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walking on the wild side

Some more walking on the wild side.

I have some friends in Asheville who, in the middle of the city, encounter more wildlife than my wife and I do in the middle of the Pisgah National Foresty. They have been having problems with black bears sneaking into their backyard and now they have a turkey that likes to park atop their car. They shooed it off before it left any deposits on the car roof.

Strange happenings everywhere.

The laurel has been awesome this past month and the rhododendron are now in full bloom also.

Despite the recent rain, our rivers and streams west of here are still agonizingly low. the Davidson River, I am told, is the lowest its been since World War II. Pitiful.

Speaking of pitiful, I watched a rather large brown trout try to swallow a moderately sized rainbow trout in the Davidson River a couple Sundays ago. I tried to cast a fly close to the brown and then realized he had his mouth full. I watched for about 15 minutes as the big trout struggled to swallow the smaller fish. He never did while I was there. I guess his eyes were bigger than his stomach (or mouth).

THE craziest thing I've ever seen on the river

Of snakes and fishes

One of my cats brought home a little ring-necked snake the other day to play with and torment. The snake was dead by the time I noticed her jumping and dancing around with the little reptile, so i spent the next half hour taking pictures. My border collie, feeling left out, went hunting across the street and brought home a rainbow trout, dead of course, and looked at me like he was expecting some sort of reward. Since I read that raw fish is bad for a dog's liver, I picked up the slippery corpse and gave it a proper burial at sea, sort of. I tossed it into the river.
I did not take any photos of the dead fish. It was not a wild fish, just something that escaped from the hatchery nearby, so I did not feel too much remorse. I place a higher value on wild trout than with the farm fish.

the funky trout

Here's a photo of a little weird looking trout I caught a couple of weeks ago near our cabin in Transyvania County. Interesting markings???