Pond Boss Forums GENERAL QUESTIONS Pond Boss Local native critters

One of the things that I enjoy on this forum is reading posts describing local critters from all the different areas. I would like to hear of more or any unique/rare visitors. I spend my week days working in Grande Prairie, Alberta. Among some of the noteables here are, cougar, black and grizzly bears, wolverines,Lynx and bobcats, tons of moose, elk, mule and whitetails. Migratory birds: Bald and golden eagles, white pelicans, snowy owls, tons of songbirds, hummingbirds, cormorants,great blue herons. No reptiles, only amphibians are frogs

Dang, I envy you.

Our most unusual and exciting visitor is one that is mostly rumor, and that's the mountain lion. Nebraska has only recently been known to have some of these creatures. I haven't seen one in person, but there's been some fairly convincing evidence that they're around.

We've already seen bobcats and bald eagles for sure.

I never know when I'll look out into one of the fields and see the Granville (Ohio) Lion (or one of the mentally and natural history challenged individuals who dreamed it up). This fierce creature roamed the woodlands and fields near me for 2-3 years, terrorizing local residents. It was finally caught on film about a year ago.


But seriously, we do have the occasional bobcat joining their temporarily liberated domestic brethren here.

Is that a cat?

Guv, I thought that by now, at least, you would have registered a Sasquatch sighting after finishing the book you were reading.

I might have a porcupine, but I ain't got no armadillo.

Dave I thought you would have posted the following:

Eric, those are important parts of DD's diet. Take, for example, the Hurst & Bowie 7 Course dinner - an armadillo and a 6-pack of Lone Star.

Road Kill Chili. No place but Texas.

Here are a couple of things you may run across fishin in La. lakes and bayous. The gator is always fun to play with on a hook and bobber.

Yummm! Our WV version of Armadillo without the armor.

For once, and only this time, I am speechless and have no retort.

I'm thinkin, I'm thinkin.....

Here are a few from my neighborhood

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Sunil, my game cameras haven't caught a Sasquatch yet. However, there are newspaper accounts of sightings of some kind of big hairy monster (no bull from me here) about 50 miles to the East of my place. Most of the, as usual, unconfirmed sightings have been in remote heavily wooded areas around Lake Texoma. However, that's where Lusk abodes so it might have been an honest mistake. Or, then, it might not have been an honest mistake at all if Mike Otto was involved.

Rad,

Mongoose, monitor, and coconut macaque?

I love to watch those monkeys in action. Amazing how they can detect the ripe coconuts.

I have turtles, snakes, and birds galore. No aquatic mammals yet, thank goodness.

My brother saw a mountain lion in his neck of the woods a couple of years ago at very close range. The sighting was unconfirmed by the G & P as it rained hard shortly after "they" saw it, this included my brothers friend who is a local vetrenarian. My brother actually walked into the grass patch it disappeared into an jumped it up along a fence line from a distance of 20-30ft.

Hey Bruce, have I ever mentioned the "Big White Hairy thing" that a number of my friends claim they saw below the dam a Yankee Hill one night while fishing after dark on a full moon. I was there at the time but was still in the parking lot while they headed down to the lake, all three of them came back very quickly looking white as ghost. This was twenty years ago, to this day they swear up and down the "big white hairy thing" was 7ft tall and walking on two legs. Just so everyone knows, Yankee Hill Lake is near Denton, not far from the Condello BG ranch.

Did the big white hairy thing have really long arms?

Yes! I hear long arms are great for taking fish pictures. Now who do I know that has really long arms?

Bobad,
The monkeys are a lot of fun to watch, the monitor was between 5 and 6 feet long and if found by any of my neighbors, is dinner.
We had a hog badger, but I was not been able to get any pictures. Strange looking animal.

hey wood, i agree.

although, i could bore you guys to tears w/ stories of all the critters we get, most are "common" but we have many "commonly seen" resident dwellers in and around the house that keep most folks living in the suburbs.

anybody who comes to visit, check yer clothes in the morning BEFORE you put them on. i actually do check, and i actually shook a scorpion out of my pants one day, and one time a full grown tarantula out of my boots in the garage. just three days ago it took me an hour to dig out all my tools along one wall of the garage to get to the rattler that had crawled in. between late june and early august, walking out and about alone at night is ill advised due to our resident cougars.

beau, those look like giant wood rats?

very cool to see yer critters from thailand rad....rikki tikki tavi

Dave, that's a nutria.

