…and in the middle of Minneapolis in my apartment building’s parking lot, taking advantage of the rare “warm” day and picking at stuff on the ground. Wow, that’s a ginormous bird compared to the usual pigeon or crow urban size standard. Maybe I could hitch it to a cart and have it haul my groceries.
You sure you’re not seeing the other kind?
Wouldn’t blame you. Weather like yours can drive a man to such things.
Seriously, that’s pretty cool. It’s like the hawks and even crows around here. You get used to thinking of birds as the little goldfinches and sparrows that hang around my feeders. Then a hawk swoops by the feeders looking for a poultry lunch, and it’s like: holy crap, that wingèd monster is a … bird.
Here the local news media are freaking out that some people in my neighborhood and a few others saw a bobcat. Sheesh, I wonder where they think we live? I know, pets and kiddies and such. But the kitties were here long before we were.
Recently there was a brown bear sighted in Bavaria! He was in the media every day, they even gave him a name! Okay, he killed some sheep… but anyway, what do you do with an animal whose species has been exterminated so carefully? Right, you authorise them to shoot it again.
No bear may survive in Germany! 
(edited to correct some syntax)
Nah, last time I had that was '92, in Tokyo.
Hawks and eagles we got, but they’re usually up in the sky, so they don’t count. This sucker was right there on the ground not more than 20 feet away, and her back (it was an adult hen) was as high as my knee. Stuff definitely just got real, as they say but a bit more roughly. She was all there, just puttering around and making soft little “buckle-buckle” noises. Then she decided she didn’t like all the attention - or maybe the pickings were slim, because she didn’t seem all that worried by us - and ran off. Boy, do they move fast.
That’s a shame. We have bears, but for the most part they stick to the wilds because, unlike turkeys, they aren’t very adaptable. If they’re killing livestock, then their natural food has probably been scarce, or they’re too decrepit to survive naturally, so either may be the cause IF the evidence for the bear killing the sheep is rock-solid. Unfortunately people sometimes make up false stories just out of fear, but I’m not going to go so far as to charge that without knowing, myself. The fact is, though, that for most of the year bears are herbivores until they have to fatten up for winter hibernation and the clock is ticking, and even then berries, roots, and grubs may be the best they can get, but with enough high-caloric food they manage. A bear attacking livestock around here would be quite an anomaly, not normal at all. Going after garbage would be far more likely.
Of course in an urban setting like mine a bear astray would be unacceptable, but the preferred solution would be to tranquilise it and move it to wild territory where it naturally belongs. Unfortunately, the expediency of a bullet is sometimes instead the snap decision; but bears within true urban settings are a very rare occurrence in my locale either way. Like, almost never. They’d far rather avoid people. Wild turkeys OTOH are established well within my city (I’m smack-dab in the middle, not in an outlying area) because there is sufficient habitat for them; not anything near as common as sparrows but an amusement and a wonder, or at worst a nuisance. Being territorial, adolescent toms have been known to chase children, so that is something to be aware of. Apparently the lads also like to occasionally block traffic specifically at intersections, and no one can exactly figure out the reason for that particular behavior, but if I remember anything of my own teenage years, it makes perfect sense. We called it “power tripping”. 
We see a flock on the marsh every few winters, and this was one of those winters. Amazing to watch them fly off. I have no idea how something that large can remain unseen most of the time.
Well this Bare will sweeten the life.
http://barenjagerhoney.com/default.aspx
During the warm months, we live in Sagamore Beach, Massachusetts, (a village in the town of Bourne). We’re the first town south of Plymouth, where the Mayflower landed and the Pilgrims did lunch with the locals.
We often have wild turkeys in the yard, and they never look too happy. I can’t help thinking they still carry a grudge.
They are impressive birds indeed.
At a previous house we had lots of woods out back and we often had wild turkeys in our yard. We started putting out cracked corn for them and they regularly came to eat. One morning, while it was still pretty dark, I wandered out in the woods. I started hearing odd clucking sounds up in the trees. All of a sudden, a piece of the darkness separated itself from the surrounding blackness and flew away–it was a turkey that had been roosting in a tree! At that signal, about 8 others took flight. I had no idea that they roosted in trees, but with local predators like foxes and coy dogs, it makes sense.
