Animals in the wild

I've seen black bears in the Smoky Mts, but I've seen a bobcat in my back yard.

 

I saw several alligators in FL in the everglades. One was about 15 feet long! Just recently I saw a wildcat near the road while driving in a rural area. We see foxes from time to time, and lots of deer, too.

 

None of the above.

 

I voted all but elk and grizzley.

I grew up in L.A., so gators were common. In fact, our family still has a beach house in Gulf Shores and right at the end of our street is a park that usually has an alligator in it.

We also had an abundance of bobcats.

Before my wife and I were married, I was the caretaker (please, no Shining jokes) at a large Christian retreat in the Poconos and black bears were common to the point that they were pests. They rarely bothered anybody but, good night! did they make a mess. The worst part is that many of the campers and guests would actually leave stuff out to attract them.

I understand black bears and wild boar are now moving into our area, which thrills me to no end, because I used to love to hunt boar.

 

Alcott, maybe five years ago, my daughter brought home a cardboard box. I could see from the towel sticking out of the top (not to mention knowing my daughter, who we affectionately call "Ellie Mae" because of her love for critters) that it was going to be some kind of animal. It was a fox kit that had wandered into a store parking lot looking for food (which leads me to assume he was abandoned) and was backed over by a car.

She nursed him back to health and we took him to a local game preserve and let him go. Man, he was pretty.

I've got the photos around her somewhere. If I can find them, I'l scan them and send them to you to give to your sister in law.

 

Salty, my dad went to Alaska for a couple of months when I was a kid to work on the pipeline and he used to talk about the moose er, mooses all the time. He said they would just wander out into the road and stare you down and that once they did, you should make yourself comfortable because they don't move until they're good and ready.

 

Some intriguing stuff in the Southeast to see:

-alligator snapping turtles. yikes, what a scary, primitive mess. Saw one a few years back nearly the size of a garbage can lid. I took him to the ocean, sunk him a mile down, and he got so mad he bit an oil pipeline in half (not really...but he looked like he could).

-A few years back, while "crawdad hunting," I found an old swamp with (count 'em) three carniverous plants: Venus flytraps, pitcher plants (probably a hundred or more), and sundew ("sticky dew") plants. Pretty cool. Especially since it wasn't thought that Venus Flytraps grew in our neck of the woods.

 

I saw the bear in the Sangre de Criste mountains.