Wildlife Photographer

By Brittany Mangus

I love nature. Below are some photos that I've taken over the years. I seem to have a knack for attracting wildlife. This should further the accuracy of my diagnosis of "Snow White" that I received from the online Disney Princess Test.


This is a bull moose we saw near Bear Lake.

This is a coyote we saw near Brighton.

This is my cat (Parley P. Cat), taunting a pair of blue birds. (The blue birds are wildlife!)

Mule Deer, Book Cliffs, UT

Que with a moose near Brighton.

Another shot of that same moose.

This is a (small) fish I caught last month. I probably shouldn't include pictures of wildlife that I've killed, but what the heck. Otherwise I couldn't post this picture:

This is Chuck. Well, this was Chuck. That is, before The Incident. (Don't worry, I don't have any "After" photos.) Anyway, Chuck was the chipmunk that wandered into our house in Ephraim. My roommates and I tried to herd him out of our house and back into the wild, but we lost him. Three days later we found him again; smashed between my box springs and my mattress. There is nothing like realizing you've not only squashed the life out of a rodent, but that you've slept with its rotting corpse in your bed for 2 nights. I love nature.

Doggin' Bears

By Brittany Mangus

This weekend my husband Que and I went camping with my parents. We went to a lake where we fished and Que swam. "Swam" as in across the lake (and back). I think he needs to taper off on the time he spends watching the Olympics. A canoe of people even stopped him and tried to rescue him.





We went to a campsite that was in Bear Country. And, while we were there, a camper called in a bear sighting- which was right in our campground.



Fortunately, the bear was caught:





It's a good thing the Park Rangers and the Forest Service guys (who came prepared with their bear cages and tranquilizer guns) had better vision than that of the camper that Madison frightened. Otherwise, poor Madison would have been tranked and released into the wild.



Unfortunately, word didn't get out so quickly that the angry, blood-thirsty, 200 lb. bear was actually a happy, 90 lb. golden retriever. The scare caused a mass-exodus from the campground.


To City Slicker Campers: Bears don't come in orange. Nor are they into wearing jingly dog tags. Madison is however, fairly large and hairy, so I guess I will have to give her a haircut and put her back on a diet. There is nothing like being mistaken for a bear to motivate you to lose weight.

Deer Husband

By Brittany Mangus

Hunting freaks me out. I couldn't even kill the praying mantis that was mortally wounded by our garage door. On the other hand, my husband, his family and all of my attorneys are blood-thirsty hunters. They're kinda like Noah, in that they seem to have the goal of collecting 2 of every animal. (I said kinda like Noah.) They hunt everything: Deer, wild pigs, turkeys, elk, grouse, rabbits, geese and swans. Swans!?
Hunting may freak me out, but I'm not exactly anti-gun. I'll go shooting with Que's family. We annually buy pumpkins from a local patch the day after Halloween, take the pumpkins to an undisclosed location and blow the shivvy out of them. (Pardon my language.) Bustin' a cap in a defenseless pumpkin is about as close as I come to killing something with a gun.

I've gone on hunting trips with Que and his family before. I took the above photo of this doe while my dear husband was out trying to fill her deer husband full of arrows. This year I decided to sit it out. Even though the thought of hunting hurts my heart, I am strangely conflicted about it. I personally don't want to hunt anything (besides pumpkins), but I don't want to stop other people from hunting either. I find myself actually hoping Que gets a deer; I just hope I don't have to see it. (The first year we were married, Que got a deer and left it strung-up in our carport; I walked outside and saw it.)
My attorneys went on a goose hunting trip to Canada earlier this year. In honor of that, I doctored this Far Side cartoon with my lead attorney, Bruce's name and put it on our office bulletin board. I'm pretty sure this is what Bruce will be doing as soon as he gets to heaven. (In case you can't read the caption, it says "You sure you're supposed to be doin' that, Bruce?")

Ironically, I feel like I can put up with things like decapitated deer heads and large dead fish (with teeth!) mounted on the walls. (The above Alaskan salmon lives in our law office.) That being said, I have but one rule: No stuffed birds. No geese, grouse, chucker, owls, swans or sparrows. I don't want my house (or my workplace) to look like The Bates Motel.