One of the prompts today made me laugh until I really thought about it. The question was “Do you ever see wild animals?” The reason it made me pause was because really, most people don’t see any wild animals in their lifetime. I guess I live in a unique location, plus, my family and I get out in nature quite a bit, so we see more than maybe the average person.

Just this fall we got to see more than we might normally see with our trip up the highway from Utah. So I thought I would share with you all the different wild animals we have seen this year, 8 of which have pictures, but I’m not great at taking them, I just tend to enjoy see the wild animals. Not all the pictures are mine for that reason as well.

We see moose all the time. We love seeing moose. All through the winter we have them wandering through our property, and in the spring we often have cows with their calves come through. We have some that are more resident moose, that stick around in the same 5 mile radius, and then we have some that just wander through in the winter looking for food. I have lived in Alaska for 27 years, and I never tire of seeing the moose!

We have birds of all types. I love the chickadees, but rarely get photos. We have woodpeckers around our house quite regularly, but they are very skittish. Every spring we have bald eagles come as the ice on the lakes and ponds start to melt. There are a lot of fish and bugs and things that get frozen in the ice and as it melts, it becomes available for many birds, but the bald eagles are my favorite to watch.

We get a lot of birds in our area, and we love the really big ones. Every spring we have sandhill cranes come through, usually as the ice is receding off the swamp. They come during mating season and it’s fun to watch them dance for each other. The dog, who is not at all afraid of moose, is very afraid of these big birds. They look innocent enough until they open their wings and flap at her! They are beautiful to watch, and we look forward to seeing them every spring.

This next animal scares me, not because I’m scared of it, but because we do have a dog. Once in a great while we have a porcupine wander through the property, or near our property. This year was particularly bad in in some areas around us although we only had one that my son saw wandering near by. We had a dog years ago tangle with a porcupine and get quills in his face. That is not a fun job, picking quills out. We saw a couple near the highway this year. They really are fun to see, once in a while, from a distance!

This elk is in a game refuge, but it’s the only picture I had. We saw many elk and deer when we were driving up the Alcan coming home from Utah. There aren’t any elk or deer in the area where we live, but there was a lot where I grew up in Utah. It was fun seeing them this year, out in the wild as well as in the game refuge area we visited when we had family and friends visit this past summer.

Bears are one of those things that people are super afraid of. I have to say, I am more scared of moose than bears. But only because we rarely see bears. This year we saw one bear on our drive up the Alcan. This particular bear in the picture was also in the game refuge we went to visit. It’s not that we don’t have bears, we see signs of them throughout the summer, but they are super skittish and avoid humans for the most part, so seeing one is really a rare treat, as long as they’re off in the distance as well.

We don’t have any caribou in the valley that I live in, at least not wild caribou. Our neighbor had some caribou for a little while, but they were tame, so technically reindeer. There are caribou north of us, and when we drive to Fairbanks we often see them on the side of the road. There are also caribou south of us, but we don’t see them usually when we drive that direction. This year we saw a small herd of them on the Alcan.

This last picture was probably the one I hadn’t anticipated. We don’t have wild buffalo in Alaska although there are people who have buffalo on ranches here. But I have never seen one in wild until our trip up the Alcan. Canada has introduced buffalo back into the wild, and there were a number of small herds that were right along the highway. This was probably my favorite animal to see, simply because I have never seen one so close before.

We also saw sheep on our trip up, but they were so far away that to get a picture would have been little white dots on the side of a mountain. We see them here in Alaska as well.

We see all sorts of birds, we have lots of rabbits around our area as well. Sometimes we see foxes and I know many people who have seen lynx in the area. We spend at least a little bit of time around coastal areas in the summer and often see sea lions, jelly fish, and whales of different kinds. This spring we had a river otter come up out of our little stream and sit on the snow, that was an unexpected animal to see.

We love seeing the wildlife in our area, as well as in our travels. Wild animals definitely aren’t something you would want to just walk up to and pet, but from a distance they are really fun to see. What kind of animals do you get to see?