I seen all kinda weird animals in 2021.
Why is this? Are animal populations quickly encroaching on human suburbs due to Global Heating? I certainly ain’t complaining! It’s awesome to see strange and exotic animals when you least expect it.
There have been some mundane animals that are now more proliferous than ever.
Deers
Hawks
Deers are all over the damn place now. Sometimes I have to chase them out of my yard as if they were the mischievous neighborhood kids trampling all over my flower beds. The deers wrecked my hostas! Their carcasses litter the sides of highways.
Way COOLER than deers are the hawks! I couldn’t tell you what species of hawk they are, because all birds have like a thousand species with extremely minor differences. But anyways, I’ve never seen so many hawks swooping around in the sky. Some days there would be like 5 or 6 of those guys just hanging out in the sky, circling around, maybe screeching every now and then. The best thing about hawks is that you don’t hit them with your car (unlike owls; I hit an owl with my car once).
In the year 2021 AD, I’ve also seen more woollybears than I have ever seen in my entire life. Some of you may not know what a woollybear is… well, a woollybear is a caterpillar that is furry with black and orange banding. In Northeast Ohio, we have an annual celebration of the woollybear, known as the Woollybear Festival, where people dress up their dogs and babies as woollybears and take pictures of them. It’s all quite folksy and wholesome. But as I said, I have seen more of these woollybears this year than I can recall in any previous year of my life. Is this some sort of OMEN?
I didn’t just see a bunch of normal animals in 2021, no sir! I saw some crazy shit, man. I will list these animals in order of least awesome to most awesome:
Buzzard, eating a dead animal on the side of the road. It was a big son of a gun, I’ll tell ya.
Salamanders… but in my bathroom! That’s right! On a particularly rainy night, I found a small salamander hanging out on my bathroom rug. How in the hell did it get there? I captured it and put it outside, then returned to my bathroom and found another salamander! What the heck is going on around here??
Wild turkey, which ran across the street in the park. How odd! Never saw one before.
The corpse of a giant snapping turtle, near a big secluded pond. So I’m walking along and I see what appears to be a big rock sitting there. Nope, it was the desiccated corpse of a huge snapping turtle. If it were alive, it could have killed me with ease.
And now for the TOP TWO animal sightings I had in 2021.
A MINK? I think that’s what I saw in my backyard! It sure as hell wasn’t a squirrel or a rabbit. This dark brown, loping creature quickly hopped away and squeezed through an impossibly small space in the fence. If it was a mink, well, I’ve certainly never seen a mink before, and I didn’t even know I could see one of those things around here. But the CRAZIEST animal I ever saw was……
AN AMERICAN WOODCOCK! I spotted a particularly rare bird, and I didn’t even know what the hell I was looking at. So there I was, minding my own business, walking along a path in the nearby park. I see this little dude up ahead, hopping around the grass next to the paved path, poking its beak into the ground. I’m like WHAT? I get closer, and this guy doesn’t even care that I’m about 3 feet away from him. He’s occupied with digging up worms or something. I’m thinkin’ “what is this weird birb? Look at its odd head and beak!” And on my return trip down the walking path, I passed this dude again! He didn’t give a shit about the presence of a giant, terrifying man. He’s got a death wish.
So that was my animal adventure of 2021. Good times. What does 2022 hold for me, in terms of animal sightings? I’m hoping for the elusive Sasquatch.