One obvious thing that gets you more or less as soon as you arrive here is wildlife. People talk about snakes not as abstract entities carefully explained by David Attenborough (or ripped out of trees to Steve Irwin’s shouts of “crikey! looka this bloightah!”), but as everyday threats you need to beware of through the summer.

And even in the relative calm of early February, there are obvious striking differences between Californian fauna and the relatively tame stuff we get in Britain.

I discovered the most delightful of these when I visited last summer, in fact on my first morning here. As I was walking through the company campus for the first time, my boss suddenly stopped and pointed into the flowerbeds. He’d spotted a hummingbird feeding from a flower, and it was one of several flitting about in the early morning.

They’re still here now, and one of the pleasures of sitting out on my balcony on weekends is watching them hover amongst the trees a few feet away. They’re absolutely amazing, and the amazement doesn’t wear off after the first viewing. I’ve been trying to grab a photo of one, but unfortunately the little blighters are as quick as they are remarkable.

Keeping with the subject of birds, I had a slightly more gruesome “wow” moment driving through Sunnyvale a week or so after I arrived here. As I came round a corner, I noticed a group of largish birds on the road, gathered around some roadkill. It should have been obvious what they were, but sitting still in the first moments of my approach, they looked rather like turkeys. “What the hell would a turkey be doing in the middle of the highway?” I was thinking, when one of them opened its huge wings to move away a little, and I realised that I was looking at a group of buzzards…

Finally, there’s an animal which I have, well, experienced, but not yet seen. My first exposure to this particular rodent came one night on the road back home from Palo Alto. Quite suddenly, the car was filled with a fairly overpowering smell, rather like (as any Glastonbury-goer will know) particularly strong marijuana. I turned in confusion to the other people in the car. “Is that…?” “Skunks,” they replied before I’d even finished the question.

It had never even occurred to me that the breed of super-dope referred to as “skunk” was so named because, well, it smelled like mating skunks.

As Steve Irwin would say, “crikey!”

This article first arrived on the interwebnet on Monday, February 14th, 2005 at 11:18 am .
It's arbitrarily categorised as being about: Brief Notes on America, Thinking.
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There are thousands of articles on this very subject all over the internet. 39% of them are cleverly-disguised attempts to sell you little blue pills, 26% of them lead inevitably to a badly-researched, logically inconsistent Wikipedia article and 5% are written in an ancient Navajo dialect which is only spoken by 2 professors. The remaining 30% are, like this one, of very little interest to anyone besides their original author (and even he's a bit bored by it).