Animals, Hammocks and you!

[mbiraman]

When i was 19 i was in Jasper Nat'l Park for about 2 months. 1971. I had this little orange pup tent and was camped in a meadow area. I woke up one morning hearing all this munching ,,,,stuck my head out to see about 20 Elk all around me eating. I pulled my head back in and slept a while longer till they moved on . I was awe struck. Fresh air,,mnts all around and wild animals at my door. I never went back to Toronto.
In the mid eighties i was about three hrs north of here in a remote valley called The Duncan. It was fall and i was in a work camp. It was about ten at night and a bear went by my tent and sort of leaned into it pushing its nose against the side of the tent . I gave it a whack and it ran off. Next morning we had a grizzly standing in the middle of camp and i realized that that was probably the bear i hit. It gave me pause.
The animals i've been most nervous about were/are skunks.

[BillyBob58]

Recently, while camped in Idaho's Sawtooth mountains, something bumped my hammock hard enough to cause it to sway. I had only been in the hammock an hour or two, but I think I had already fallen asleep, but woke up with a start. I sat up and looked around- my light was dead but the moon had finally come out enough to see pretty good. I saw nothing, leaving me to wonder if maybe I had dreamed it.

I have also, like Mbiraman, been quite nervous about skunks ever since someone here reported reaching out of his hammock to grab a water bottle and instead grabbing a skunk with bad results.

MB, I am also quite impressed that you swatted a bear on the nose as he pressed against your tent, and then the next morning you had a Grizz standing in your camp. I'm sure it did give you pause. I can't imagine being in more danger without actually being mauled. Assuming it was the Grizz you swatted on the nose- sense black bears don't usually hang out in the vicinity of Grizz- then I guess you can be thankful that the bear you swatted on the nose was in a good mood.

[FLRider]

Bit of a thread necro, and not really hammock-related, but definitely in the spirit of animal encounters...


So, my wife and I like to car camp when we go together (she likes frontcountry camping a lot), and one of the items we have is a pop-up gazebo type structure with bug netting. A couple years back at Ginnie Springs here in Florida, we'd left some chips out on the picnic table that we'd set the gazebo up over--and we'd then forgotten about them when we left to float down river.

When we came back, a squirrel had managed to find his way underneath the netting to get at the chips. The netting came down to about four or five inches above the ground, and then there was a strip of cordura-type fabric the rest of the way down. It must have looked like there was nothing there but for the bottom fabric to him.

When I opened the netting at one end to chase him out of our foodstuffs, he took off like a shot for the side netting and leaped to clear the bottom fabric...only to bounce off of the netting like a Looney Tunes character! He sat back down, shook his head to clear it, and took off the other way--straight for the other side of the netting--and leaped to clear the bottom fabric! Same result.

This squirrel, poor thing, kept running back and forth like a ball bouncing in a racquetball court for a good ninety seconds before I could get my laughter back under control enough to circle around and chase him out the open end.

To this day, I still can't believe how much it looked like something that Wild E. Coyote would pull!