Meeting a moose

used to see otters, foxes and hares quite often but i grew up in the sticks. how come you've never seen wild rabbits? - you get them everywhere. do the moose eat them all in norway?

I think it's too cold for wild rabbits here. There are hares and polar hares, but no rabbits as far as I know. According to the internet (the net is always right you know :-) ) someone took wild rabits from Shetland and put them on two Norwegian islands around 1900, and in the 1980s they introduced them to an island in the Oslofjord. No idea why, as they don't really belong there and graze the grass to low and make life hard for other small animals. Bad rabbits :-) They really "belong" in south and middle Europe though, they've been introduced in your parts of the world I think. Some time around 1300 or something like that? Moose eat blueberry bushes. There's the odd wolverine or lynx though, they'd take them. Or badgers. There's a badger living under the loo at our summer/winterhouse. When my father makes too much noise the badger comes down and scratches at the door to make him stop.

The biggest surprise I've given someone along the lines of things you've never seen was when I told my Australian friend that I had never seen a cockroach before. We were in Bangkok then so we didn't have to wait long before one showed up, but she really couldn't understand how someone could have lived for 27 years without seeing a cockroach. Haven't seen one since though.

I don't think we saw any Tui birds when I visited a friend on New Zealand 3 years ago, but we did see some Kea's. Really cool birds, although we were a bit worried over whether it would ruin our rental car or not. It went for the wind screen wipers with a vengeance! We saw some wild animals too, but they didn't live on land. (whales and seals :-) ) Never seen that many sheep before though, quite impressed really.

New Zealand seemed quite safe, at least compared to Australia! I was there first and got stung by some strange plant, and I got small blisters every now and then for months afterwards. Luckily I didn't meet any dangerous spiders or snakes. The dangerous stuff on Iceland seems more things you do to yourself (falling into rivers and things like that)

Haha, yes Keas can be pretty destructive, they have been known to tear the rubber from vehicles. If you walk into the bush or go hiking on any of the tracks here in NZ you would hear the tuis, they make a very distinctive gutteral sound at the end of their song. They are good mimickers too, sing the song of the bellbird, but at the end of their song give this gutteral sound. We do have a fair number of sheep, especially in the South Island, mainly cows where we are. Glad to hear you got out of NZ unscathed...haha.

Wow, I don't think I'd run after one! We have some pretty big moose here, so I'm not sure if a horse would be bigger or not. The feet are different, though, and a moose is wild, so that's probably where the difference is. If a moose trampled vegetation everywhere he went, there would soon be nothing left.

We stopped, went out of our cars and ran after them! But it was two bulls, not mating season, not a female with calf so the moose were more afraid of us I think. And then a big trailer came and they ran up in the forest again. If I see them again I hope they run out into the field again instead :-) For some reason, they made nearly no mess on the field. I'm sure my horse would have trampled half of it had he walked the same way. (but then he's probably heavier than a moose)

There's no wild rabbits here so if you see one in the wild, it's probably a lost pet. There's a few, but I don't think they survive the winters this far north. On Shetland and Orkney we saw a lot of rabbits but hardly any on of them were alive! :-/ Lot of roadkill out there.

They're usually afraid of people, so they'll walk/run the other way once they have spotted you. Quite sensible beings, unless you meet a moose cow with calf. I just had visitors from the UK, now moose sightings this time, we saw a tiny frog and heard lemmings. Not really as exciting as moose :-)

Maybe the moose ran out of food or something! I don't know what might make them all come into town like that it is so unusual. There are four kinds of poisonous snakes in our state. We have all four of them! The coral snake is poisonous. If it bit someone as far out in the woods as I was they would likely die but they are not deadly if you can get treatment quickly.

Poisonous snakes are often very pretty but a bit scary ... I was worried when I went to Australia, nearly all animals you here about there are one of the most poisonous of its kind in the world. In the end I ended up being stung by some plant, not an animal! It itched for months afterwards, very annoying.

We got some very confuse moose in town this summer. It's about 170 000 inhabitants here, fairly big for Norway, but young and confused moose don't bother about that. Some they had to take down, others were transported back to the wood. Snakes are cool! Especially if you have a clue so you know whether they're dangerous or not. I have no idea, but then there's only adders here.

Most people here who walk a lot in the forest see wildlife all the time. For some reason the moose seem to avoid me, I've met one when I was riding. Some of my friends see them all the time when they ride in the forest. I usually see a lot of birds though, they're not so afraid of you when you ride. I'd love to see bears and wolves but maybe from a shelter or a car, not from horse-back.

I saw lots of squirrels when I was in Washington. I also went to the zoo there, so I saw tigers and elephants too :-)