Summer Wildlife Roundup

This summer, I've been riding my bike home from work most days. Along the way, I've seen quite a bit of wildlife. I took a few pictures (with my phone, so the quality isn't great). I saw about 10 to 15 deer total, and here is one of them:

You might have to look hard, but it's in there!

I also saw two coyotes, but I didn't take pictures of them. One was running under a fence and was only about 10 feet away from me.

Today, as I was cruising up a gentle hill, I saw a snake on the bike path directly in front of me. I saw it just in time to skid to a stop with my front wheel about 3 feet away from it. It was a rattle snake! It coiled up but didn't try to strike. You can just barely make out the rattle in this picture (click for a larger view of this and all the other pictures):

After I took the picture and calmed down a bit, I decided to detour around it through the grass. Here are a couple more pictures from the other side. You can see some skid marks above it in the pictures where I came to a stop. One of those is mine. I don't know if the other one is an old one or if someone else did the same thing.


To give this a sense of scale, I'd say the path is about 6 to 8 feet wide. I didn't try to stretch the snake out and measure it, but I'd say it was about 3 feet long.

I'm pretty sure I saw another rattle snake in this same area a couple of years ago, but that time I was going downhill and I just swerved around it and kept going.

So that's my wildlife roundup. Maybe next summer I'll start carrying around a better camera for some better shots!