Regina Raccoon & Tom Turkey

 

It's unusual to see raccoons out during the day - except this time of year
 when they've had kits.

Tom found himself a girlfriend!

He put on quite a show for her.

I don't know if he was successful or not.

Not a Kitty Cat

This morning, as I set about to drink my hot water and read the news online, I glanced out the window.

The pasture to my left was full of does. I watched them, and they started acting a little skittish. It's the rutting season, or near the end of it, anyway, so I thought perhaps there was a buck coming toward the does. They can get a little weird if they're not in the mood when a buck comes around.

I called to my husband to come and look at the deer out the bedroom window, and I got up and went in there myself.

The deer were indeed acting strangely. To my surprise, I saw this huge hulking cat-looking thing standing up like a cat might do if attacked as a doe approached it. The doe was going after it. I've seen does pounce on other animals before, and it isn't pretty. Once I saw a doe stomp on a neighbor's cat before I could get outside to scare the deer and save the pet. The cat didn't die, at least, not then - it ran like crazy for home and I never saw it again.

The cat I saw this morning had a large head with pointed ears and a short tail with a touch of white on it. The light was low due to the early hour and clouds, so the animal looked dark. It was as big as a large racoon, but this was no racoon.

My husband arrived at the window just as the animal sprinted toward the woods.

"That was a bob cat," I said.

"Either that or a really big feral cat," my husband replied. But I am sure it was a bobcat.

Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture. This is the first time we've seen a bobcat on the farm. I saw one when I was young on my father's farm, but I haven't seen one since.

A bobcat (Lynx rufus) has a distinctive appearance and is generally solitary in nature. It is a medium-sized wildcat, typically weighing between 14 to 40 pounds, with males generally being larger than females. It has a short, "bobbed" tail, from which it gets its name, and its coat varies from tan to grayish-brown with black streaks and spots that provide excellent camouflage in its natural habitat. The bobcat's ears are black-tipped with short tufts, and its face appears wide due to ruffs of extended hair beneath the ears.

That's almost exactly what I saw before the animal ran for the woods.

Bobcats are highly adaptable and can thrive in a variety of environments, including deciduous and coniferous forests, swamps, and even urban edges. In Virginia, they are commonly found in the Appalachian Mountains (that's where I am) and the dense forests of the Piedmont region.

They primarily hunt small mammals such as rabbits, hares, and rodents. They are also known to prey on birds, insects, and occasionally larger animals like deer. Bobcats employ a stalking and ambushing technique, using their keen senses of hearing and vision to locate prey before pouncing with precision. Their diet varies based on the availability of prey in different seasons and habitats.

It was amazing to see a bobcat outside of my window. I hope I see it again - with a camera in my hand, this time.

Look, Squirrel!

I think we have an addict on our hands. This squirrel is out on this stump, licking at it, almost constantly.

Back in the fall, I placed a maple-flavored deer mineral tablet on this stump in the back yard. The deer ignored it as best I could tell, and I forgot about it. It disintegrated from time, sun, and rain.

This squirrel seems to be completely addicted to what I assume are the remnants of this mineral tablet. It is there every morning when I get up. It's there whenever I look out the kitchen window.

I hope whatever it is, it is good for squirrels.

Common Whitetail Dragonfly

I saw this critter out on the patio the other morning and snapped some photos. My guidebook says it is a common whitetail dragonfly. I don't know what it was doing at my house, since we've no ponds or standing water in the yard, but with the drought who knows what is flying where.

It was interesting to watch its little head bobbing up and down while I was shooting photos.

Raccoon

This raccoon popped up in the field in front of the house yesterday. I took loads of photos of her (I'd bet the house that this is a mother raccoon looking for food because her kits are making her thin) but these two were the best.

I don't generally see these animals in the daytime so this was a treat. She wasn't acting like anything other than a hungry animal, digging up grubs in the ground, so I felt sure she was ok.

She even hung out with the deer for a bit.

Deer at the top, raccoon at the bottom.

The Hawk, the Squirrel, the Fox, and the Deer

I was on the phone when I glanced out the window and watched a hawk land on a tree across the way. Next thing I knew, the hawk was chasing a squirrel, its wings flapping, head bobbing as the bird tried to grab the furry little thing in its talons. The squirrel ran in circles around the tree, it's fluffy tail wagging behind it like a flag. It raced to the back of the tree, and I lost sight of it.

So did the hawk. With its prey gone, it flew off, and I turned my attention back to my conversation.

Then I looked out the window again and saw a fox trotting across the pasture, not far from where the hawk had just been defeated by the squirrel. A mother fox with kits, I guessed, since she was out in the middle of the day. She didn't look rabid or anything. She was just going about her business, doing fox things in a fox way. 

I had to tell the person on the phone what I was seeing, because I don't see foxes very often and this was rather exciting. Fortunately, my caller is a nature lover, too, and understood my enthusiasm. But not enough for me to hang up the phone and find a camera. The fox would have been long gone, anyway.

