Houston's Wild Animals

[littlebunny]

Ok, maybe it's a strange topic but I know there just has to be some crazy animal stories about Houston. I remember years ago a manatee swam up Buffalo Bayou. So I am hoping the old timers on here might remember a few stories. I can remember when I was around 4 years old, looking out the back window of our house at a lion that had gotten loose from his cage. He belonged to a crazy neighbor, I guess animal regulations were not very strict in the 1960's. I know we had a wolf we raised from a pup for a few years in the back yard, and the neighbors never complained. I grew up in Aldine, I am just wondering about the rest of the area. Anyone else have wild kingdom memories?

[GEM]

Not wild,but Dad raised chickens on the north side in the 60s...........

[lockmat]

My friend has encountered huge wild cows while surveying near Spring Creek. Of course everyone has heard of wild hogs around. A friend raised a deer and Bobcat when he lived near the Heights back in the day.

And why do I have a memory that someone was attacked by a wild feline at what is now the Toyota Lift of Houston on 45N in the late eighties?

[littlebunny]

They sure have plenty of chickens out here now. I have been chased by a crazy rooster a time or two on my morning walk. (and I was worried about the pitbulls)

There are still lots of rabbits running wild. I live off of Airline Dr, and every once in a while you see a horse just wandering down the street minus his owner.

[lockmat]

Check out this article from 1983. It says hundreds of thousands of grasshoppers swarmed a few blocks of downtown Houston.

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=dldWAAAAIBAJ&sjid=6O4DAAAAIBAJ&pg=7040,3685562&dq=skyscraper+downtown+houston&hl=en

[plumber2]

Check out this article from 1983. It says hundreds of thousands of grasshoppers swarmed a few blocks of downtown Houston.

http://news.google.c...n houston&hl=en

I remember driving to the valley several years back and pulled into a convenience store near Robstown. It was at night and the store lights had attracted millions of grasshoppers. They crunched under your tires as you drove in and crunched again under your feet as you made your way to the front door. The walk off mat inside was smeared with fresh dead grasshopper carcuses. It was a discussting mess.

Another memeory a few years before, coming out of the valley on 281. It was raining pretty heavy and the road was covered with what I thought was clods of dirt. Well it wasn't dirt, it was millions of frogs, jumping all around. It was slaughter as the flattened bodies fipped up into the wheel well, one after another. It went on for miles.............. Very unpleasant.

I've seen recent pictures in the Galveston News about coyotes coming into town looking for food. Some spotted in the Harve Lafitte subdivision near Moody Gardens.

I saw a wolf walking behind Clear Creek (near Walter Hall Park), back in the early 70's. It scared the crap out of me. Nobody believed me, until I told the story to an old timer that lived behind us. He said that there was a pack that lived between League City and Dickinson, and that they sometimes came up to Clear Creek in search of water and food. So all of y'all folks living in Victory Lakes can take comfort in knowing that your house most probably displaced a pack of wolves.

[LarryDierker]

A few years ago there was the 3 year old boy that had his arm torn off by a tiger and then it was reattached.

http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-201_162-172652.html

Wonder how his arm has healed?

[luciaphile]

The story of the early 19th century wildlife artist Alexander Wilson and the ivorybilled woodpecker sort of epitomizes for me our fraught relationship with wild creatures. This was the bird that he shot (in order to paint from "life") but only wounded; so he tried to make a pet of it, despite its "violent crying {like that of} of a young child," initially passing off the squalling bird off as his "baby" at the inn where he was staying. Leaving the bird captive in his room, he went to see to his horse, to find upon returning that the bird had destroyed part of the wall and the ceiling; he then tied the bird to a table and left to get it some grubs, during which time the bird nearly destroyed the table. It cut him up quite a bit during the portrait sitting and displayed "such a noble and unconquerable spirit, that I was frequently tempted to restore him to his native woods .. . He lived with me nearly three days, but refused all sustenance, and I witness his death with regret."

There's a little inkling of this ambivalence in my Houston parents' relationship to their armadillo, who has gone by the same pet name these 30 years. Sometimes -- I forget why -- they have some grievance with him. My father then tries to shoot him, fecklessly -- he's no longer a good shot -- while mother wonders vaguely if the neighbors were disturbed by the sound of shots. They then usually succeed in trapping him, and my father tenderly places the cage in the shade so the critter won't overheat, then takes him to a sylvan spot one neighborhood over. The same animal he was shooting at only a few days earlier.

This process has played out many times.

And I'm thinking of it because I'm here in the vortex of the crazy.

[littlebunny]

I had forgotten about the tiger attack, but it really makes you wonder what kind of pets your neighbors might have. I know there is a exotic pet store right on the other side of the Hardy Toll rd. and they have all the small animals, but in the back of the store they have a fully grown lion and tiger behind bars of course.

luciaphile I love the armadillo story, I can almost picture it.