D.I.E.D.
I shake out my shoes as well.

Yeah a nutria rat. Some folks around here call that good eatin. I tried it and didn't care for it. Nasty little critters.

Rad do you have the cobras, kraits and sea snakes as well and are they a local delicacy ? I guess you have to be quick to live on the edge.

Yesterday I was driving through my CRP field and I heard what sounded like crying--sort of like little children would if they were in danger. I drove round and round and finally found the source of the noise. It was a little patch of unmowed weeks. As I investigated further I found the long tail of a bullsnake sticking out. I parted the weeds a little bit, and found that he was raiding a rabbit's nest. Not a pretty sight. The bullsnake coiled up and hissed at me like he thought for all the world he was a rattler!! He even took a couple of good thrusts at me.

In my parts, that is usually a leopard frog with a garter snake latched on to it. Since the leopard frog never makes that noise otherwise, I surmise that the frog's strategy is to call a warm-bloded predator to spoil the snake's dinner. It's not surprising for your rabbit, but I find it amazing that a frog could evolve to call a predator to get it out of trouble.

But did ya tell your old buddy JHAP, nooooo!

Last time up at my property I turned over a tarp and found a nice scorpion, 18 or 19 inches long at least, or perhaps it just seemed that large with my heightened state of cowardess.

We do have a resident fox that is a tough little fellow. Stands his ground with a lot of attitude. Bears and cougars have been spotted on my place but not any by me.

Nothing particularly exotic like Rad though.

look anything like this bobad?.........


this one werent callin out nothin

taken on my driveway above pond.

Haa! Posted with in seconds each other. Hello Dave!

ewest,
We have cobras, kraits, sea snakes and a whole slew of different models of pit vipers.
We have killed two blue coral snakes in the house, and a pair mangrove pit vipers made a nest and tried to raise a family next to the house. We found three babies and boy were they mad, as soon as they saw me they started hissing and striking.
I have been swimming many times and never seen a sea snake.

We don't really have any unusual critters in our zone, but during a visit to southwestern Minnesota, we encountered this beast raiding a nest of Limed Coronas...
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You guys make me real glad I live in WV! Except for a few copperheads and timber rattlers, I can't think of many critters that really could make life scary or unsafe -- except maybe humans.


Southern Flying Squirrel

Edit: (Brettski -- I think we posted at the same time. It is a good feeling to live where the critters are like yours and mine.)

Now we know why Life is Good on Bremer Pond!

ROFLOL !! B'ski that is almost as good as the stooges. Badger - Badger - Badger ---- snake.

Exactly! Substitute my western ribbon for your red sided, of course. If that was a leopard frog in my area, it would be bleating and screaming bloody nurder.

Excellent....Rad's critters are just that. I like the armadillo and possum also. Catmandoo, we are used to living among large predators, I do spend a lot of time in the back woods but take certain precautions, as a minimum I carry pepper spray and bear bangers, defender 12 guage if we are tenting out. I forgot to mention, I also have a couple of bush weasels.

Cute weasels, Wood.

In the process of stripping out a car right now. So far I have killed 8 brown recluse spiders and I am only halfway done. These things are very common here and we catch them on glue traps in the house. The exterminator sprays twice a year but admits that pesticide has little effect on them as they don't drag their body as they walk. Every once in a while I will go through my spare plywood stock and kill a dozen easily.

BTW the armadillos have made it as far north as St. Louis. I seen on 10 years ago and no one believed me. Recently though the local paper has shown pics of a few hit on the road so now nobody doubts my sighting.

Hey Wood, the weasels are growing nicely. Looks like you have been feeding and fertilizing.

