The Story of My Life, via a Not Scrupulous Record of the Many Wild Animals I've Encountered in their Natural Habitat, Part One

This will be an ongoing series. It will partly be me making for the first time a written record of the more interesting animals I've encountered in the wild in my life, and partly just shameless bragging, as this is the kind of thing a person like myself brags about.

The list will be in chronological order, best as I can do; they will include brief stories of the encounters; and many entries won't have accompanying images (damn), as they just happened in non-camera-carrying moments. Some, I'm happy to say, will entail quite exotic creatures, seen by not a whole lot of people; some are not so exotic animals (the skunk, for example), which I include only because of the stories surrounding those encounters (including getting sprayed by a skunk from very, very close, while trying to beat it to death with a stick).

Crow at the grape vine (late 1960s): When I was probably only six or so, there was for a period of time, maybe only a summer, that a wild crow would eat out of your hand. Maybe it had been domesticated and escaped, I don't know. I remember it scaring the crap out of a couple kids on the way to school, trying to land on a shoulder or head, and that there was for some weeks talk among the adults of this vicious crow, and that maybe something should be done about it. Luckily that something was never done. (At least I think it wasn't.) But best, I remember being at the grape vine in our far back yard on North Maple Drive in Lancaster, outside of Buffalo, New York, the crow sitting on my knee, me feeding it grapes. I felt like Marlin friggin' Perkins. Maybe that's where all this wild animal crap started.