I’ll have to figure out how to make the thumbnails go to larger images when you click on them!

I took the afternoon off and took some pictures. Sometimes I like to go off on adventures by myself. I used to go off on adventures to the dog park with my dog…until some idiot tried to break up a dog fight and got over 200 stitches in his arm from a pit bull that took it personally. The idiot went after the Forest Preserves with a lawsuit, and they shut down the dog park for all those wonderful people - trainers and AKC trials for tracking, etc. When all he should have realized was…duh!!! Don’t be stupid and break up a dog fight with a couple of pit bulls in it!

So that eliminated my solitary jaunts to the woods with my big sheltie boy to meet up with other dog owners and introduce Kirby to new friends.

One thing I have to say is…

These things are BUTT UGLY at this stage!!! They are only cute one time in their whole lives - and that’s when they’re small enough to have yellow down. After that, things go rapidly downhill until they’re replicas of their giant parents, who can weigh up to 35 pounds. That is a pretty good-sized bird; as a matter of fact, that’s a Thanksgiving sized turkey! They serve a Christmas goose on Christmas in Britain, I’d like to know why we can’t cull the flocks a little bit and serve them to the homeless. There aren’t a lot of natural predators, although we have a limping gosling or two because I think they tangled with the resident muskrat. Hopefully I’ll get a picture of that thing if I can catch him busying himself on the grass one day.

Look at the size of the drumsticks on this thing. And it’s not even full-grown. My husband calls these Canadian Geese flying rats. When we were on the Spirit of Chicago, there were Canadian Geese swimming in Lake Michigan. I looked over at him and expressed my surprise, and he shrugged. “Flying rats!” he said. They’re worse than rats; they take up more room, and they eat a lot of grass, -not quite as much as sheep do, but they still take it down far enough that if left in one place too long to graze, they’ll kill the grass.

Since people feed them, they don’t migrate south anymore; they have no reason to. So we have year-round problems with their tremendous deficating and they’ll even poop on you when they’re flying overhead.

When we first moved here, I thought the sound of honking geese as they came flying in was romantic. They looked lovely in the winter when they were swimming in the cold half-frozen water. But it turns out the water doesn’t freeze because the bacteria level is so high because of their poop.

Ugh.

Anyway, I might as well take pictures of them so i can bitch about them now and then….

I’d rather have swans. At least they don’t gather in gangs and attack children and pets like these things do.

You know what else gets me about how the numbers of these things have exploded out here? They’re a protected species. All I think about come Christmas time is how many geese are out there polluting our waterways that could be sitting on some unfortunate person’s dinner table who wasn’t able to provide a holiday dinner for their family.

I’m going to have to find a way to get a close-up of our resident egrets and herons. When I start to approach them, even if I’m pretending I’m interested in something else, they fly away before I’m able to get a clear shot. I will keep trying, though, because they’re magnificent on a closeup.

I paid a little visit to this lady today to check on the wounds she’s been inflicting on herself. I saw a program the other day about pet psychics, and this buffalo could use the help of one. She has a nervous habit of licking her fetlocks raw. The blood attracts the flies, the flies irritate the area, and then she licks it some more. She’s now starting to do it to her other legs. You have to wonder what it is that’s bothering her, and why she is doing this to herself. The veterinarian is aware of it, so hopefully the vet will arrive at some sort of a solution that will help her out.She has some buddies hanging out with her, and they seemed fly-free in comparison to how many bugs she was battling. All of the animals were having quite a time of it, and it wasn’t even that hot outside. The pigs in particular were having a problem with flies; but flies are attracted to their stench and they stink to high heaven. The sheep also smell, and they were staying in the shade, as were the elk and white tailed deer. The cows were also having a problem with flies, and I was wondering…can’t they spray for bugs around here, or is that against environmental regulations? The pigs were the most aggravated. But they seem to have aggravated temperments and aren’t as chilled out as the other animals seem to be.

I tried to get some pictures of the pigs, but they were ornery. They saw that I didn’t have any food for them, so they just threw themselves on the ground and were trying to go to sleep. With all the flies that were biting them, though, they were doing a lot of twitching.

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Here is a bubble share album with about 70 or so pictures in it. I took almost 300 today.

I think I overloaded it because it’s crying “uncle” now, so I’ll have to try to upload more later.

This is a prime example of my wandering off alone to satisfy my need to recharge. In essence, I was just playing…being outside, looking at things that were of interest to me, and not being rushed or told what to do by anyone.

I need to do this more often to recharge my batteries.

For more on the ‘loner’ type that needs to recharge by getting alone or reading a book, read “The Introvert Advantage”.

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More photos. One more album to go.

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Here it is, now I’m going to bed.

Hope someone enjoys them as much as I enjoyed taking them.