This isn't a story about a wild animal but I felt it was worth telling.
Me and my family have always loved chickens and we finally got some in mid 2018, we hatched 2 eggs and named them Salt and Pepper (since one was pitch black and one was grey-ish white). Salt later died due to a weird crooked beak so he couldn't eat, but pepper lived for quite a while. He was the best rooster of all time and never really attacked you but did a great job of protecting the flock and keeping them in a good routine, he would occasionally challenge my dad and attack him as if he wanted to "play fight". Sadly, age took it's toll on Pepper and he almost died during a very cold winter (even for here in a cold part of Canada where the winters are exceptionally cold) but somehow made it. He even picked up multiple terrible infections and lost a toe, but only ended up dying a couple weeks ago due to a racoon attack, and he didn't even die to the racoon! He died 3 days after the attack because of brain damage. He was the strongest rooster I've ever seen. RIP Pepper.
I had recently custom painted my shoes as a sky with a sun and clouds. I go on a trip a couple weeks later, I'm outside and a daddy long legs spider climbs up to stand on one of my shoes, It turns around like it's inspecting my shoes and then it crawls off and leaves.
Speaking of spiders, several years ago we had a cross orbweaver make her home on our porch railing. My mom first discovered her and named her Gloria. Gloria made beautiful webs and we went to check on her every day for several months. I saw at least one baby nearby but sadly her descendants haven’t camped out on our railings yet.
Actually, come to think of it, I have a lot of interesting spider stories but I’ll save those for another time XD
(sigh) this is going to be really personal but I had a bad experience with dogs. So it started off like this. When I was a young kid I remember climbing over someone else's fence (yeah at the time I didn't know better to being someone else's property) then I saw a big black dog. It started chasing me all over the yard. I was screaming out in fear and I was so terrified. Eventually the neighbor heard this and called the dog back before it started to bite me. I was lucky I didn't get bitten but still it really left me in state of shock.
So whenever I do my walk I still have to watch around because I may never know a dog could be close by. Then it happened again. This happened like 4 years ago but when I was doing my walk a random dog came up to me and it was barking at me. I stood there not wanting to move an inch. Then by some stroke of luck a car came by and the person saw what was happening and decided to get the dog away from me. I didn't thank the person because I was in a rush to get out of there as fast as I could.
To this day I have a fear of dogs. Whenever I hear them backing I just get a bit tensed up. I know there are people who love dogs and thats fine more power to them but for me I tend to avoid dogs at all cost because I don't want to run the risk of getting bitten or suddenly be hurt by them.
I live in Cambodia where hornbills were generally thought of being in decline. Sometime during the pandemic, they started appearing in the capital again in large numbers. I heard of them flying about before, but I thought they mostly hung out in the temple or park areas where there‘s a lot of trees. My boyfriend and I were running some errands around the city when suddenly 3 giant hornbills swooped down to the street and just started hopping about around us. Turns out there was a tuktuk driver who was feeding them snacks, so this street was one of their hangout spots. They were so docile, kinda just like stray dogs looking for food. Some people suspect that the birds aren’t actually wildlife here but brought in by a government official who kept them as pets… and then they just multiplied lol. Either way it was kinda interesting seeing them up so close and that they are “thriving” in my country again, even though we don’t really know the exact reason.
I have some other animal stories that are probably unique to others but pretty “normal” for an average south East Asian. I’ve had a lot of run ins with monkies over the years (macaques). I used to live near wat phnom (our biggest pagoda/park area) and monkies would always travel from the park to the city on the telephone lines. We’d have monkey break ins in our house regularly where they’d come and steal our offerings we put out in the spirit house lol. I would scare them away with peanut shells. And more recently, a baby monkey randomly appeared on my balcony just out of nowhere. My new residential area definitely does not have monkies because there‘s no parks or big trees, so I think this one hitched a ride in a garbage truck and got lost here. We tried for weeks to capture it but failed. About a month later we saw that another resident managed to capture it… but it was on a leash with a shirt on lol.
i used to live out in the sticks, and its really common for people to have chickens/ducks as pets or for eggs. my mom and i would always drive a special route home so that we could see a cute little duck farm- sometimes they'd sleep in the road so you have to get out to coax them (gently) to move, or take an alternate route lol.
one time when i was driving with my best friend, we saw a HUGE group of turkeys just in the road. they were massive. he didnt really know what to do so he honked his horn, and the turkeys all gobbled and one "pecked" at his headlight really angrily. it was so funny.
oh yeah, and one time we went to a petting zoo when i was a wee babby and got to hold a baby tiger. not really great, shouldn't interact with wild animals like that, but its an interesting photo op that i had. wouldn't do it again though!
