September 3, 2020

More Animals Seen While Traveling

By roads-rus

On August 29, 2020, I wrote about some of the wild animals Ruth & I have seen. I mentioned koalas, caimans, and some other critters. I wrote about a particular javelina that we saw on a highway in Texas that I photographed. However, I indicated that the photo was long gone. Well, it wasn’t. I found it. The evidence is above. I do not recommend getting as close to a wild javelina as I did.

We have been lucky to see wild bears on 3 occasions. Seeking contact with them is really stupid, and we did not. I once watched an unforgettable video of a bear attack while in Canada. It horrified me. We happened upon wild bears grazing below while on a ski lift in Canada’s Lake Louise area not too far from where I saw the video. We saw a bear family scampering across the road at a high elevation on Mount Rainier in Washington State. This was quite a shock. We also saw a wild bear on the streets of Aspen, CO. This is not an uncommon experience in late summer. The bear eventually dove across a table display of honey during a street market and disappeared up a tree. The twin bears above were penned atop Grouse Mountain north of Vancouver, BC to amuse and hopefully educate visitors about how dangerous they can be.

The Stellar Jay with a crested black head above that I photographed on Mount Rainier is described as a “common fixture” there. Jays associate people with food so are seen in picnic areas hoping to get scraps. They are usually found at 3,500 feet or below, but this one was much higher. There are 182 species on Mount Rainier according to the Audubon Society, so visitors are almost certain to see birds.

The most interesting critter I have seen this year is Lord Stanley. He’s a lobster on display in the new and recently reopened aquarium in St Louis’ Union Station. Lord Stanley was donated to this aquarium by Arnold’s, a restaurant in Massachusetts, when the Saint Louis Blues hockey team beat the Boston Bruins to win the Stanley Cup in 2019. I didn’t know that one in 2,000,000 lobsters is born naturally blue. This is attractive but not necessarily desirable since lobsters like to blend in to avoid predators and being blue is a liability.

Hank

About roads-rus

Since the beginning, I've had to avoid writing about the downside of travel in order to sell more than 100 articles. Just because something negative happened doesn't mean your trip was ruined. But tell that to publishers who are into 5-star cruise and tropical beach fantasies. I want to tell what happened on my way to the beach, and it may not have been all that pleasant. My number one rule of the road is...today's disaster is tomorrow's great story. My travel experiences have appeared in about twenty magazines and newspapers. I've been in all 50 states more than once and more than 50 countries. Ruth and I love to travel internationally--Japan, Canada, China, Argentina, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, etc. Within the next 2 years we will have visited all of the European countries. But our favorite destination is Australia. Ruth and I have been there 9 times. I've written a book about Australia's Outback, ALONE NEAR ALICE, which is available through both Amazon & Barnes & Noble. My first fictional work, MOVING FORWARD, GETTING NOWHERE, has recently been posted on Amazon. It's a contemporary, hopefully funny re-telling of The Odyssey. View all posts by roads-rus
This entry was posted on Thursday, September 3rd, 2020 at 9:14 pm and posted in Travel Warnings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

Comments are disabled.

%d bloggers like this: