Annoying and sometimes Frightening wild Critters!

[Bigfoot Mike]

I really have a big problem with HORNETS/WASPS especially when I catch fish and am trying to cook them for dinner. Some how they fine our camp and BAM!, they bring all the relatives.

[Anne H]

Yellow jackets - that's a good one! Boy, do I hate those guys.

[Mike Watters]

Although I voted (snakes) it's not so much that I "fear" them - I have a fairly reasonable concern for my kid's safety since a few are poisonous enough to do reasonable damage to a kid. The reason I selected them is that they have a tendency to lay VERY still either IN or NEAR enough to hiking paths that you can be on top of them before you know it (literally - stepping on one followed by the snake's retaliation is reasonable).

If I ever camped anywhere in Bear country - that's likely what I'd vote for though. I've got a pretty healthy respect for any animal that's willing to (and capable of) rip the door off a car to get a cracker.

My son however is freaked out by hornets. Specifically the ones that show up at a campground we've been to a couple times. Course, they are about an inch and a half long with retractable stingers that look to be about 1/4 inch long.

When the big kids were younger - they'd panic when they saw a horsefly.

When my daughter was much younger she'd run screaming away from "Spiders so small you couldn't see them".

mkw

[bonnie w]

I just can't resist but to throw this in. When I was a small child fishing wih my father near Whitehorse, I was bitten by a horsefly underneath my chin. The screams could be heard for miles I'm sure. Close by was an elderly Native woman with her husband. Although she couldn't speak English, she made the motions of putting ear wax on the sting. Amazing it really worked taking the sting away. Moral of the story don't clean your ears before going on a holiday.

[Brian B-P]

I wrestled with voting for the one most capable and/or likely to cause real harm ("What scares your the most"), and the one capable of the greatest annoyance.. and went with skunks as the latter. Bugs are, of course, more annoying in total, but for ability to wreck your day in a single event, skunks win. That smell just doesn't go away easily.

I have a healthy respect for the genuinely dangerous (bears being the only ones on the list that have any chance of actually encountering), and thus little fear of actually being hurt by them. For me, bears get a high score for level of damage, and a tiny score for probability, so I'm not worried.

I like coyotes; I spent a while one day in a Jasper National Park campground trying to get a decent picture of the local resident... but failed.