Last night at the Youngest Island Boy’s Tiger Cub meeting I was talking to one of the dads. He was telling me that he’s been seeing the coolest critters when he leaves for work each morning and that he’s started taking pictures of them on his phone so he can send them to family, back home in New York.
He told me that one of the most amazing things about moving here (6 months ago) is seeing all of the large, wild ferrets. “Large, wild ferrets?” I ask. I’ve never heard of any large, wild ferrets living around here. “They’re huge!” he tells me. Then he pulls out his phone and shows me a picture of one he saw the other morning.
The picture looked a lot like this one.
“Umm, that’s not a ferret, that’s a fox” I say.
“No way! There are no foxes around here” he says.
I told him that there are a lot of foxes here and even though their population has decreased some over the last 10 years or so, you can still see them often.
He just shook his head, not believing a word I said.
Then he tells me that he also sees a lot of Muskrats and shows me a picture that looks like this
“Umm, that’s not a muskrat, that’s a opossum.”
He rolled his eyes at me and then asked how long I’ve lived here. “My entire life”, I tell him.
I decided not to argue animal species with him because he seemed pretty determined that he was seeing large, wild ferrets and muskrats.
And then came the best of all. He passed a real, live coyote on his way to work yesterday morning and got a great picture of it. We do have a lot of wild coyotes around here so it wasn’t hard to believe that he saw one. Until he showed me the picture. It looked like this
As he finished showing us the "coyote" picture, his son called him and he excused himself to go see what was needed.
The woman sitting next to me leaned over and whispered “Someone needs
to buy him an animal book or it won't be long before he's catching rats and calling them kittens” LOLLabels: Staying