A couple of years ago we had a bear sighting on the campus where I work (suburban Washington DC). I saw some of its scat when I was running a couple of days later. I was really excited, but evidently when all the people showed up he got spooked and left, so I never saw him. We’ve planted a lot of native plants in my yard to encourage deer to hang out (it really riles up some of the neighbors). There was a time when I saw foxes in our yard (and on campus at work) pretty regularly. They’re gorgeous animals.
There are now a lot of coyotes in the area. That has people up in arms, but I suspect those are people who don’t know how shy coyotes are of people. I’m hoping that they don’t go the way of the German bears.
To be fair, they tried to catch him for a couple of weeks. But apparently he didn’t feel too excited about humans… probably they didn’t tell him the consequences of his ignorant behaviour.
So bourbon is getting better with honey? 
In Berlin wild boars are quite common! Thankfully, nobody really complains; they’re just accepted as another kind of citizens. I hope your coyotes have a secure future, too.
On topic, I never ever saw a wild turkey other than the liquor, though.
What? Wild boar are very dangerous creatures. While a bear in my back yard would freak me out some, a wild boar would freak me out a LOT.
I sent one to give you a visit:
AFAIK they’re rather relaxed… as long as they don’t think you’re threatening their young boar, of course. They’re just plundering the waste and stuff. Or surfing on the Wannsee.
But I hope it’s not going to convert me to Jehovah’s Witnesses or something…
Nothing like that. But it is after donations.
Speaking of crows, we’ll have scads of 'em, especially in late fall/early winter. They’ll fly in great black clouds all over the place and fill whole big trees when they take a break to mob-perch a while and croak at each other. It’s ominous, like walking into an Edgar Allan Poe story. One day I was going from point A to point B in my neighborhood and went past a car they had targeted to crap on. The street was full of parked cars, but no, that was the one they picked specifically for some reason, whether for a revenge or sheer random perversity, and no other got hit. Nary a drop. Most weird. It was so totally covered in whitish crow poo that you couldn’t easily tell its original color, which was dark, IIRC. The owner’s reaction on seeing it there like a frosted cake among all the other untouched cars would have had to have been something special. 
I live in the Forest of Dean. There are loads of wild boar here, including, for a time, some apparently living in my garden during last summer. Trust me, they’re bloody frightening, dangerous creatures. I remember going for a walk on a very frequently used path on The Sculpture Trail through the forest. There, about 200 yards away, was a boar. As soon as it saw me, it started to run full pelt towards me. I ran as fast as I could and just got onto a road in time - they don’t like the traffic, you see.
Vicious things, they are.
Troy, NY and environs, where I work, has huge clouds of crows during that same time frame. They come into the area each evening and roost somewhere, not always the same location. Next morning they all take flight towards the surrounding country where they alight to glean farmers’ fields for left behind corn and other grains. I too have seen cars totally plastered with crow poop ala Jackson Pollock with a vengeance. My best guess is not that the cars are targeted, but just have the misfortune to be parked beneath a tree where the crows decided to roost in that night.
A reasonable assumption, but you would have to have seen this car compared with those on either end of it. I don’t recall if it was under a tree, but if it had been (it’s likely, because tree-lined residential streets are the norm here, so any car is likely to be under a tree one way or another), then surely other cars near it would have been hit more or less equally if there had been no targeting involved, yet all the rest were comparatively clean, by far. In my neighborhood cars are parked on the street almost bumper-to-bumper since most residents are renters and few have off-street parking (this is characteristic of practically all of residential Minneapolis), so the realities of sheer proximity would call for more cars being hit, and heavily. But they weren’t; only some predictable by-splatter on the nearest ones, but nothing near like the one I’m talking about. No, I believe that in this case that particular car was indeed targeted, but why, of course I couldn’t say.
I hesitate to post the following link, because as much as I would like to believe what the interviewees have to say, I think they’re taking huge chances with their safety and are promoting the same:
I can’t believe that David Slater lives in the Forest. Everyone who lives here encounters them, either directly or through the damage they cause, every day in the Forest. It’s perfectly clear that there are hundreds of them and that they are increasing year on year, yet he says there are only 40 - 50 left. Nuts. The damage is everywhere. I cannot believe that 40 - 50 animals can constantly patrol and dig up 42 1/2 square miles of Forest. In the summer, you can see new damage on road verges and in gardens in every part of the Forest every day.