Posts Tagged ‘wildlife’

We spent about 20 minutes watching this coyote roaming and hunting for small animals at Devil’s Lake State Park this morning near Burma Road.  Click on the video and do your own 67 seconds of coyote spotting.  And yes, I did see that! Bad dog!

Autumn doesn’t only bring bright fall colors, it is also the time of year when most deer & driver collisions happen as well.  According to a recent Sauk County press release, “October is the start of the increase in car deer crashes in Sauk County as well as in the state. Last year in Wisconsin there were seven fatal crashes involving deer and four hundred and seventy-four injuries as the result of car deer crashes according to the Wisconsin Department of Transportation. In total there were 16,338 reported car deer crashes in the state for 2009.” Read the rest of this entry »

If you thought the mosquitoes were bad in Wisconsin this summer, you should be worried about how our bats are doing. Cave bat populations in the eastern US have been ravaged by a voracious fungal condition called white nose syndrome and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources is now concerned the threat has spread into our state as well.  Read the rest of this entry »

We love this time of year for viewing wildlife here in the Baraboo hills region.  Now that the summer crowds have calmed down and just before fall hunting kicks off in earnest, wildlife and especially waterfowl are increasingly active everywhere as they prepare for the coming winter and fall migrations. One of our favorite spots to watch waterfowl in our area is located south east of Baraboo, near Merrimac, called Gallus Slough.  The slough is a often filled with a frenzy of wildlife activity which of course makes it popular with fisherman and hunters as well.  The area is most easily accessed from by boat from the Moon Valley landing on Lake Wisconsin. [Locate on our "Big Map"] Visitors should be aware of Wisconsin’s hunting seasons & dates and take the proper precautions when visiting this or any other natural area this time of year.

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Violence against wildlife should not be tolerated. Period.  In just the last 2 days we witnessed 2 separate incidents at Devil’s Lake State Park where children were attacking wildlife.  In one indecent a pre-teen boy in the south shore beach area of the park found a toad in about an inch of water and began violently kicking at it for fun, while his parents looked on in oblivion.  Of course we stepped in and the mother finally told the child to leave it be. Yesterday we came across a snake that had been just killed on the north shore of the lake.  In this case a school group chaperon told us that one of the children in her group saw the snake swimming in the water, grabbed it by the tail, and then began to violently swing it against a wall, smashing it’s head until it was dead.   What’s going on with these kids? Read the rest of this entry »