moose
What is the strangest animal you have ever seen in your garden/house??
Refused wrote:
Two foxes were making babies in our back garden once. It scarred me for life.
Foxes??? Aww shouldn't have done!! I was scarred for life by seeing two spiders making out once. 16 legs - ugh!! At least they were not tropical; I would have killed myself by now... I feel sick now - I need to find a nice pic to wipe out this awful image.. I know .. I will find a pic on behalf of EW!! 
Peter and jason
I am jealous, jealous, jealous esp. of the wallaby... though I did feed one once at a safari park in England.. can't remember where, I was only a kid at the time, but I got to wander round in a whole paddock of them - it was really thrilling...
There is no doubt the Aussies are gonna make the best contributions on this thread altho JDMFs moose was pretty cool.
Love
LW X
Lone Wolf wrote:
Peter and jasonI am jealous, jealous, jealous esp. of the wallaby... though I did feed one once at a safari park in England.. can't remember where, I was only a kid at the time, but I got to wander round in a whole paddock of them - it was really thrilling...
There is no doubt the Aussies are gonna make the best contributions on this thread altho JDMFs moose was pretty cool.
Love
LW X
I dunno, I reckon the bear is the best yet. I find poisonous animals creepy, whereas a creature that could break your neck with a half-hearted swipe is awesome.
Wallabies aren't too common in Canberra, but there are fuckloads of kangaroos in the many unbuilt areas within the city. I'd only need to take a 15 minute walk from home to have a good chance of finding some.
Pete
Quote:
Peter and jasonI am jealous, jealous, jealous
And so you should be. Its currently spring so all the magpies are out on their yearly swoop-a-thon, cracking people's scalps open for them. And they hunt in packs like the velociraptors on 'Jurassic Park'- one stares at you from the powerlines to get your attention and the other comes from the side and pokes your eye out. Walking to work or school is in itself an adventure. 
I've never seen maggies work in teams. I've got one up the street that attacks me every time I ride to work. He started out ineffectively, but lately he's actually hit me a couple of times - luckily on the helmet. I think I'll have to buy some mince and make friends with the little black and white fucker.
There was one that lived near my parents when I was a teenager that we called psycho maggie, he didn't care if you were looking straight at him and would dive away. And if you were on a bike he'd sit on your shoulder and peck you on the neck/ear. Never want for the helmet.
A 3 year old boy lost his eye to a magpie in Canberra a few years ago.
Pete
Lone Wolf wrote:
He said how it is commonplace to get bears in the garden in Canada
=P not *all* of canada. i used to live in the same province as him, but no bears at all. er... i was about to suggest he must live in some backwater albertan town, till i remembered the "edmonton" part... do they actually get bears in edmonton??
i havent had anything all that weird... in ontario, we'd infrequently see some garter snakes. when i was living in calgary, during a particularly cold winter, we had a big family of deer wander into our backyard to eat out of the bird feeder ^-^ (when they went into someone else's backyard, they were less invited and someone lobbed a snowball at them)
it's weird for me to hear about australian magpies, which sound like such little bastards... the ones that were all around in calgary were very kind, and certainly wouldnt attack you. the worst i saw them do was taunt and shadow my cat for a few months or so whenever he went outside, but the little bugger probably did something to diserve it =P
hmm, my brother's ingenius hamster escaped once, we'd duct-taped up every join in the cage (one of those plastic tubey ones), and padlocked the door, and it escaped without a trace of how :? anyway, i swear it cross-bred with the rats or mice or something because a weird mutant rodent thing used to come out and do a lap of the front room at about 3am, it looked like a 9-inch tall kangaroo or something (i wasn't stoned )
Feighnt wrote:
it's weird for me to hear about australian magpies, which sound like such little bastards... the ones that were all around in calgary were very kind, and certainly wouldnt attack you.
Australian magpies are only distantly related to the Northern hemisphere magpies, they aren't even members of the Corvid (crow) family. But they are in the same order - the next level up in biological taxonomy.
Pete
John. wrote:
Grace.
I hate you. So much.
We had a group of ducks that lived in our quad last summer, that was pretty cool. As far as my garden at home goes, there's never been anything more interesting than toads. There are a fair few peacocks in the area but they don't usually venture onto the housing estates.
Vaneigemappreciationclub wrote:
LW, you cant of had a coypu in your garden, you sure it was just a clinically obbese water vole?I once had a parrot in my garden, one of those blue and yellow ones, sat on the bird table for an hour or so we fed it some cheese and it flew off never to return
No no it really was a coypu!!! It was a large animal - even a modern-day junk-food bloated water vole couldn't be that big!! Nah like I said he would have escaped from somewhere... 
Like I was telling EW at the drinks thing - there are no animals native to the UK that are inherently dangerous...but there IS a modest population of escapees from animal parks, homes and private collections. This article I was reading in a terrible newspaper 
said there were an estimated 2 dangerous snakes, 7 tropical spiders 
(lets not go there... ) and a handful of other creatures on the loose so to speak... not saying the coypu is dangerous btw ... just making the point about escapees - and of course it has been posted on libcom before about wild boar reestablishing themselves after a few escapees from animal parks, farms etc - made a bid for freedom. I think it is fab they have re-established themselves... good for them.
So V it was definitely a coypu - one of my more special childhood memories along with playing in the wallaby enclosure...I like animals in case anyone didn't work that out..
Zobag
Great pics!! If you took them yourself you should get a job for National Geographic! 
LOVE
LW X
Lone Wolf wrote:
No no it really was a coypu!!! It was a large animal - even a modern-day junk-food bloated water vole couldn't be that big!! Nah like I said he would have escaped from somewhere...
The coypu's were established back in the 20's they were escapees from fur farms.
There used to be a group (not sure what you'd call them) of wallabys, that used to live in the countryside near crawley. And i've definately mentioned the flock of parakeets that used to live up near hollingbury hill fort/golf course in brighton. Until some **nt cut their roosting tree down. I saw them once when i was walking my mates dogs, i was, how do i put it, SHOCKED. As i didn't know about them at the time.
BB
Cool!!! Parakeets and wallabies - it has all been happening in your area - great!!! Yeah the person who cut the roosting tree down should also be cut down... 
I just find it really inspiring that imprisoned animals esp. from somewhere as disgusting as a fur farm 
can occasionally make a sucessful bid for freedom and make a go of life in the wild...Isn't that what we want... to escape the constraints of shackled living, make a bid for freedom and re-establish ourselves and organise ourselves in the way we see fit... 
(And hope no fucker cuts down our roosting tree.... )
Love
LW X
Oooh peeps!! Meeting EW gave me the idea for this thread. He said how it is commonplace to get bears in the garden in Canada - that sounds so cool. I am so jealous!! But then I remembered I saw this cool critter in my garden once.. given the coypu is not native to this country (England) I guess he must have escaped from somewhere.. good for him!!!
So have any of you guys seen an unusual critter in your neck of the woods??? Obv. unusual for yer country of residence that is. No spider pics please!!
Love
LW X