[plumber2]

There is a story in the Galveston News this morning (also online). Authorities trapped the above mentioned coyote Wednesday near the neighborhood of Colony Park. It had apparently been killing small neighborhood pets. The health department will check it for rabies before they destroy it. Kind of ashamed, becuse he was sort of a cult hero type of animal to me (and apparently the news staff too), surviving in an unfamiliar uban environment all these years. If it is indeed the same animal, he had been spotted in these same neigborhood streets well before Hurricane Ike.

[little frau]

Unless there is a new method of testing for rabies, the animal will be have to be killed in order to do the test. It has to be done on brain tissue after death.

Some twenty five years ago or so, I had to take a product to the city health department for testing and there I observed a sign telling the public to bring only the head of an animal for rabies testing.

If you'll remember past news stories, when a person is bitten by an animal suspected of having rabies, and no animal is available to test, that person has to take the series of shots as a precaution.

[plumber2]

Your right, after I reread the article it stated that the animal would be destroyed so that it could be tested for rabies.

[samagon]

wasn't the story that the Allen brothers, when they were trying to get people to move to Houston, said there were exotic animals that grazed the banks of the bayou?

I don't have a wild animal story, but someone domesticated a goose and used to walk it around the block with their dogs. The goose was unleashed and very obedient, it would walk right next to the owner!

[jgriff]

There used to be a guy that had a lion somewhere on Crystal Beach. Back in the 90s it chased me down the beach and latched onto my leg with it's mouth. It didn't have claws and it was just playing but it was a little scary. I remember a bunch of us having to climb up on the roof of a cabin to get away from it.

Edit: I wouldn't be surprised if this is the same lion.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,423504,00.html

Edited November 26, 2012 by jgriff

[luciaphile]

There used to be a guy that had a lion somewhere on Crystal Beach. Back in the 90s it chased me down the beach and latched onto my leg with it's mouth. It didn't have claws and it was just playing but it was a little scary. I remember a bunch of us having to climb up on the roof of a cabin to get away from it.

My sleepless thoughts keep recurring to the lion on the beach. I would have died of fright; unless, as was my perpetual fate on Galveston, I had just set down my beach things, stepped into the surf, and been immediately stung by a jellyfish. In which case I'd be too busy hollering to care.

The "lion on the altar" caption in the link-- inadvertently called to mind Aslan.

Not Houston-related, but once (while or after he was president, I'm not sure) Teddy Roosevelt came to Austin. A shopkeeper on Congress Avenue kept an old mountain lion in a cage out in front of his store, and it was well-known to all. The city leaders, to entertain T.R. with a "hunt," decided to release the lion on the Rob Roy ranch (it's the area you see if you drive west out of Austin on 2244, there's a bbq place and a storage facility and houses there now, and a lake.) I believe he did shoot the lion. I wouldn't want this incident to reflect badly on T.R., whom I revere -- he probably wasn't told he was hunting somebody's pet.

I read this long ago in a book setting down the recollections of the ranchers and cedar choppers who settled this part of Travis County.

[littlebunny]

I can remember around 1975, waiting at the bus stop behind my house with my friends one morning. We were standing on the side of Aldine Mail Rt. and the traffic was stopped for someone making a turn. My friends had their back to the traffic and I was facing it. When I looked into the front seat of the car in front of me, there was a full size lion sitting there. I must have been speechless, because when I told my friends to look the car was past them and they did not see it, and they all thought I was nuts. I still remember it like yesterday, You know they say things happen in threes, if so maybe I should be worried!

[luciaphile]

I can remember around 1975, waiting at the bus stop behind my house with my friends one morning. We were standing on the side of Aldine Mail Rt. and the traffic was stopped for someone making a turn. My friends had their back to the traffic and I was facing it. When I looked into the front seat of the car in front of me, there was a full size lion sitting there. I must have been speechless, because when I told my friends to look the car was past them and they did not see it, and they all thought I was nuts. I still remember it like yesterday, You know they say things happen in threes, if so maybe I should be worried!

I don't doubt that you did see that, littlebunny. Such strange things are very indelible. My husband once saw a bighorn sheep clinging to the cliff above Austin's Town Lake, just above Red Bud Island, as he was going home. There was really no explanation for this.

One morning when I was small, awoke to find that a peacock had blown into our backyard during a storm. This was not all that odd, as someone a half-mile or so away kept peacocks. Still, it was out of the ordinary, and I remembered how he looked against the azaleas. Years later in some class we were asked to write a Sapphic stanza and I described that peacock, representing it as some sort of rebuke to suburban tedium. Or to bourgeois values, one or the other. It was totally fraudulent, as all my schoolwork was, and the professor ate it up, as planned.

