ResQgeek

Saturday evening, we went out to dinner with my parents, two of my father's brothers and their families and my grandfather. As we were finishing up the meal, our waitress told us about the family of skunks in the field across the street. They'd been watching the skunk cubs for several weeks, and they had just come out for the evening. She suggested that our daughters might enjoy watching them from the safety of the restaurant porch.

Now my wife has a serious dare devil streak in her, and she got her camera out of the car, cross the street and walked right up to the cubs and started taking pictures. When I came out of the restaurant, I saw that she was focused entirely on the playful cubs, and didn't see the full grown skunk coming her direction from the other end of the field. I yelled to get attention, warning her that if she got sprayed I wasn't going to let her ride in the car with me!

The mother skunk never came over to where the cubs were, and my wife got a lot of pictures of the cubs, including some of our younger daughter standing near them, enthralled by these cute little critters. No one got sprayed, but I was a bit nervous about how casually she acted around these potentially stinky animals...

I was walking to my bus stop in the pre-dawn dark this morning and had an adrenalin inducing close encounter with some of our large neighborhood animals. I still find it incongruous that I can live within a few hundred meters of one of the busiest interstate highways in the eastern U.S. and yet have plentiful wild animals in our neighborhood. I have seen foxes, raccoons and rabbits. But by far the most impressive are the whitetail deer that wander through the backyards. Our encounters with the deer have become more frequent lately, as the home builders continue to clear the remaining parcels of wooded land to erect "McMansions" to feed the real estate frenzy in this area. This leaves our resident deer population with fewer places to hide and eat, so they are venturing more and more into backyards, feeding on lawns, flower beds and gardens. The frequently wander through our backyard, jumping over the split rail fence that surrounds our lot.

This morning provided me with my closest physical proximity to our neighborhood deer. Because of the darkness and some bushes, I didn't see the deer standing just off to the side of the sidewalk, until one started to walk towards the street. The movement, not more than a dozen feet away from me startled me, causing me to break my stride. At the same moment, the deer noted my presence, and reacted immediately, reversing direction and crashing through the bushes between the adjacent homes. There's nothing quite like a sudden and unexpected close up encounter with a large animal to wake you up. Its better than caffeine!