We were raised in cities…speaking for myself, I get excited when I see a squirrel. In our travels, we have seen wildlife while driving, hiking and walking.I take the warnings seriously, however, there are plenty of folks who have read the warnings and must think “That will never happen to me”….and actually left the safety of their car climb fences and follow these wild things into the woods, down the riverbank or up the hills…getting closer to generally take a photo or selfie.

To date, we have taken a video of a grizzly walking through a meadow while several people were following him into the woods (crazy); several elk grazing along the roadside, one as big as the side of a house; a moose, spotted from a bridge, eating grasses at the river’s edge; a doe literally caught in our headlights, we slowed the car, honked and she backed down into the trees; a fox just as he jumped from the roadside into a culvert making his way to the nearest hen house; a marmot standing guard outside the visitor’s center at Logan Pass; a herd of buffalo in Yellowstone having dinner just steps from the car; antelopes frozen in their tracks on a vast sea of low scrub in the flatlands of Wyoming; a chipmunk at Jenny Lake burying his nuts for the coming winter; a beaver in the rocks overlooking his damn on the Colorado River; a small herd of mountain goats on the mountain side outside Glenwood Springs, their movement showering rocks downward; and for our feathered covered friends,  a gaggle of geese in Jasper…I swear I recognize some from the golf course in Sun Lakes; a pair of osprey in their nest watched as we floated by in our river raft; two eagles fishing in a lake while several loons floated by; a magpie as big as a penguin who sat on the back of an iron patio chair and crooned a tune for scraps from our lunch plates; and of course all shapes and sizes of homo sapiens in all kinds of activities!