Wildlife

Along with our quest for meese? mooses? multiple moose? we have seen quite a bit of wildlife in our last two weeks.

But first . . . our 3 moose that we have seen. Matt Stevens in the Lyme Regional Office promised me 5, so be prepared for more moose pics in the future.

No, this isn't our real first moose. This is Stihl - our boundary crew mascot. He's representing our first moose sighting, which happened week 1 while driving home at night. The female moose ran by our car for a little while, then turned into the woods. I was so excited I didn't get a picture until the moose had already headed into the woods and all I got was a really dark pic of a moose butt.

This is moose #2. We saw him on our hike up on the Carlo Col Trail week 2. He hung around long enough to pose for some pictures. It was really cool to see a moose in the wild!

Again, Stihl is standing in for moose #3 as I didn't manage to get pics . Sally, Emily, & I were driving out Success Pond Road on Friday night. Everyone has told us how all you see of a moose when you drive up on it is it's legs, and they're right. Sally stopped a good 15 feet from the moose, but all we really saw was some shadowy looking stick things in the headlights at first. This moose was not at all impressed by us. He actually aggressively blew air out his nostrils at us. Emily told Sally not to honk her horn, which Sally had no intention of doing. Emily said that moose in rutt have been known to flip trucks that honked their horn at them! We definitely don't want to get in a fight with a moose (I have a feeling we would end up on the wrong end of that), so we just sat and waited until he decided to leave. The camera was in the back in my pack, so no photo of that guy either. :(

Other cool wildlife we have seen on this trip:

A saw-whet owl one night at Carlo Col Shelther.

A toad came and visited me at my tent platform the first night I set up.

Mom, don't look at the next pic!

A snake that was sunning on the trail one day on our hike into the boundary.

We've also seen multiple squirrels, chipmunks, and mice.