Wildlife

This place is teeming with animals of all sorts - not just the domesticated kinds like the sheep and cows that routinely wind up in my garden a couple of times every summer after jumping the decrepit fence between my garden and their field. I've even had the pleasure of waking up to the sound of a bleating sheep on my verandah (wtf was it doing there?) at 0530 in the morning, getting out of bed, out the door, grabbing two hefty handfulls of wool and chucking the beastie back across the fence before going back to bed.

More fun the wildlife, then.

Foxes and roe deer regularly visit my garden and the nearby fields. Moose are a regular road hazard during winter - I don't mind being close to nature, but with the bumper of the car you're in missing 500 kg of moose by 10 cm on a slippery, snowy road, that's actually a little too close for me.

We have a sea eagle that comes gliding up our fjord looking for lunch just about every day. Then there's badgers and beavers, martens and lynxes and all sorts of rodents (pests and not-pests). Several sorts of woodpeckers driving people crazy by pecking the metal plate on top of telephone poles in the spring, owls and goshawks, and all sorts of other birds. All these we see pretty regularly. The rather more intimidating wolverines and bears are also to be found in the area, but I have yet to see any of those.

Some I can do very well without - like the flies, gnats, wasps, horseflies and mosquitos. Anything that flies and bites or stings is rock bottom of my "lovable" list. The most annoying insects we've got around here are the daddy long-legs. "Hey, what's wrong with those fellas? They don't even bite or sting!", I hear you say. True. But I HATE having one of those inside my bedroom at night. As soon as the light is out, the useless thing is aloft and endlessly banging into the walls, making "frrrrp!" noises as the wings hit the wallpaper. Annnnnnnnnnnnoying!

Some are downright cute - like the squirrels; we had one of these little fellows trying to pick our local gas station clean after someone, while topping off their car, introduced it to hazelnut chocolate. The little rascal was pretty quick in figuring out where the chocolate originated, and would sit outside the gas station door - like a cat wanting to get in from the cold - looking to sneak in as soon as someone opened it. It succeeded in getting inside a couple of times, one of those times I was there to bear witness, and it did nothing of the wild careening about and messing up stuff that its fellow squirrels usually do when they get inside houses. No, it went straight for the biggest hazelnut chocolate bar it could see, got it down on the floor and started pulling it (or rather, tried to pull it - 300 grams is pretty heavy for a squirrel) across the floor.

I walked up to it to shoo it out the door again, but it just looked at me, teeth deeply embedded in one corner of hazelnut chocolate heaven, with a deadly serious "Wha'? Can't you see I'm busy here?"-look. No obvious fear, just pure desire to have that c.h.o.c.o.l.a.t.e. bar. It looked so serious about it, it had us all in stitches, so the owner let it have the bar and held the door open for the furiously hardworking squirrel. Bet there was a very happy nest of small squirrels that night!

For some reason, every now and then I stumble across wildlife that behaves unusually tame or unfazed by the fact that they've just run into a human. Like the other day, I was standing in the rain, knocking on my neighbours' front door, a hare came skipping idly through their garden. As it passed the stairs, it just looked at me in a very suave manner, like it was saying "Oh, it's YOU, is it?" It had me pretty amazed, because every hare I've seen around here has been a grey, vanishing smudge on the horizon as soon as I've become aware of it. Not so with this one. It took its own good time exploring the surroundings, headed into the carport on the other side of the road and obviously decided it wasn't a very hare-y place to be. Then it came back onto the road, sat down and looked up and down it for a while, before finally slowly making its way out of my view. It behaved so much like a cat in familiar surroundings, it was uncanny.

Did I learn anything from this encounter? Yep. I've got to be the least scary person on the planet. Either that, or I just looked like the world's sorriest excuse for a carrot to that hare.