Spotting Wildlife

Orbs can really amaze you, if you find a real orb instead of the fake kind.

 

I come across wildlife all the time...

This guy I almost stepped on..


And wouldn't have noticed this little guy had I not seen him blink... I was like "Did that tree just blink at me?" zoomed in and saw this little owl..

 

i used to live, i grew up living, where we could see these kinds of guys all the time.

along with skunks, porkupines, rattle snakes, the occasional mountain lion (felis conocolor, also called puma or cougar) and more seldomly california brown bear (some of whom are also black and mistaken for grizzleys, who were long extinct in that location at that time) and pine martins. it is possible we had foxes too, though i never had the fortune of seeing them. (however there was a photo between the pages of an old encyclopedia, that someone had been using as a book mark, when we moved into that house, that should a picture of that house, which the people who had presumably lived there when it was taken, playing with one. which among other things, leads me to believe they were around, or had been. we just never had the fortune of seeing them. possibly because of our two cats who would kill rattle snakes and bring them home to us, and our puppy we had at the time)

the house had been owner built, as were all the other houses near it, which were few, and half a mile from a town of less then a thousand people, who mostly, like us, lived in small houses, surrounded by forest.

close enough to town to walk to the store, and the railroad station where my dad worked, but just far enough away, to be surrounded by all these other kind of four legged people who lived in the forest that surrounded us.

not too far from where i live now, over at a friends of a friend's house for thanx giving last year, there was a ton of quail and wild rabbits. another friend who lives a little further in another direction, has a young coyote who comes around all the time.

the place i was mentioning where i grew up was in the northern sierras in california. where i'm living now is in northern nevada. different kind of environment but less then a hundred miles away.

 

Many lifeforms in nature aren't noticed because of the way they blend in. One has to learn to be observant.

I've seen wasp nests that look like a pine cone hanging from a tree branch. Monarch butterflies in autumn hang out on the tree branches and blend right in with the golden leaves. Whitetail deer resting on the forest floor look from a distance like rocks with spots of light dappled on them. These kinds of things tend to go unnoticed.

 

If only humans realized... that to live a long life.. it's sometimes best to go unnoticed...

 

The philosophical remark of the day.

 

so absolutely true. so many are seduced by excitement or ostentation to think they care, until their time too soon comes, and then its already too late.

 

Spotted neighbour's chickens who invade the garden through a hole in the fence. They are quite destructive.

Counting them as wildlife (as well as their owners).