I just received a digital card reader from my father in civilization — thanks, Pop! — so I could salvage the last batch of photographs from my dead or dying Kodak EasyShare; I didn’t even realize such things existed. It’s a little marvel — I put the camera’s card in the reader, the reader in the Mac Mini, and all of a sudden here are my missing photographs. I’ll probably post them in a few installments.
The moose we saw in a farmer’s field on the way to the pumpkin festival at the beginning of this month,
Tom thought we should take a closer look, but the moose thought otherwise,
He finally got away from us by running into a stand of trees.
More wildlife, this time a muskrat on the driveway, on its way to deeper water across the road in which to spend the winter. It’s been dry enough for the past few months that many of the ponds and sloughs have dried up.
Filed under: Autumn, Country Life, Farm Life, Seasons
Reminds me of that old joke about the two Scotchmen, Angus and Hamish. Angus had years before emigrated to Toronto and wanted to show cousin Hamish, newly arrived for his first visit to Canada, something of the country. So off they drove toward the great west.
Everything that Hamish saw was so much bigger than in Scotland: Niagara Falls, the Great Lakes, the endless wheat fields of the prairies, the buffalo that at first sight he thought were cattle.
One evening, while camping in Alberta, they saw a beast of some considerable size feeding at the nearby lake. ‘What in heaven’s name is that?’ exclaimed Hamish.
‘Och, calm yourself’ replied cousin Angus, ‘it’s just a wee moose’.
‘A moose you say, a moose! If that’s a moose I dinna wanna see one of your Canadian rats’ shouted Hamish.
Luckily for Hamish, there are no rats in Alberta. Or so say the boosters of that province. Muskrats don’t count.
But was the moose running aboot the hoose?
So many Albertans unfamiliar with Norway rats that they tend to report muskrats to the Alberta Rat Patrol, so the Rat Patrol has an educational display to help provincial types distinguish between the two. Not needed by me after living in NYC and Washington, DC, where I saw rats as big as puppies.
The moose ran aboot the hoose for such as Lorne Greene, Peter Jennings, and John Candy until they emigrated south and took a few elocution lessons with Henry Higgins. Not altogether successful for Peter Jennings, eh.
Fun pictures. It’s always exhilarating to encounter great beasts out on the loose.
sippican, especially when they’re not carnivores. Saw a great big bald eagle sail over us while we were in the truck a few weeks ago, but we were on the move without a picture, so unfortunately couldn’t capture the moment. Next time, I told myself…