Furry and Feathered Friends

When you read the descriptions of the National Forest, Forest Service, National Parks or state park campgrounds, the verbiage goes on and on about all the different wildlife species found in the woods. Point your camera in any direction and you’ll capture big horn sheep, grizzly bears and even the elusive wolf. Personally I think this is false advertising. Like when the campground says flush toilets and all except one are vault toilets … for camping neophytes a vault toilet is a fancy word for outhouse, but I digress. I digress pretty regularly.

In our camping travels we’ve seen squirrels. Big squirrels, little squirrels, ground squirrels, tree squirrels, fat squirrels, skinny squirrels, grey squirrels, brown squirrels, squirrels with long tails, squirrels with short tails, squirrels with fluffy tails. Oddly enough the only kind of squirrels we haven’t seen are shy squirrels.

Also on our list of animal sightings are a jack rabbit, cotton-tailed rabbit, elk, chipmunks, raccoon … at least I think it was a raccoon, it was dark … bull frogs, toads, and assortment of lizards, gopher snake and rattlesnakes. The rattlesnake was under the picnic table. We also saw a deer but it was dead so I don’t think that counts.

As to our feathered friends, the most exciting was a pair of wild turkeys and three chicks. They looked like quail on steroids. I’m not into birdwatching, so I can’t name hardly any of the different kinds we saw. I do know we saw raven, crow, blue jay, robin, hummingbird and hawk.

Now in case you’re wondering, we saw this wild assortment of fur and feathers in four states over 56 days of camping and I think over 30 national parks and forests We didn’t camp I all 30 parks but drove through that many.

Dee
Note to Self: Bring binoculars, the fuzzy tree-stump looking thing could have been a bear.