I have seen 2 panthers since living here.Both were within a mile & a half of the house.One was extremely thin & just walking along the dirt road until it heard me(I was out biking).The second was in much better condition & ran across the road,while I was driving. My father-in-law & myself had two black bears cross the road early Saturday morning when we were driving to a game. Late yesterday afternoon,I got bitten by this guy.I am extremely lucky,as it only broke the skin with one fang & apparantly didn't inject any venom.It was curled up under a squash vine & I was pulling weeds,when I felt it strike my index finger.I took the pics,as I figured I would be heading straight to the ER & wanted to give them a positive i.d of the snake.It is a pygmy dusky rattlesnake.I kept an eye on the wound(& my pulse/breathing-hard when getting a shock like that),but never got any pain,swelling or erratic breathing.I think I should go buy a lottery ticket today :)

we have had a mild winter here as far as snow its way below normal but have had lots of cold nights and mostly sunny days. just patches of snow left on the ground. the red wing blackbirds are already here a month early and a couple Lewis's woodpeckers also here ahead of normal I get eurasian doves year around but the mourning does just spend the spring and summer and i have a pair of the mourning here this week that are also a month early. The evening grosbeaks usually leave out in late fall and come back in spring but a flock has stayed around all winter. the nuthatches and tits and chickadees usually stay all winter and leave out in spring but they have already started to move uphill into the mountains.there has been several sightings of orioles just 50 miles south of here this week a month early

My bird book says blue grosbeaks breed well south of Canada, but it is a "casual straggler north to the Great Lakes and Maritimes".

One way is to go to photobucket.com and open a free account. Upload your pictures to that account. After uploading them hover your cursor over them and you will see a box with several lines of code. Click on the one that says 'html code' and it will be saved. Go to your gardenweb post and paste that code where you want the picture to be. You can put more than one in the post. When you preview the pictures will show up where you pasted the codes.