We've been amazed at the wildlife we've photographed on our place since building three years ago - partly because we are just three miles out of the city limits but it seems so remote! Let's see... bobwhite quail, pheasant, bobcat, deer, turkey, coyotes, morning dove, coons, possums, roadrunners, armadillos (GRRR), skunks, and way too many cottontail rabbits, tons of birds and snakes and frogs...OH - and then there is DHs wild "pet" squirrel named Sissy.

(Gonna try to post a few pics - not sure if this is how to do it...and I can't find my bobcat picture. I'll keep looking!)

up here in IL we have deer, deer, o and more deer. but the coyote packs have gotten a lot larger and actually are pretty agressive they took a few of our cats which made my mom learn how to use the 22. The bucks get big up here though. we also have our nice turkey flocks the bald eagles in the winter, the turkey vultures, the hawks and all those ground animals rabbits squirrels etc. but i did see a bob cat a couple of years back no one believed me but i am certain of it

Love that road runner.

The cat has been cornered by a flock of turkeys and wants inside.

That's a great animal GW. They're getting scarce.

I was attacked by a green bean.

I guess I have just about everything but bears. No mountain lion stories for the last 10 years. My wife did see a huge bobcat a couple of weeks ago about 50 ft. from our front window. It was 3:00 in the afternoon. She got really excited.

Last year I did see something odd. It looked exactly like a whitetail buck but had axis type spots. It did not have axis antlers. I talked to another guy who said that my report was the third he had heard about over a 20 mile area. He also said that he had talked to the Game Warden and was told that they couldn't/wouldn't cross breed. I guess it could've been a whitetail with an odd gene trait but I've never seen anything like it.

We do have some game ranches around. Last year, some kind of exotic antelope was in my pastures. It looked like a Texas antelope but had long, thick, spiraling, horns. I saw it 3 times. I'm a long way from antelope country. A neighbor saw it once. He wanted to shoot and mount it. I couldn't see the point in doing that. Haven't seen it since and he didn't shoot it.

we've had four really interesting sitings in the past week. a week ago, my wife was looking down over the hill from our driveway and saw an adult cougar sitting on his hind legs with his front legs straight (like house cats do, kinda like a sphynx). she said it blended in so well, she thought at first it was just a clump of grass, she turned her head for a minute, and when she looked back, it was gone.

three days ago, i saw probably the same cat across my property stalking a fawn or jack rabbit, i couldnt tell the prey, it ran too fast into the trees, then i saw the cougar slinking low through the grass approaching the area the prey ran into. from across the canyon, it heard me walking on the driveway, turned and looked, then took off into the woods.

day before yesterday, my wife (with binoculars in hand), looking into the same spot she saw the cougar, saw an adult bobcat carrying an adult rattlesnake in its mouth. the bobcat was unaware of her presence, and she got a fantastic long look at this....but not long enough to get the camera, it was gone when she came back out w/ camera.

last night before retiring to bed, i was outside infront of garage. have you ever seen a domestic cat get into that crazed rage and race around? in the darkness below our driveway i heard something dashing around and then jumping onto a pine and climbing about 10 feet up into....then it kind of grunted and yowled twice, i grabbed the flashlight, and just caught the bobcat descending from the tree and tearing off into the woods.....all this while taking in some nice meteors last night (persyiad (sp?) meteor shower).

Dang Dave, you have a regular wild kingdom going on there!

Consider yourself reprimanded for not carrying around a camera.

With all your cougar sightings I think that you must have a den or cougar condo or something on your property.

I have a squirrel with an attitude at my place, does that count? (and before anyone says it I was not referring to myself).

I always figured there'd be more Cougar sightings down in Houston.

Look, there's a squirrel.

Those motion sensing lights are nice for catching wildlife. When it clicks on, my cats run to the back door, because they know there will be a critter there to watch. One night we were treated to a red fox vixen and 3 or 4 kits.

Last year I saw what I beleived to be a Jagurundi down by my pond, But TPWD will not take a report without proof.

Nothing exotic as mountain lions and bobcats, but last week we got a good amount of rain. It caused an outbreak of toads and frogs. This little guy was snoozing on a lounge chair on our deck. One was even happily floating in the cat's water bowl.
(I guess I never paid much attention to toads before, but all the toads we saw were all colored the same as their surroundings.)

awesome pic cat, a very photogenic subject.

