Animals around your house...

Fisva wrote:

schleich61 wrote:

In your own words, Fisva: "...my opinions about Asians is quite racist." Evidently, you felt the need to say this, so feel free to try to explain it away. If you meant something different and this is a matter of posting in something other than your first language, no problem, just say so. Otherwise, you've been "hoisted by your own
petard" I'm afraid...

Probably it is a matter of language, I ment rather that my opinion may seem racist rather than it is quite racist. Anyway, nowadays even simple "I don't like them" may seem racist to many people...

Okay, we can simply agree to disagree. Thank you for the clarification.

Agatha, Roger, Schleich 61 and everyone here..
im sorry about my picture..

so everythings clear now.. let see another animal arround your house..

NandO wrote:

Agatha, Roger, Schleich 61 and everyone here..
im sorry about my picture..

so everythings clear now.. let see another animal arround your house..

Absolutely no reason to apologize, NandO. The photo depicted a really unfortunate reality, but it doesn't do any of us any
good to pretend this kind of stuff isn't happening, everywhere...

i guess eveybody has a good and bad side of his/her character, nobody's perfect anyway, its the eros and thanatos principle, the life and death thing, and again, "its a wonderful world to live in," :)

This poor guy tried to find a way through the fence. I was really scared that he's going to run on the street, but fortunately he went back. He managed to find a way behind the fence :) It almost broke my heart that a wild animal has to live near human houses.
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So cute Agata

Wow, what a pretty guy

Agata, yore so lucky.. cant find him here

What a beautyful, beautyful bird  
Fantastic photo  

It is so beautiful that it looks like a toy!

It appears I wrote a novella when all I tried to do was list some birds. Disregard at your leisure:

We've had quite a busy bird spring here. A Botaurus stellaris has been doing his bass-boosted bottle-blowing thing hidden somewhere on a large raft of fallen reeds in the nearby cape. If one manages to creep close enough at around four in the morn without attracting too much attention, it's possible to get so close as to hear the intakes of breath and have one's chest cavity actually vibrate from the strength of the base notes the bird blows. Frogsong emanated from the same raft a few weeks ago so loud it could be heard three kilometers inland.

A young Dendrocopos major has taken to drumming the metal cover of a telephone post just opposite our house. He still feeds at our feeder, too, lazy thing (it's not far from high summer already). Pheasants are a common sight, too, with one rotund older couple and two skinny hens sending our dogs into a manic rage near daily. Pheasants have (besides a most sonorous call) a most amusing rolling gait, I find. They move like they're on wheels. A pair of magpies nests in the fir in our yard, and engages in daily scraps with the couple of crows nesting in the other fir, some twenty meters away. Fieldfares, also nesting locally, have a field day giving both parties a hiding when this occurs.

Another slacker unabashedly abusing the delights of our bird feeder is a Turdus merula who dropped into our yard too weak to stand or flee in the middle of the worst January -30°C. He has since not only survived, but grown plump and hilariously lazy on our offered buffet of nuts, seeds, grain and raisins: he arrives to eat; stuffs himself silly; flies, wobbling, to digest his meal in our shed some ten meters away; (craps massive amounts all over the place); and within half an hour returns for seconds. This was all he did the entire winter. Now that it's spring, he does also sing - although considering the amount of feed he's cost us, it's some top-dollar birdsong, that.

Other fellers frequently seen around our house and garden are tits (great and small, also blue, sometimes crested); hares the size of Golden Retrievers; robins; fieldfares; red squirrels; and hedgehogs (who sometimes even make it past their second year here, it appears - in my previous town of heavier traffic and more sadistic citizenry, the oldest specimens one ever saw were skinny yearling hedgehogs and their doomed young). On visitors infrequently seen or only heard: Jays sometimes drop by, and I had the rare pleasure of hearing a Gavia arctica call in the morning mist on the lake some nights ago.

