KW Critters

So we thought we would share with you the wildlife of KW!

First we have never been anywhere that people love animals more than KW!!! As mentioned before there are a number of them just in our neighborhood and they are found EVERYWHERE!

Dogs - Lots and lots of dogs as you can imagine since there is a dog beach. We have seen all kinds. The other day a guy came by the house on a skate board and his dog was sitting on the front of the skate board just riding along. What a hoot! I wish had my camera for that one.

There are also a number of bars and restaurants that dogs are allowed at. Usually where there is an outdoor area you can bring your dog along. One of our favorite bars, Schooners Wharf usually has at least a few when we are there. We have even taken Dyna there and she loves it. Even our local fish market lets us bring Dyna in when we go to buy fresh fish. It is a great place since they get the fish from the local fisherman each day.

You can aways tell the locals from the tourists. The tourist will see Dyna sitting in the yard and move out of the way since they are afraid and think she is mean. The locals see her and come over to talk to her and pet her. She is convinced that everyone who comes down the street is there to talk with her.

Cats - There are probably more of them than any other animal. Of course there are the famous Hemingway cats that you can see at the Hemingway house that have 6 toes. The rest are here as pets and many are wild. We even had one that came with our house. Of course she can't come around since Dyna is here (and chases her every time she shows up). She has been with the house through 4 renters. There is also Linda a cat lady who lives a few houses down and puts food out all up an down the street to feed all of them. The Daily Neighbors even have a hurricane plan on who take which cats during a storm so none are left out.

Chickens and Roosters - They are the city bird and run wild. They are also everywhere! Of course this I love since now I have a real excuse to 'chase chickens'! We were at KMART in the garden center and found eggs that had been laid in a few of the plants. That was another big HOOT! Wasn't really expecting that one! The roosters are also confused on when to crow. It happens at all hours of the day and night. Lucky for us there aren't a lot of the roosters in our area. We do hear them at 3:00 am but since they aren't close they don't bother us. We have a friend that has them very close and he tells a story of chasing them down the street in his boxers due to crowing in the middle of the night.

I also have to share our own chicken story with you.....
Tom and I were walking Dyna the other day and approached a momma chicken who had chicks. Usually they squawk and move out of the way. For some reason the momma and the chicks felt trapped and rather then leave the momma decided to attack Dyna. Now Dyna usually ignores the chickens but since this one decided to attack she was NOT going to back down. She decided to attack back. So we started with Dyna on the left, Tom in the middle holding Dyna's leash and I was on the right. The momma went right so Dyna went right which was around both Tom and I. We didn't have enough time to react so the leash went around both of us. The momma continued around the back of us and so did Dyna. By this time we are all tangled up in the leash and doing everything we can to not fall over since we can't move our legs. It must have been a sight to see since I looked across the street and there was a group of tourists watching is all go on since it was quite noisy between the squawk of the chicken and Dyna's barking. We were finally able to get Dyna under control and momma allowed us to pass but continued to chase Dyna down the street trying to peck at her butt. We just couldn't stop laughing.

Birds - many people on the island have various exotic birds. They take them out in public all of the time and usually have them riding around on their shoulder. One local rides a Harley and has a large white Cockatoo that rides on his head. One of our neighbors has a love bird that makes all sorts of cooing each morning. Another one of our neighbors has a green parrot, Ricky, that we all refer to as 'the EVIL bird'. It likes NO ONE and attacks anyone who comes near it. The only person Ricky won't bite is his owner. More than one person has lost skin to the Evil bird.

Scorpions - VERY different than what we have in AZ. Here they are large, 2 -3 inches and are black in color. I saw one the other night walking down the sidewalk and COULDN'T BELIEVE the size of it. They are not very poisonous due to their size just scary since they are so big. Our bug man said that if we had any we would know it since you can hear them walk on the tile. YUK!!! Luckily with having Dyna we shouldn't have any in the house.

Ticks - we have also had our issues with ticks since the first week we arrived. Dyna dug a small hole in the yard and laid in it. Of course it was March and that is the height of tick season. From that experience we have been battling ticks but at least we are WINNING! We had to take the bark out of the back yard and have it replaced with rocks since that is here the ticks hang out. We also have had the yard and house sprayed to get rid of them.

Spiders - lucky for Tom there hasn't been a lot of them around the house. There is a very unusual one that we have a few of outside. It is something that we haven't seen before and resembles a crab. Of course they give Tom the creeps!

Termites - they are everywhere!!! We have them in the house and all of the locals just accept them as part of life. It freaked us out at first but now we just clean up wood droppings where ever we find them. We never use a dish out of the kitchen cupboards without checking it and cleaning it out. They are the worse in that room. They are so bad that a selling point for a house is to post when it was last tented and sprayed to get rid of them. It is not unusual for a house to be tented every 5 to 7 years to try and keep the little critters under control.

So hopefully this will give you an idea of the KW critters that we live with each day of the Adventure.