Freeway Sightings

About 5 minutes into Montana a big crow was in the road. I said, “C’mon crow, get out of the way.” Then I realized it was a HUGE bird, like a wild turkey or something. It waltzed into the grass and that was that. Birds are big here. And plentiful. The Ospreys have neighborhoods. I’ve never seen such big nests one after the other.

There were so many deer, too, and one dead fawn on the road. Poor baby. I can’t tell you how many times we stopped in the middle of the road, receiving poo-poo looks from cars passing us. I get it from a safety point, but if it had been me, I’d have stopped right behind the person to see what they saw. And we saw some really cool things.

Here’s the best: Peanut spotted foxes! We just sat there and watched them gamble about and decided they must have been pretty young. Only after uploading my pictures did I notice they weren’t foxes at all – they’re coyote pups. Isn’t that the most amazing thing? I know there’s a huge coyote population, but I’ve found them to be rather elusive. And yet here we’d happened upon pups!

The next great thing we found was an OWL. Imagine an owl, in the daytime? This fascinated us for some time although Niece and I were concerned about its lack of movement. Sure enough, it was an owl scarecrow. I still can’t figure out what it was doing there though. No reason to scare owls from a freeway that I know of.

After talking about how few people live up here in the woods, we did a double take when we saw a pull out for dumpsters. I did a U-turn to check it out. There were literally 15 tidy green dumpsters with a big “household garbage only” sign above them. This looks like the kind of place where it’s okay to burn your garbage or just let it pile up somewhere on your property (like other rural places we’ve seen). But this place actually has a garbage man that picks up whatever you can pack into the back of your pick-up and stuff into a dumpster! Cool. No recycling containers though…

The last thing we all noticed was wild flowers, dandelions in particular. They look like they’re on steroids. I’m serious. We were freaking out about these and finally had to pick one. A pom-pom is almost the size of Niece’s fist and one seed is about as big as Doodle’s hand. When we tried to toss it out the window of the car, seeds blew all over us. Truly wonderful!