Oh, and, we have a melanistic (also sadly scabies-ridden) fox residing under a nearby abandoned house! He is quite cool. I've seen him once or twice, and he doesn't appear to be dying very fast, so I'm hopeful about perhaps getting a photograph or two of him before starvation does him in. If I succeed (and the results aren't too grisly), I'll share the photos here if you're interested - assuming there was anyone who made it to the end of my wordy and information-poor essay here. (If you did, I commend your tenacity!) (And puzzle over your driving forces..)

at the moment a lot of common swifts with a lot of noise  

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Here in Michigan, the black berries are beginning to ripen, and there is a huge patch behind my house. Last night, my family went out to pick and eat some. The patch is very thick, and you can only see about ten feet in any direction. I had gotten a little ways from the group, when I heard cracking, like my brother had followed me or something. Anyway, I stopped moving and listened. I heard crunching and heavy breathing. I said "HEY!", and all of the sudden a great big black head popped up out of the briars and stood on its hind legs about ten feet away. It was the biggest black bear I have ever seen in person, and was easily six and a half feet tall.   Thank god he was as scared of me as I was of him, and we both took off in opposite directions. That was the last I saw of him, but I went back today and there was a big pile of bear poop. Hopefully I can see him again, just from more of a distance. :) :) 

Uhhh! It is such a long time since I saw this subject  

WOW, CC, , are you eating the poor bear`s food ?  
Sorry  What a terrible chock !!! Good that he ran away  

Andreas, I love the picture of the swallows. Great picture !!!
They are wonderful birds, eat all the moscitoes, - and their "talking" is ever so charming  

Lea, thankyou for telling about all the birds. Sounds like you are also a great lover of out feathered friends  

SUSANNE wrote:

Uhhh! It is such a long time since I saw this subject  

WOW, CC, , are you eating the poor bear`s food ?  
Sorry  What a terrible chock !!! Good that he ran away  

 

I was SOOOOO relieved when he ran off!  

I saw the bear again last evening. I was riding my ATV when he ran across the road in front of me. I felt a lot safer on the bike, so I followed him. He got away though. I wish I had had a camera with me!

cattlecollector wrote:

I saw the bear again last evening. I was riding my ATV when he ran across the road in front of me. I felt a lot safer on the bike, so I followed him. He got away though. I wish I had had a camera with me!

Very interesting  

My garden is more or less a dog-run, but the little bit of hedge, I like to keep neat  

So why does it look like this ?
It looks horrible and irritates me, why don`t I clip it ?
Am I just lazy   ...or ? 
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No ! This is the reason !
A HUGE nest of wasps , - very aggressive wasps ! 
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I have not dared go near them for months, - well I can cut the hedge when it becomes winter

Those are animals with a remarkable collective inteligence, they surely know where is the best place to live.
Be careful!

  Yes, the best place for THEM  
Well, I suppose the wasps were here long before any humans  

Here in Michigan, it is legal to go out at night with a spotlight to shine deer. (As long as there is no weapon in the vehicle.) It is really fun, and me and my dad do it almost every night in October. It is almost eerie to shine alight into the woods and see a bunch of eyes glowing back at you. On the last night of October, me and my dad made one last run. We saw a huge ten point whitetail buck breeding a doe, which was pretty interesting. Then, we were driving down a dirt road when black bear sow and two cubs ran across the road twenty feet in front of us.  
This made me realize really how big the bear population has grown in the past few years. Five years ago you would NEVER see a black bear in the wild because they were so far in between. This year has been different though. I am seeing bears and bear sign everywhere. Hopefully I will figure out how to post photos some day, and I can show you guys some photos.

This bird and turtle i saw in the türkiye

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cattlecollector wrote:

Hopefully I will figure out how to post photos some day, and I can show you guys some photos.

I hope so much you will give it a go   


Beautyful critters, Andreas !

Strange to see a real. live turtle in the wild...for me it is almost as exotic as a bear. But less dangerous, I am sure  

SUSANNE wrote:

Strange to see a real. live turtle in the wild...for me it is almost as exotic as a bear. But less dangerous, I am sure  

A bear is exotic?  They are almost a dime a dozen here, quite common.