Saturday, October 30, 2021

A Welcome Surprise

It had been a trying morning. I had been on hold for two different issues for a long time. On one of them, each time I reached a representative I was told she couldn't hear me and the person hung up. I eventually found out the company was having phone issues.

This is not how I planned to spend my morning. With one issue handled successfully, just before 11 am on October 27 I headed downstairs and walked in to the kitchen preparing to make myself a cup of tea. I stopped dead in my tracks. Outside the kitchen window, right in the yard, was a cow moose!

It has been more than a decade since we have had a moose (which we have seen) on our property. My camera in hand, I quietly approached the window and found another surprise - a moose calf. 

From inside (so not to disturb them) I watched as they moved around the house. The calf smelled a lot of my plants (which he could have easily uprooted and destroyed) but he opted to snack on the remaining leaves of our columnar cherry tree.


Mom kept an eye on her calf and strolled over to see if there were any remaining goodies on the apple tree. After they had their fill, they slowly meandered down the hill.


After a very dry and hot summer, she looked surprisingly fit and had a full healthy coat filling in for winter.

 

I wonder. If I had not had a frustrating couple of hours first thing in the morning, would I have missed seeing this pair?

1 comment:

Peter Brown said...

What a thrill for you, Linda! I hope some of your photos are paint-worthy.

With no fences around our little patch of land, we have frequent visitors of the animal kind, but almost always under the cover of darkness. With the aid of a camera trap, we regularly spot wombats, kangaroos and wallabies, brushtail possums, koalas, and of course the rather less welcome rabbits, foxes and feral cats, all within close proximity to our house. There's a growing - and problematic - feral deer population in our region, so I guess it's only a matter of time before they show up on camera too.