daylight. I am sad to admit it but they lost their appeal as their rarity value
decreased. We were a little 'oh yeah, a mule deer two inches away from us,
what a pest, crowding us. Oh look, there's a chicken.... I wonder how far you
can push it before it will fall off its perch?'
Some of our more exotic brushes with wildlife occurred not in National Parks,
despite us visiting about half a dozen of these, but in urban areas. San
Francisco proved especially wild. On our first day in the city we were
restricted from walking along one of the busy shopping piers by the group
(flock/herd/stink?) of vomiting seal lions - nice! A couple of days later we
spotted three skunks, foraging in a back garden. At least, we think they were
skunks, according to a ‘nature programme’ we watched once they could have
been cats that had fallen in white paint. Famous naturalists the Warner
brothers tell us that it is an easy mistake to make. We opted not to investigate
further and instead took photographs, from a safe distance.
Normally we had no choice but to observe the animals we spotted from afar.
Being 'wild' life they did not tend to let us get closer. The immediate aftermath
of sightings was usually spent culling hundreds of pictures in search of the
perfect shot. Perfect in this case meaning 'vaguely distinguishable...if you
squint'. The beauty of our digital camera meant we could zoom in and re-crop
images several times before they deteriorated into individual pixels. By this
method we revealed a whale flipper in the bottom 100th of a photograph that
apparently just contained sea and sky. Our excitement and pride in this shot
was short-lived when everyone we showed it to reacted with supreme apathy.