Not long after the fox went by, I saw a small herd of deer wandering up from the creek, heading into the same pasture the fox has just vacated.

The deer were in no hurry, and I watched them simply flop down beneath the oak trees, sunning themselves in the warmth of the day.

They were still there when I ended my call. I grabbed the camera. They weren't a fox or a hawk, but they remained, still resting and soaking in the sun, and the other animals had vanished.

This is what I love about my life. Where else could I have such a view, and see such things on a warm spring day?

Deer just hanging out in the sunshine.

A Brown Raccoon

I grabbed these photos last week, in the middle of the day. I know raccoons are having babies now, so I assume this is a mom in need of grub to keep the kits fed.

The distance to the deer was amazing. She walked very close to them as they lay in the field.

The coloring also confused me. At first, I thought it was a groundhog, then I saw the long tail and the masked face. Raccoons are usually gray. I've never seen a brown one before.

Bugs

 

This is a moth, but I don't know what kind. I can't find anything like it in my guide book. It may be a Dark Arches Moth, as the closest I can find.

True katydid

The Groundhog

This groundhog lives under our outbuilding. He is eating acorns that have fallen onto the trailer, fattening himself up for winter.

Groundhogs are also called woodchucks in some places, among other names like whistlepig, etc.

The holes they leave in the fields can break a cow's leg. Or a person's.

Free Range Zoo

Last week, we took a drive up the road a bit to visit a drive-thru zoo. I am not a fan of zoos, but this was allegedly an open zoo with the animals roaming about on 180 acres. While that may sound like a lot of land, it is not. Not for as many animals as they had in there.

The safari place sells buckets of food, too, and you are supposed to feed the animals from your car. This means the animals are conditioned to think that car equals food. Most of the animals hang out at the entrance of the park, because obviously by the time you get to the middle or the end, you've given out all of your food.

I found it terrifying to have the car suddenly engulfed by a slew of domesticated wild animals. I still have llama slobber on my car window, my repayment for not purchasing the bucket of food.

The following pictures were taken through the car windows, so there is some glare and reflection.

This is what greets you when you drive over the cattle guard and into the safari area.

They don't like unopened windows. Yikes. This is a llama.

These are either fallow deer or axis deer. I am not sure which.

When I saw this, all I could think of was hakuna matata, from The Lion King. However, the guidebook doesn't say they have wart hogs. This may be a kune kune pig from New Zealand.

I think this is an eland, which hails from Africa.

This may be an elk.

I am not sure whether this is a blackbuck from India or a scimitar horned oryx from North Africa.

Some kind of deer. Fallow deer, maybe.

The little axis deer are very small. They came from India. There were a lot of them.

More deer.

Notice the field. There is little grass there for the animals to eat.

This is a blackbuck, which comes from India.

I think this was another elk.

They don't mind getting close.

These were resting a little distance from the car. I think they're elk.

Elk, I guess.

They had several white animals. In the wild, when we see albino deer on the farm, it generally means the herd is too large and there has been too much inbreeding.

This is an axis deer from India.

I think I liked the zebra the best. This is a "Grant's zebra' from West Africa and/or Zimbabwe.

This bird was huge. Ostrich, I think.

This was further into the park. The animals all came running toward the vehicles. Note again the lack of grass in the fields.

A kune kune pig from New Zealand.

A llama who is figuring out it should have gone to the front gate, I suspect.

You could see the giraffes but they were in a different fenced-in area and so they did not come near the car.

A fallow deer. They are found in Europe and Asia.

The farewell team of llamas.

We probably won't go back. We both thought the animals looked listless and sad. We know how many cattle we can run on the pastures of our farm, and it's not anywhere close to the number of animals on this small acreage. The organization feeds hay and there appeared to be a steady stream of cars behind us with the animal food, but this is not what I consider fun. It was a nice outing with my husband as far as that goes, but animals like these need to be roaming free. At the least, the herds of small deer and llamas need to be thinned out. There were too many ostriches, too.

Katydid

Yesterday, I saw a leaf walking along the side of the house.

It was katydid. I don't know what it was doing on the side of the house, but it had been there for over a day.

I think this is called a "true katydid", aka pterophylla camellifolia.  It likes oak trees and makes a sound that goes "katy did" or "katy didn't," although I didn't hear this one say anything.

They generally are about two inches long; this one had very long antennae.

We used to see these a lot when we were children, but I hadn't seen one in ages. Maybe when you're younger and closer to the ground you see such things better - or maybe they're another one of those species that come and go in cycles, although nothing I've read says anything about that.

The brown part on its back makes me curious, but I am not sure what that is. 

Katydids are kin to crickets and often mistaken for grasshoppers, though they are in the same scientific family as grasshoppers, etc. 

There are about 255 species of katydids in the US alone. They are found all over the world except for Antarctica.