Welcome to the Listening Time Podcast.
Hey everybody, this is Connor and you're listening to episode 73 of the Listening Time Podcast.
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All right.
In today's episode, we're going to talk about some of my encounters with wild animals, and So the word encounters just refers to experiences that you have with something.
So if I've had an encounter with a wild animal, this means that I've had an experience with a wild animal.
I've seen and been around a wild animal outside, so that's an encounter.
So i'm going to talk about a few encounters i've had with wild animals.
This will be a fun one because i'll be able to tell a few fun stories from my past and i'm sure it'll be an interesting episode for you.
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All right, let's get started.
Are your ears ready?
You know what time it is.
It's listening time!
Okay, let's talk about some of my encounters with wild animals.
First of all I need to mention that I've always lived in the suburbs and the city, so I haven't lived in the middle of nature before, so I'm not very experienced when it comes to wild animals.
But I've had a few interesting experiences before, even in my own environment, living closer to the city.
And I've also made the effort a few times to go out and see these animals in their natural habitat.
So I'm gonna talk about five different times that I've had funny or interesting or scary experiences with wild animals.
So first let me tell you about one that happened when I was, I think, 18 years old, if I'm not mistaken.
I remember that I was in the backyard with my family.
I think we had a little get together that day.
In English, the term get together just refers to an informal gathering where friends or family members come together to hang out.
So we had some type of get together that day and we were all at my parents' house in the backyard and it was a nice afternoon.
And I remember that I walked over to the slope that my parents have in their backyard.
A slope is kind of like a hill.
There's an incline.
We have this big slope in the backyard there.
And so I was walking over there just to go up the slope and look at the view from the top of the little hill.
And I remember that I was walking over there and I heard this very interesting noise that I had never heard before.
It sounded kind of like a buzzing sound.
It sounded kind of like there was something shaking or something making a buzzing noise or something like that.
And I didn't know what it was and I just ignored it.
And then, about 20, 30 seconds later, I see my dog come running towards me and my dog has this weird look on his face and he's whimpering and there's obviously something wrong with him.
The word whimper in English just refers to crying in a soft way.
So if someone cries in a soft, quiet way, they're whimpering.
So my dog came running towards me.
He was whimpering.
He had this weird look on his face.
And then he just kind of ran past me and looked a little bit confused.
And I thought, what happened?
What's going on here?
And then I had an idea and I said, maybe that sound that I'm hearing is a rattlesnake.
And yes, I was right.
It actually was a rattlesnake that was in our backyard.
It was on our slope.
And if you don't know what a rattlesnake is, it's that type of snake that lives mostly in desert environments.
And it has this thing on its tail that shakes and creates this rattling noise, as we say in English.
And so that's the sound that I was hearing.
And so I went down the slope and I went to go tell my family what I thought had happened.
I said, I think our dog just got bitten by a rattlesnake.
And sure enough, his face started to swell up.
In English, when we say that something swells up, this means that it gets inflamed, it gets bigger because of some injury or some damage.
So his face was swelling up because he'd gotten bitten by this rattlesnake just moments earlier, and now the poison, the venom from the rattlesnake, was running through his body and he was having this reaction.
And so we acted very quickly and we drove this dog to the animal hospital.
That was maybe 15 minutes from our house, and at that point his face was super big, it was completely swollen, he could barely open his eyes and he looked pretty pathetic.
And so we had to leave him at the animal hospital overnight and they had to give him the antivenom.
This is like the medicine and to help him recover from the snake bite.
And then I think the next day he was okay.
I can't remember exactly how many hours he was there for, but I remember that he stayed there overnight.
So that was a pretty interesting experience and where I grew up in San Diego there are a lot of rattlesnakes around, so if you go into the nature part of that area, and during the summer especially, you can definitely see these rattlesnakes around and you might hear them once in a while, and you have to be careful when you're walking.
And so that is definitely one wild animal that we are always aware of.
In English, the word aware just means conscious.
So we're always aware or conscious of the presence of these rattlesnakes near that area.
All right, the next story I want to tell you is when I was walking home with a friend of mine.
We were out skateboarding and it was getting a little bit late and we decided to walk back home to my house.
And it was around sunset when we were walking home and we were getting closer to my house, but we wanted to take a shortcut through these hills behind my house because it was gonna save us maybe 15 or 20 minutes if we did that.
So we decided to take this shortcut, but unfortunately the sun had already gone down And it was getting pretty dark at that point.
And so once we started walking through these hills, it got completely dark.
And we were still able to see things in the distance, but it was a little bit hard to navigate through the darkness.
And we were walking through these hills.
This was kind of a nature spot with open fields that is pretty close to my parents' house.
And so we were walking around there and trying to navigate our way to my parents house, and it was dark but we started to see shadows around us and at first it was kind of hard to tell if it was just our imagination or if we were actually seeing something.
But I soon realized that yes, there were animals around us.
And I don't think my friend had had much experience with this type of animal.
So he didn't know what it was at the very beginning.
But I did know what this animal was.
And I quickly said to my friend, be careful because we're surrounded by coyotes.
If you don't know what a coyote is, this is similar to like a wolf.
Right.
But it's not as big.
And usually coyotes live near the desert.
So we were surrounded by a pack of coyotes.
In English, when we say a pack of something, this refers to a group of some type of animal, usually an animal that's related to dogs, like a pack of wolves, a pack of coyotes.
So a pack of coyotes had surrounded us and were walking around us.
And it was very scary.
We had our skateboards with us.
So we had our skateboards in our hands and we were ready to swing them like a baseball bat, just in case these coyotes started to come towards us.
