Wild life

[eileithyia]

Goodness redvee, where do you live that you do not normally see Herons?
Herons are almost a common sight when I go out around here, possibly due to the reservoirs. Even living in urban Coventry I used to regularly see Herons.


Wildlife = wonderful to watch, many a time a walk around the Wigan Flashes, Pennington in particular, with my Binocular saved my mental state during rocky times of my life.

[Audax67]

We have a barn-owl living up in the roof of our barn. Makes us jump out of our skins every so often when it flies near the house and shrieks at dead of night.

The most frightening wildlife moment I've had was when I looked up from the stem to see a wild boar come barrelling out of the corn across a narrow strip of field, straight at me. I started pedalling pretty hard, but he held his course and eventually passed about 20 metres behind me - he was more intent on getting to cover on the far side of the cycle track than anything else. Another time, a troop of about a dozen boar crossed the road 100 metres ahead of me.

And on the 2007 400k PBP qualifier I was run into by a roe-deer up the in Jura at night. That was interesting.

[dodger]

My friend had a nasty encounter with (semi) wildlife which his car insurer was totally sceptic about.
Basically, he wrote his Citroen Berlingo off by running into an ostrich that had escaped from a local farm. They're big birds, as shown by the complete mess made of his car. It was only a year old too.

[skicat]

To be fair, you could probably write off a Berlingo by hitting a pheasant.

[Redvee]

This morning's ride home from work, midnight finish, had me encounter 2 badgers and a fox. Badgers are huge and could seriously hurt if you had the misfortune to hit one. I tried talking to the fox being an urban fox I thought it would be OK close to humans so as it crossed the road I was going to turn into I spoke and it stopped and went back to the pavement.

[eileithyia]

sadly have already seen 2 road kill Badgers so far this month, it is usually mid-Feb before that occurs so I guess they are coming out of their setts alittle early this year and are still half a sleep.

Reminds of seeing 3 baby badgers playing in a lane as we were finishing LEL nr Thorne in the wee small hours a few years ago.

We saw a Sparrowhawk flying off with, what looked like, a Blackbird yesterday on the Lune cycle path.
I sometimes see Deer localyy and the other morning the local Tawney Owl was hunting as I went to work.

[Si]

Talking to a copper about the number of road kill badgers in Wessex and how it seemed to be rising he suggested that not all were road kill, rather some were the results of badger baiting - after they'd been killed they were put on the road and run over to hide the evidence and make them seem the victims of cars.

[Guy951]

I followed a muntjac this morning. It came out of a neighbour's driveway, clippety-clopped up the street for a couple of hundred yards then turned into another driveway. I assume there are fresh green tasty things starting to grow then.