Just yesterday Luke was biking on a trail in Brevard NC. He came flying out of a bushy rhododendron area only to end up biking right in between two black bears. The bears took off in opposite directions. This was a first for Luke!
He also saw a very large black snake, who he had to poke off the trail with a long stick. And he saw a turkey. The turkey was well behaved.
Luke had also recently seen a big black bear in Tennessee, but it sadly was extremely skinny and out of it (presumably from hunger). Very upsetting. Apparently the acorns season was quite poor this year, so they were signs posted to expect to see more bears than normal in the lower areas, looking for food. The bear population has been soaring after they were reintroduced about 20 years ago. Hopefully this doesn't mean that a bunch of them will be starving this year.
Luke sees many more bears than I do. I suspect I'm not fast enough to surprise them, and that they can hear my panting from a mile away. I'm not complaining, by the way.
The next exciting animal encounter was back a couple of months ago, in Bellingham. We were at a beaver dam and managed to sneak up on the beaver so we could watch it for a bit. It was diving in the water and coming up every 30 seconds or so, chewing. This went on for a bit, until I tried to sneakily take a photo with my phone. The phone make a little click sound and that was enough to alert the beaver to our presence. It started swimming along, parallel to us, until ==SMACK==, it slapped the water with its tail and dove away. Very dramatic! Sadly, after all that I didn't even get a good photo of the beaver because my phone camera sucks.
While we were in Tennessee we saw a lot of insect action.
Gross caterpillar nest
This was a spider/caterpillar show down. The spider kept trying to bite the caterpillar, but just got mouthfuls of fluff. The caterpillar wriggled until the spider jumped back, then it managed to get free of the web. Caterpillar wins!
Grasshopper that looks like a leaf. One of these jumped on my face a couple of days later.
Then there were the orb spiders. These were everywhere! They make very pretty webs and aren't poisonous, which is good since both Luke and I got a number of these on our heads as we were biking.
I've never seen spikes like these on a spider before! I went to the Big Fork Ranger Station to ask about what kind of spider these are. Both rangers gave me a funny/grossed out look and proclaimed that they don't know anything about spiders (these spiders are *everywhere*, so I was surprised that they didn't know anything at all about them). Internet and google came to the rescue and identified it for us. Not sure what they learn in ranger school, but spider identification is not in the curriculum.
I met a couple of very nice gentlemen from the Asheville area yesterday and learned from them that the long-leggy squirrels we've been seeing in the area are 'boomers'. They are super fast and acrobatic. I also learned that the chestnut-looking nuts are buckeyes, and that they say that if you carry one around with you, you'll stay healthy. I also learned that the buckeyes are partly poisonous, and they say that if you want to know what parts you can eat, ask the squirrels. 'They' have charming sayings, I think.
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