[LMB] (Chat) Foxes!

[David Mcmillan]

CatMtn at aol.com wrote:

> One of my more vivid memories is of a bobcat coming to drink at the cat's  
> water dish during a drought, the cat watching from a windowsill, and falling off 
>  onto the dog when the bobcat looked up at him.  The  cat apparently thought 
> the dog was the bobcat, the dog thought the  cat was, and there was an 
> extremely confused and noisy squabble while the  bobcat calmly finished his drink and 
> departed.

	Heh.  Mine isn't nearly as funny, but I have an old family friend who's 
spent years building his own houses (then selling them, and building a 
new one) out in the boonies.  One of them had a living room that was 
almost like a church auditorium -- cathedral ceiling, floor-to-roof 
windows (screened) on one end, giant fireplace at the opposite end... 
lovely place, way out in the woods.
	Well, one hot summer night, *all* the windows in the living room were 
open (no central air), and the entire family was shocked out of a sound 
sleep by this HORRID scream from right outside.  Once our friend armed 
himself (12-gauge and a big Maglite) and went outside to investigate, he 
found bobcat tracks right under the big windows.
	The started keeping the lower windows closed at night, after that.

	On another note, I was at Kennedy Space Center last week (squarely in 
between Discoery's launch and landing, darn the luck), and the tour 
guide explained that the reason that the fences arc up through a good 
45deg well above the 2m height level is b/c the local crocodiles have 
demonstrated a startling ability to scale vertical fences up to 3m high 
-- even the regular little slanted-out barbed-wire bit you see atop so 
many security fences wasn't enough to stop the dependably.  So the newer 
fences are vertical to about 1.5-2m, then arc outwards
over a meter, so that the crocs can't hang on against gravity.
	Of course, not ALL the fences at KSC have been upgraded this way yet...