I don’t have individuals but I’ll make up stories for them. If it’s a bird that’s hanging around me or bug I’m enjoying watching or a school of fish in a stream. I’ll sit there for a bit and just imagine a world that isn’t infested with society. Not sure if that’s the same thing. Usually I’ll call any animal near me a friend. If it left an impression, I’ll thank it and say my farewell before I leave it be.
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Any animals that I see repeatedly, get a name. I have an eastern Cottontail named Clover. An eastern grey squirrel named Hazelnut, her baby named Almond, and their dad, toasted marshmallow. I also have a sweat bee named Jade. Also the golden finches have names, Sunny, Olivia, and Olivier.
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We get a lot of Western Jackdaws (Corvus monedula) in this area and if you start to feed wild birds in your garden you’ll often end up with a large flock of Jackdaws visiting every day to steal the food. I tried a lot of things to deter them like making a bird table with a cage around it that only let small birds inside but the Jackdaws would do their best to break into everything I invented to stop them. They’d undo knots or twisted wire, remove bolts and hide them, even break things apart if they weren’t strong enough. I’ll admit I quite liked the interaction of finding puzzles for them to solve though. Anyway they’re very nervous birds and will quickly scatter when you go into the garden. All except one bird that was easy to recognise by a patch of grey feathers on its chest. It looked like it might have been an old scar or damage causing the feathers to grow badly. This bird was not afraid of people at all and would sit close by waiting to mop up the spilled food from when I topped up the bird table. I never fed it or tried to make friends but always spilled a bit more food than necessary. We called him Blaze for the marking on his chest and he visited for a few years before disappearing one winter. I wondered someone in the past had found him injured and cared for him for a while, hence the scar and tolerance of humans.
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Where I used to work as a lifeguard there was a mallard we nicknamed Daisy who had a chip in her bill. She would come to the beach most days and try and get food from people which we tried to discourage. One summer she came back and was teaching her ducklings the same behavior.
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There are a couple of Merlins that visit where we live that we collectively refer to as “the wizards”.
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There was a hedgehog that visited my garden a few times who I named Quandale Dingle ( after a meme that was popular a few years ago), sometimes I ponder how the little guy is doing.
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