But thankfully, we didn't need to do that.
The coyotes never tried to attack us.
But it was very scary to be surrounded by these coyotes.
They were walking around us.
They were probably fighting three four, five of them, i don't remember how many, but it was scary and thankfully we were able to escape that situation.
We didn't need to fight off these coyotes, but i definitely learned my lesson that we shouldn't go through those hills at night.
All right, the next story that I have for you is one that took place when I was maybe I don't know 12 years old, 11 years old maybe.
I was outside with my neighbor because at that time I used to play outside with my neighbor a lot.
We played basketball in the street and I think that's what we were doing.
I think we were playing basketball in the front yard, and we were just playing basketball normally.
It was a normal Saturday morning or something like that.
I don't remember.
But we were outside, and his dog was also outside.
He had this small chihuahua.
So if you don't know what a chihuahua is, it's a very small dog that kind of looks like a rat.
In my opinion it's a pretty ugly dog, but some people find them to be cute.
But his chihuahua was outside with us and this chihuahua was just playing or walking around or something I don't remember, And we were playing basketball, I think.
And I noticed that there was a hawk flying in the sky.
A hawk is a big bird, kind of like an eagle, but not that big and not that cool.
And there are a lot of them in San Diego, where I'm from.
And they like to hunt for little animals.
And they're kind of like predators.
And so this hawk was flying in the sky, which was very normal.
We always see hawks.
But I noticed that it was getting lower and it was coming closer to the ground.
And I thought, hmm, what's going on with this hawk?
And then suddenly this hawk came all the way down. and tried to pick up my neighbor's chihuahua.
This hawk came lower than I've ever seen a hawk come, and it was like at the height of my head almost, and it had its talons outstretched and open.
In English, the word talons refers to the feet of a bird with its sharp nails.
So its talons were outstretched, ready to pick up this little chihuahua.
And we were able to scare it off at the last moment because we were standing pretty close to the dog.
And we were able to wave our arms and make noise.
And the bird got very close to the dog.
But at the last second, it flew back up and didn't pick up my neighbor's dog.
And this was a really funny experience to talk about afterwards.
The fact that his dog almost got picked up by a bird and almost got eaten.
But thankfully it didn't happen and it became a funny story afterwards.
But in the moment, it was very strange.
It was something that We definitely weren't expecting, and it just goes to show you that, in areas with a lot of hawks and birds that like to eat small animals, you need to be careful if you have a small dog, because they could also be seen as prey by these birds.
In English, the word prey refers to some type of animal that is eaten by another animal.
So the predator eats the prey.
So these small dogs could be seen as prey by some of these big predator birds.
So that's something that we learned after this.
And my neighbor was more careful with his dog after that.
And my next story is a little bit different, because it was an experience that I had, that I actually paid for and that I wanted to have.
And this was when I went swimming with whale sharks in the city of La Paz in Mexico.
That's the way we pronounce the city in English.
And this is a city that's famous for its whale sharks, because you can go into the sea and you'll see these whale sharks at a certain time of year and you can actually swim with them.
So I was able to do this.
I was able to go in the water with these huge, huge animals.
Whale sharks are gigantic.
They're really, really big.
They are the biggest fish in the world, if I'm not mistaken.
Of course, whales are not considered to be fish, so whales can be bigger.
But in terms of fish, the whale shark is the biggest one, I think.
And we swam with some really big juvenile whale sharks.
The word juvenile just refers to someone or an animal that is still growing.
It's still in its younger years.
So these sharks weren't even fully grown.
But they were already really big.
And so you can imagine how big the fully grown ones are.
But it was a really cool experience.
And I took my GoPro with me so I was able to film the experience and experience catch these whale sharks on camera, and it was an adventure, an experience that I'll never forget, because I don't think I'll ever be close to another animal that big in my life.
So that was a really cool experience, and that was the only experience that I had on purpose that I'm talking to you about today.
And I have one last short story.
This is a funny one.
My parents have a pool in their backyard.
And I remember that a long time ago, these two ducks... started to make their home in our pool.
It was the strangest thing because there shouldn't have been any ducks nearby.
We didn't live near any pond or lake or anything like that.
But somehow these two ducks started living in our pool.
And at first it was really funny because we were wondering what was going on.
This is such a weird experience.
But on the other hand it was a little bit annoying because obviously these ducks were not letting us swim in our own pool, because these ducks were dirty and they were leaving their mess in our pool.
And it was not convenient for us to have these two kids animals living in our pool, and especially because it's always important to keep your swimming pool clean and you always need to maintain it and do a lot of work on it, and it's a little frustrating when you do all of that and then these animals just come and dirty it up.
And that was what was happening with these ducks.
And so we had to get rid of them.
And what we did is we used fishing line, this line that you use when you go fishing.
You put it on your fishing pole, this kind of like string.
We call this fishing line in English.
So we used this fishing line and we ran it back and forth along the pool and we made this kind of spider web thing that didn't allow these ducks to come and swim in the pool.
And so the next time that they came, they saw this fishing line and they weren't able to swim in the pool.
And so they decided that they couldn't be there anymore.
And eventually they left and we were able to have our pool back again just for us humans.
And we didn't need to worry about these wild animals swimming in our swimming pool.
So that's kind of a funny one I wanted to add.
All right.
Well, why don't we stop there for today?
I hope these stories were interesting for you.
And I hope this episode was good practice for your listening skills.
Remember that if these episodes have become easy for you, if you can understand everything that I'm saying pretty easily, then it's time for you to move on to my advanced podcast.
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All right.
Thank you for listening to this episode.
And I'll talk to you on the next episode of Listening Time.
