I'm amazed sometimes at the amount of wildlife I encounter on a fairly regular basis. Because some of the areas where I work are still on the wild fringes of suburbia it's not uncommon to see deer, raccoons, skunks... or to hear stories from customers about bobcats and even mountain lions.
I see lots of birds, from hummingbirds doing their aerial mating dances and swoops, to jays landing on my parked truck to check it out and quail scurrying away and ducking for cover. I even saw a great blue heron not long ago near a slow moving and deep section of Coyote Creek that ran along the backyard of a job.
Then there are the more unusual encounters... a couple of weeks back while working on a lighting job in Los Altos I was up a ladder at the edge of a roof when I heard a racket in the nearby pine trees. A solitary agitated squirrel was scrambling around the trunk in a spiral and then out to the end of a branch and back again... Then I saw it.. the wings and head were unmistakable.. a redtail hawk perched on the end of the branch...
I'd never seen an interaction like this before. The squirrel charged at the surprised hawk with a ferocious intensity. Twice the squirrel charged, and the hawk, a little awkward in the confined space between branches, seemed out of its element. Unable to maneuver, all it could do was spread its wings. The squirrel, undaunted, charged a third time and drove the hawk away.
It's cool to run into these animals so close to so many people.
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