Your best wildlife encounter

[Kerne]

Just remembered something weird that I saw:

I was doing the C2C and was making my way across the NY Moors when I saw a bubbling pond at the side of the track. It looked like a geyser about to blow - but these are not common in Yorkshire ! It turned out to be a frog orgy. Thousands of them, going at it like nobody's business. Amazing sight.

 

[Bothwell_Craig]

I thought I wouldnt have much to add to this but thinking back I have had a couple of lucky spots.

Isn't that just the beauty of having memories stirred!!

I thought of another one which had completely escaped my mind for some bizzare reason!

Beautiful winters day mounatineering in the grey corries of Scotland. Came back to the bothy and decided to sit outside and have a dram whilst soaking up the atmosphere. Just to my left, about three feet away was a weasel, complete with field mouse in its mouth, standing up tall. It looked at me, I looked at it and it just casually backed its behind down its hole with a wiggle.

 

[timtom1]

probably seeing a moose an her calf run in front of me about 10 ft away in Algonquin a few years ago

 

[wingstoo]

Mine is a simple one, I was sat here in my front room on my sofa working on the laptop computer and in walked a grey squirrel, right into the room in front of the fire, it was a summers evening and the doors were wide open, it took a look around and out it went again, nothing overly exciting I guess, but where I live on the edge of a big city it was, well, different

 

[Joe]

I ended up running alongside a badger for at least 100 metres whilst out on an evening run through the Wiltshire countryside. We were on the same track and both too stubborn to change course.

Another summers evening I was laying up in some long grass hoping to bag a few rabbits when two Badger cubs decided to have a play fight right next to me. I carefully sliced off a few choice pieces of one of the rabbits already shot and sat there pretty much dropping the meat into their greedy mouths.

Come to think of it, a lot of my closest encounters have been badger based. I must smell familiar to them...

 

[falling rain]

Great topic Bothwell_Craig.

I've seen badgers emerging from their setts on a couple of occasions on a badger watch while on a tracking course with woodcraft school. That was fantastic. They came really close. I also woke up one morning while sleeping in the woods and a Roe doe was having a shuffty around the woodland floor no more than 20 yards away from my bed. I laid there and watched it for a good ten minutes before it went away. I was fishing in the sea once and an emormous grey seal popped it's head up just a few yards from where my bait was and was looking straight at me. He hung around for quite a while dissapearing beneath the water and popping up again and again to look at me. That's happened a few times when I've been fishing. They've got really big eyes and it really was checking me out. Great stuff.
Also a couple of years ago when I was fishing in St Ives I saw some dolphins a few hundred yards out from the shore.
When I was driving back from air cadets one night a barn owl flew alongside my car. It just happened to be on the same trajectory as the road and I looked in rear view mirror to check nothing was behind me and slowed down to the speed of the owl and drove along beside it for quite a distance.
I've seen racoons and various snakes in Japan, and wild boar in Germany. Tree creepers, king fishers, osprey, red kite, avocet and on and on.
There's loads more but I won't hog the thread. I read once in a Tom Brown Jr book that our nature and wildlife is 'the greatest show on earth' and he's absolutely right. You simply can't buy it, and you simply can't beat it.

 

[Nightwalker]

A few months back a friend and I were fishing, laid back from a steep bank with the rod poking over a foot or two, my friend wasn't looking and he thought he'd had a bite, but I saw a beautiful Kingfisher swoop up from the river below and perch right on the end of the rod! In the same split second it landed with both startled each other it it was off like a flash of lightning! That was my very first sighting of a Kingfisher.

I have also had one close encounter with Fox cubs whilst out walking, managed to catch them on tape too: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=uAw4nKL1aZc

There have also been other magical encounters I wish I'd seen more deer though!

 

[Forest fella]

Last November I was walking through my local wood and looking for some Hazel to make afew Walking sticks and I spotted a good stick and went to cut it,as I was sawing it a Dead Rabbit fell on my head,it still had a noose on it,it looked like some kids made a Spring snare up.and didn't check it,Well we all know that after setting snares you should take them back with you when your trip is over.But tobe fair there snare did work.
Still gives me the shivers thinking of that rabbit landing on my head though

 

[Cobweb]

My most memorable one is taking a winter walk through some local fields which were crispy and sparkling with frozen snow, I come up a slight bank and look up at the horizon to see a beautiful barn owl perched on one of the fence posts only 10 or so feet away from me.
I stopped and looked at it for about five minutes before I started to get really cold and I had to walk away. It didn't even twitch, just sat there fiddling around with it's chest feathers.

Another time, I had been out side taking a smoke break at the place I used to work and a pheasant came right up to me and pecked my trousers, scared the sh** out of me as it was near enough pitch black at the time.

At he same place, I couldn't sleep one night and went out again to have a quick smoke and there were a set of badgers, looked like one adult and three kids playing about in the garden, the mother saw me but didn't seem to care, I sat out there for a good half hour, chucking bits of bread to them until I ran out and needed to go back to bed.

It's magical when it happens

 

[Nagual]

I remember my mum taking me for a walk in the woods when I was little, maybe 7 or so. We came across an owl, probably a barn or snowy not sure now. We were literally a few feet from its perch low in the branches - it was in the branches not us.. It just sat there watching us for a while before flying off.

A few years later while fishing off the pier in Dunoon, I found a line that had been hung up by some stairs leading down to the water and left there. I started to pull it in, and it was a long line 100m or so, eventually I pulled up a wee cod, perhaps a couple of pound. Next thing I heard was a snort - looking down I saw a grey seal looking up at me, it had obviously saw this fish flying through the water and was chasing it. Luckily for us both it never got it, I shudder at the suffering it would have gone through if it had caught the cod with the hook and all.

A couple of camping trips ago, saw a pair of eagles and an eaglet, they were training it, one flying off and calling, the other then doing the same. Saw several deer that had been sleeping in hollows or track side ditches till we wandered past only to see them jump up and run in front of us.

Perhaps the most surreal was chatting to a couple of friends at his front gate, a small tree beside us in the garden with a blackbird in it. I did a sort of light bird whistle and it jumped up and flew straight at me, staring straight at me - eye to eye like before veering off a foot away from me... no idea what I said to it..

 

[David.from.Holland]

This year in Norway on a solo week-long hiking trip near Narvik. The encounter lasted for about half an hour, then the reindeer finally decided it was time to go.

 

[Oblio13]

Used to travel to Zimbabwe once in a while. Got chased up trees twice by black rhinos, and charged once by a bull elephant.