A few months ago one of the neighborhood joggers stopped and said, "There was a peacock in your yard the other day. Did you see it?" I was disappointed to have missed it. I really do like peacocks, and once saw a pure white one that looked just like a Spanish lace fan.

I don't know what's happening to you in threes, though. That only applies to celebrity deaths, I think, and not really even then.

[DJboutit]

Fondren Southwest had has problems with coyote's trappers have caught 9

 

http://edition.pagesuite-professional.co.uk//launch.aspx?eid=aa82a2bc-2537-4f82-9570-0225313f4a79

 

I have seen dead Armadillo and Skunks along the side of the road South Post Oak between South Willow and Gasmer where the Willow Water Hole park is

[GEM]

Coyotes in beautiful downtown Deer Park............

[FilioScotia]

Wolves were common in this area up until the 1970s and early 80s.  In those days the state paid a bounty for killing the wolves. All you had to do was kill one and cut off its ears for proof.  I think the bounty was fifty dollars, and that was  just one of the things that led to their extinction in this area. 

 

There were so many wolves in NW Harris County that some yahoo out there hung their pelts on a big sign at what is now the intersection of Hwy 6 and FM 529. People out there called that intersection Wolf Corner.

 

There was a fairly lengthy discussion of this here on HAIF back in August of 2006. Here's a link back to it:

 

http://www.houstonarchitecture.com/haif/topic/7500-wolf-corner/

[FilioScotia]

I found an article with an old photo of this grisly memorial to dead wolves at Hwy 6 and FM 529.  Remember this was far outside the city, way "out in the country" at that time.

 

 

 

NORTHWEST HOUSTON — During a time when Northwest Houston farms were pestered by wolves snatching up chickens and calves at their liking, one local rancher, Charles Grisbee, stepped up and sent a message to the predators: Wolf Corner.

 

Grisbee, a dairy farmer with a ranch off Jackrabbit Road, started hanging dead wolves in the 1950s at the corner of FM 1960 and FM 529, which became known as Wolf Corner.

 

“He would do this because wolves were getting the baby calves and lambs,” said Celeste Haltom, Grisbee’s niece. “He was very proud of it because he was helping all of the other farmers and ranchers.”

 

At the time when Grisbee hung the wolves, Harris County collected a bounty on wolves, foxes and other wildlife. The county began collecting the bounty in 1955, according to a Houston Chronicle article published in 1970. Hunters who turned in the ears of the animals they killed to the county clerk would receive $5 for each kill.

 

“On Jan. 1, 1970, Grisbee collected $140 for 27 wolves and a fox killed in the Cypress area during 1969,” the Chronicle article reported. “He has earned $645 in bounty money in the last four years.”

Despite the large payoff, Grisbee, who had been hunting wolves to protect local farm animals for about fifty years, told the Chronicle he hunted the wolves as a hobby, not for the money.

 

“I help out people who call, and it mostly just pays for the gasoline,” he told the Chronicle in 1970.

Since Grisbee’s collection of wolves on Wolf Corner was so large, it often drew attention and visitors from inside of the city of Houston, Haltom said.

 

Barry Bogs, Grisbee’s grandson, remembers driving out to Wolf Corner to look at his grandfather’s killings when he was a child.“I remember going over with my father and grandfather and smelling the wolves from the corner,” Bogs said. “The telephone guys had phone boxes there, and they did not appreciate the smell.”

 

The practice of hanging wolves on fence posts was common in areas where the animals threatened livestock, according to a Chronicle article published in 1968. The people who hung the wolves believed other wolves would avoid the area upon seeing their dead companions. It also let local farmers know that a neighbor was looking out for their wellbeing, Haltom said.

 

“At the time, [FM 1960] was the main thoroughfare, and Wolf Corner let all of the farmers and ranchers know he was helping them,” she said.

 

Grisbee used steel traps and cyanide guns to kill the wolves, and he continued to hang wolves at Wolf Corner until he became ill in the mid-1970s. Around the same time, Harris County also stopped paying a bounty for wolves due to complaints that the bounty was ineffective at controlling the predators, according to the Chronicle.

 

“It was a labor of love,” Bogs said. “People highly respected him for having done it, and it was something he loved to do.”

 

 

 

 

Edited February 18, 2013 by FilioScotia

[kbates2]

My grandfather was a full blooded indian that lived in Pasadena. He had a large overgrown plot of land on which he kept quite a few animals. They were essentially wild as they had taken over various parts of the land and house. He lived in a trailer in the yard. When he passed, he had roughly 50 dogs, 40 cats, 30 peacocks - (about half white), monkeys, pigs, racoons, ducks, chicken, geese, and several other animals I can't recall.

Going to his place as a kid was interesting to say the least. The funny part is I never realized that it was an abnormal number of animals to have on your inner-city property when I was young.