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What my manager saw (Warning: Cuteness abound!)

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  • #16
    One of the nicest places I know to see animal fun is the Botanic Garden behind the Museum. At the right time of year you can see rabbits, raptors riding the morning thermals and even a beautiful, red rooster who took up residence in the peony garden for several months.

    Here are two of my favorites from a few years ago:

    The Japanese Hill and Pond Garden is home to a large population of mallards. One summer, they were joined by a vacationing pair of mandarin ducks. These were almost certainly enjoying a holiday from the zoo in Prospect Park. That's just across Flatbush Avenue. The mallards may have been wearing their finest green heads but they couldn't hold a candle to their visiting Asian cousins.

    Magnolia Terrace has beautiful ponds stocked with water lilies and big kois. The Garden is within easy flying distance of Gateway National Park. That's a sanctuary for water birds such as the Great White Heron and the Little Blue Heron. They come to the Garden all the time.

    Probably they come for lunch. Magnolia Terrace is right next to the outdoor section of the Garden cafe. Birds and people can watch each other enjoy meals. Here's a pretty close approximation of a conversation I heard a few years ago.

    K= Kid, probably about 10.

    D= Not the sharpest knife in the drawer but a good Dad.

    Here's what I heard.

    K= Look, Dad. (Pointing to a gorgeous white heron perched over the water lily pond).

    D= Nice but he can't be real. Real birds move around and this one ain't. It's a good joke though. Havin' a stuffed bird standin' on a 'No Fishin'" sign. We'll get a picture of that. Grandma will like it.

    (Dad takes the picture and, right after he does it, the heron catches sight of the perfect koi. It swoops, catches the fish and the white bird with the golden fish in its mouth flies off to a tree with lush, dark green leaves. Lunch is served but Dad missed the picture.)
    Research is the art of reading what everyone has read and seeing what no one else has seen.

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    • #17
      We see lots of wildlife out here. Had a herd of deer cross the road in front of us (we saw them a ways back and were able to stop easily), have passed many deer standing on the side of the road (fortunately, they stayed put rather than running in front of the car), several raccoons, Canadian geese, mallards, seagulls (we're about sixty miles from the shore!), red-winged blackbirds, Stellar jays, Western meadowlarks and many other pretty birds. Even saw a bald eagle in flight once.

      Sadly, lots of roadkill as well, but I won't go into that.
      I don't have an attitude problem. You have a perception problem.
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      • #18
        At my last office, I had a red-tailed hawk that would "challenge" his reflection in my office window every day. I'd spend the afternoon being startled by these solid thumps coming from the window about 2 feet from my head. He seems to do it only during mating season, he stopped after a while, but you could see his dusty body imprint on the window for a couple of weeks after.

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        • #19
          Within the city, we really only have the parrots (some of them exotic) who live in the trees near the French Quarter's "Moonwalk" area on the riverfront. When my mom used to live in NC, we would sometimes get to see white squirrels. They were always pretty cool.
          "For a musician, the SNES sound engine is like using Crayola Crayons. Nobuo Uematsu used Crayola Crayons to paint the Sistine Chapel." - Jeremy Jahns (re: "Dancing Mad")
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          • #20
            The three years I've lived in Oregon (state capitol, not rural) I've seen deer in the yard of the house next door, we know there are skunks around , and recently someone spotted a cougar a few blocks away.

            When we first moved to Washington state, I looked out my kitchen window and saw halfway up a tree, a cute little masked face peeking around the tree at me. Knowing they're nocturnal, I had to look them up online to reassure myself that it was only east coast racoons with the rabies problems, and that mamas looking for food for babies in the spring days wasn't unusual. After that, had several sightings. Also, could hear a wolf now and then.

            Before that, in West Virginia, we had resident bunnies in our yard, a very large deer who would stand majestically in our front yard at night, and occasionally got a fleeting glimpse of a very fast groundhog who lived in the back yard.

            In England, we had a resident hedgehog in the back garden (went out one night and found our Yorkie nose to nose with him). And anywhere we drove we saw pheasants, and deer, and roe deer (for those in the US, these are tiny little deer, about the size of a large dog, absolutely adorable).

            In Wales, our garden had a big wall around it, and the only thing that came in were the neighbors big cats, to terrorize our Yorkie

            Years before, I lived in Tombstone AZ, and we had a rattle snake that lived under our front porch, I found both tarantulas and scorpions when sweeping the house, the school football field occasionally had poisonous centipedes, and when I used to go out with my dad to dig for old bottles in dry washes, we had to watch for Gila monsters. The place had everything a 13 year old girl could want Oh, and there was the night my mom was outside talking to a neighbor, and kept pushing away the neighbor's cat as it licked her toes - then looked down and realized it was a skunk

            Oh, and one more, in Florida we lived on a lake, and at times could see a huge alligator out in the middle (and tracks on the beach in the mornings).

            Madness takes it's toll....
            Please have exact change ready.

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            • #21
              Ooh! Just remembered this one!

              Not so very long ago, a flock of Canadian geese on their annual migration apparently needed to take a rest break...right over my college. Imagine the surprise of teachers and students pulling into the campus to see a hundred or more full-sized adult geese milling about the common field.

              Fortunately there weren't any events scheduled that day, because there was no way to evict those birds short of a dozen bulldozers in line-abreast formation. The administration promptly issued an announcement to the effect of "don't bug the birds because they can and will open a big ol' can of whoop@$$", and nobody did. The geese were actually rather aloof; I walked right through from one side of the field to another and all they did was very calmly waddle out of the way.

              I managed to take a few pictures that day on my cellphone camera, I'll see if I can dig them up.

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              • #22
                A previous apartment I lived in was on a pond. When I moved in, there was a family of geese that would come up on my patio and the babies would eat the seeds dropped from my bird feeder. I bought a bag of squirrel food which consisted of shelled corn, sunflower seeds and the occasional peanut. I started pouring some of this on my patio each day and the geese and mallard ducks would come up to eat. It got to the point where the family of geese would come up and if I hadn't put out any food, one of them would peck on my patio door. After a couple of years, all I had to do was step out on the patio and the ducks and geese that were in the grass on the other side of the pond would jump in and swim across and they would all come out of the pond and start running toward my patio. I could come out with some of the squirrel food and walk right through the group and they didn't act like they felt at all threatened by me. They were just waiting for their treats. When I moved, I passed the squirrel food on to my brother's fiance who lived across the street. She still feeds them, and every evening her front yard is full of ducks and geese waiting to be fed.
                "I guess they see another cash cow just waiting to be dry humped." - Irving Patrick Freleigh

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