our days in court (5- for all the evidence and witnesses) in Feb. 2009. Fortunately, the law is on our side.
There is a man who would not agree about non-aggressive moose. the idiot was in a VW beetle and a bull moose was crossing the road but decided to stop. Now instead of sitting and waiting for it to move he started flashing the lights and honking the horn. It was during the rutt and this moose came and started taking apart the car. It was totalled and the moose decided it wasn't female by then so it left. We get bears, moose, porcupines, foxes all wandering around town. fun to watch from the inside of the car or house. We also get wolves coyotes but don't see them often as they come out at night mostly. Although one lady had her small dog taken off the leash and carried of by one more aggressive timber wolf last year. About 5 miles down the road we start seeing cougars and linx. now they are beautiful creatures to see in the wild. Lots of eagles falcons and hawks as well are around a lot.
Rutting season is always an exception. Even the normally gentle deer can turn vicious. Last year a woman walked up to a deer in her backyard and gently reached out to pet it. It turned and bit her, and kicked her, before she even touched it.
This one I think I can answer - other irregulars are not all as easy. It is to with etymology - geese is an umlaut plural that derives from old english / old norse and as such follows then common pluralisation in the form of a relaxation of the vowel sound. Moose is a mass noun that takes no overt plural and is native American in origin thus was derived under massively differnet socio-geological environments. Moose never went through old english / old norse vowel shifts and as such forms differently. It's chance that these singular nouns sound similar (minimal pairs in fact) and both relate to animal species. They derive however from completely different backgrounds and as such are formed based on independant context-driven environments.
"I hate meeces to pieces" I always like jinx the cat. That line in particular. now mice are little but if you call 2 moose meece I think you would confuse a lot of folks.
That's a cool iguana! I've always loved lizards. Where I live in Nebraska, we don't get a lot of interesting wildlife. Just the same stuff you see everywhere else. Though I did see a luna moth and various types of cool birds since we've been here. In southeastern Arizona, though, where we used to live, we'd have desert animals (like javelinas, rattlesnakes, coyotes and ringtails), mountain animals (like cougars), forest animals (like black bears), and even jungle animals (like trogons and even jaguars). I haven't seen a jaguar in Arizona, but I knew that they lived around my area. Oh, and also the city we lived just on the outskirts of is the Hummingbird Capital of the United States, so of course we'd have a gagillion hummingbirds. And there were swarms of bats, probably over 40 at a time, that would come to our hummingbird feeder at night.
That photo it looked like it was wearing a jacket Wrey. lol We have race horse goana's here. They is ansty. They run straight up you if you scare them. We have lots of funky animals over here, like my kids for instance har har har jokes! I think the funkiest animal we have is the Platypus, not that I see it that way, but others do. And largeman that pic was just out there...is that real or fake?
