Wildlife in Your Life

Can you get any pictures?

As you know, given their nature, they aren't out in good photo-taking light. But, as a mom, the female does tend to leave the den earlier than usual. Let me see what I got (I took some over two days).

This one is dark, but has the best focus. This is mom.

Wouldn't you love to know what she's thinking in that moment?

In my experience, most raccoons have one thing on their minds
"Hey, are you gonna finish that?"

Wow, that's a good photo!

I know how hard it is to take pictures of those guys.

It's always open season on raccoons. Nasty little things.

I did get really close to a hen turkey over the weekend.



They're so wary of humans it's incredible. They'll walk right up to your car but open the door and they'll be 100 yards away faster than you can say "Cluck".

Not during mating season.

The momma raccoon wasn't thinking about food. She was thinking about whether to move her kits away from all the hubbub of our two-family. We think she did decide to move out, we haven't seen her for a couple days.

Our mallards are strangely unwary right now. They used to take off in a flurry of dust and feathers if you passed within 15'. Now, you can practically brush them off the path. In nesting season, I would have expected exactly the opposite. Also, they are wondering further from water than usual. Has any one noticed this, or do we just have some odd ducks.

Maybe they're trying to distract you our keep you away from the nests.....

I agree with littlek.

so we had a squirrel in the house this morning.

haven't the foggiest how it got in
unless it snuck in last night while we were unloading groceries from the car.

it was freaking out, climbing the walls, scratching at the screen door.
i finally managed to 'steer' it towards the opened back door, and out.
that's one visitor who'll never set claw in this house again, i tell ya...

R(phew!)P

PS You left out the part where I screeched.

Reminds me of the raccoons in the bathroom story. Will post it if I can find it.




edit - found this much -

"I've also had raccoons at work, have told here on a2k somewhere about one dropping through our bathroom ceiling not many hours after I'd heard scratching noises above ... while I was in a compromised position. I've photos of clawmarks up the wall, Racky trying to get back up there."


Turned out there was a baby raccoon that fell through too, and got as far as the downstairs hallway. We had a wildlife rescue person come to the aid of the young one. Don't remember if they found mom raccoon or not.

In Townsville for the last couple of days. At outside dining at Rococo's cafe I saw a Kookaburra land on an occupied table walk onto a guy's salad plate he literally had his hand on it trying to push it away and it walked around his hand, grabbed a lettuce leaf and flew off.

I've seen cheeky wild birds before but not one that was OK with being manhandled.

The pic below isn't the same bird - it's just to give you an idea of size. That beak is mean and kills snakes.

The wallabies are getting closer to the car park. Only about 15 feet from my car yesterday.

I'm glad that kooka didnt take exception to being manhadled. I reckon the beak would go through your hand if he wanted it to.

Dont feed the wallabies hinge. especially white bread.

Isn't it funny - I've never been tempted to feed them, nor the roos you used to bump into all over Canberra. They make me smile.

we like the cute little rabbits hopping around in our garden , but why did they have to develop a taste for our TWO lonely zuccini plants ?

I forgot to add to this discussion that we had recently seen both a squirrel and a mouse in our house (not on the same day). The squirrel, we think, got in when we were taking groceries in and had the door propped. A propped door, we believe, was also the entry point for bats, in particular if the door is propped at dusk. This was earlier in the day when we had taken the groceries in (and then we didn't see the squirrel until the following day). Guess we've gotta look both up and down when bringing in food.

As for the mouse, it was a somewhat more intimate encounter as the mouse scuttled between my feet (eek!) and made a beeline (mouseline?) for the dining room.

We saw the squirrel leave but not the mouse. Oy.