He kinda looks depressed.

I'm trying out my new camera. It seems like a great all around choice for someone with little photography knowledge. It's a Kodak Z712is and it has image stabilization and a 12 X zoom. It was $214 + tax, no shipping.

These pics were taken about 20 feet from the feeder.




edit: You can enlarge the images even more by clicking them again after you open them.

Speaking of critters, we just had a grizzly attack here yesterday, 20 min from town, apparently a hunter was pre-scouting an area for the upcoming deer season and got between the mom and three cubs. I guess she beat him up pretty good, he managed to stab her a number of times with a hunting knife and walked over a mile to get out of the bush. He is in hospital with broken limbs, cuts, bite marks. Pretty tough guy I'd say. They apparently found the grizz dead, close to the attack area.
This in addition to a number of cougar sightings both in town and close by and always Grizzlies and blacks around means keep your head up in the bush.
It's always unfortunate when wildlife encounters end in human injury but it is still fairly uncommon considering how often we are in their habitat and how common they are around here. I for one still feel much safer in the bush than on any city street, humans are far more dangerous than animals.

Grizzlies can be rough. I didn't like the way that Hummingbird was looking at me either!

Great sighting!

I thought I saw some parrots fly over 1 day, but nobody else has seen any.

I know I posted this before, but here it is again

gee-dub, if yer not aware, hummingbirds can be very territorial and aggressive. my great grandmother once tried to save a hummingbird whose bill was caught in an old metal screen door. she gently grasped the body of the bird and carefully extracted its bill from the screening. the bird promptly turned its head and drove its beak all the way through her index finger....

I've seen them fighting over the feeders. We have two on different sides of the house and one dominant bird tries to keep them both for himself. Sometimes when we're outside they'll buzz us a little.

I've found that some of my neighbors are real turkeys. Worse than that, they are eating my deer food, and drinking my pond water.

just in time for thanksgiving

One of my pond rats was running around the other day using my fish net as a butterfly net. It looked comical and I went back in the house.

The next day he shows me this. The flip flop is exactly 11" long. The white pellet is a moth ball to keep the ants from eating his homework project.

I thought the big moth was unusual.

What happenned to the other six legs?

Bruce,
I wish I knew, it was weird, it was using those feeler things to pick up food and eat like a mantis. It moved around pretty well with just the two legs, no sign of where others could have been attached. Thalidomide or banjo playing relatives?

Must be a birth defect on the lynx spider. If I'm not mistaken, missing legs can be re-grown over several moltings. The atlas moth is a beauty.

Bobbad,
It was around 2" toe to toe. It wasn't slowed a bit by the missing legs, the counter I found it on is inside the house and 30" off the floor.
Ain't nature grand?

As my University of Nebraska evolutionary microbiology professor once told me...

"Virtually all mutations are akin to shooting a .22/250 through a race car engine--Not likely to take hold".


...or something like that.

So... should I shoot it or race it?

Rad,

2" is a bit big for a lynx spider. Now I have no idea what kind it is.

I'm wondering how old it is, and whether the legs were lost or never existed. Most spiders live 1 year, but some non-web spinning spiders can live several years. I wonder how long it took your spider to learn to get by with 2 legs and 2 enlarged palps. I would love to see it in action.

Yes nature is grand. It never ceases to amaze and inspire me.

It reminds me of the frog-thing Gorgonite in the movie "Small Soldiers."

Weird.

...this would be cause for argument in my home over whether the next phone call is to the Orkin man or a realtor.
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...btw, nice caulk job

Bski you might as well start listing LNP. Bugs & Critters go hand and hand with country living. Did I mention the ocasional rat snake in the bathroom.

bobad, in my formative years, i kept a large female black widow in a terrarium. affectionately known as "lucretia", she got a steady diet of bees, moths, ants.....on fight night we'd give her a praying mantis.....she lived to be almost 5 years old...

b'ski, RT gives excellent advice....stepping on large wolf spiders w/ barefeet in the middle of the night is always fun too

That's funny.

It's just a wild guess but I'll bet that was before you married Jean.