I have had my share of problems with animals over the years, especially animals that were in the wrong place.

I have also had a few problems with wildlife biologists, primarily because they were not in the right place either. Often these things took place simultaneously.

I first experienced the "disappearing biologist syndrome" when I was a brand-new conservation officer, fresh out of the State Police Academy.

It started simply enough; a radio call just as I was pulling into my driveway after a long day hiking in to remote trout ponds. I was dispatched to an amusement park because, "their sheep are loose." I took umbrage at this, asked why the wildlife staff was not going instead, and the reply was that they had all disappeared from the office.

Annoyed, I drove to the rear entrance of the park and found the caretaker, who looked to be about 110.

Seems the sheep had broken out of a box stall and were running amok - and he was just recently released from the hospital for his heart attack. Once again, I thought I was prepared. My partner was a N.Y. champion calf roper and he had been schooling me in the fine art of lassoing things. What a great time to try out my new lariat.

There was a long row of stalls with about a 10 foot lane between them and the high red and green painted board fence (topped with cheerful elves) that enclosed the park. The caretaker and his wife hiked to the end of this complex, chasing the sheep, which were odd-looking little scraggly things, down this lane. I hid behind the end of the building and roped them one at a time as they passed by.

Finally there was only one left.

I heard the hoof beats coming and decided to save the effort of getting the rope off the animal. Instead, since they were so little, I would just jump out and grab it. I jumped out and found myself confronted by a 250-pound, full-curl desert bighorn ram.

Said ram immediately dropped his head and rammed me, just below the gun belt, bending me over his back. I grabbed a handful of wool but he had the leverage.

We danced through the park in a series of great lurches, the speed of which depended upon whether my feet were on the ground or not. Fortunately I was able to tire him out by letting him ram me into every vertical object in the park until he was so winded I could drag him to the stall.

The colors that erupted on every inch of my body from the shoulder blades south, were truly spectacular. When I called back in service, it seems all the wildlife staff had coincidentally returned to the office and were anxiously waiting to hear how I made out.

That was neither my first nor last experience with non-native wildlife.

Just the other day I got a call from a fellow who wanted to report a strange cat. Interestingly, he did not report a "cougar." Jumping to no conclusions, he simply reported something larger than a housecat with tufts on its ears and an extremely long tail.

There are a few candidates, but the best suspect is a serval cat, a wild feline native to Africa. Not adapted to a temperate climate, this animal is unlikely to survive very long in cold weather, but in other areas of the country, they do just fine when they escape from captivity. This can be quite a problem, not only for the person who lost (or worse yet, intentionally released) the cat but for the rest of the native species in the area.

Invasive species make good news nowadays. The hot topics for the press lately seem to be plants and mollusks.

Eurasian milfoil and zebra mussels are going to close our waterways if we do not scrub every outboard motor with Clorox and toothbrushes. This is certainly a valid consideration but I find it amazing that one group of people can be so conscientious and another so oblivious.

A duck hunter, frozen after a day huddled in a blind, will stand in a driving sleet storm and carefully scrub every inch of his boat and trailer before driving home while an "animal lover" from Manhattan releases exotics on purpose and feels good about it.

Large felines gather a lot of attention and this area is especially prone to folklore about cougars. Tales and photoshopped pictures circulate continuously, often with a government plot component - "... my uncle's brother's girlfriend saw a DEC truck stocking cougars on West Mountain."

I have had to deal with a few cougars and in each case their origin was the same. Someone in Manhattan gets a cute 5 pound cougar kitten (they may be legally sold in a few states). This is fun until it becomes necessary to buy kitty litter in 55 gallon drums and bring a dozen raw chickens a day back to the apartment.

Then they pull a "born free" and release Fluffy to the wilderness, which for some reason they seem to think begins right around Exit 16 of the Northway. The animals then either head for Lake Desolation or Vermont.

If released in summer, they quickly starve. If it is more toward fall when the deer are moving and getting squashed on the highway, the roadkill keeps them going longer. One such starving refugee was found to have been defanged and declawed.

Cougars do not do so well around here. Neither do the various snakes. The bison and European boar did OK for a while. The wolves, coyotes, various canine hybrids and sometimes avian species also sometimes persist longer. Fortunately, our unforgiving winters usually help.

In balmier areas of the country, this is not the case and large exotics are becoming a huge threat, not only to native wildlife, but sometimes to humans as well. The big topic right now is the thousands of non-native snakes thriving in the Florida everglades. Everything from huge boas to Gaboon vipers are constricting and/or consuming everything from wintering songbirds to endangered key deer.

Exotic animals we are releasing have the potential to be huge problems.

Getting rammed by a bighorn ram in Lake George was, in retrospect, sort of funny but the family in a California suburb menaced by a pack of wolf-dog hybrids or the Midwest hikers who got thumped by an ostrich guarding its nest, are probably not as amused.

Bob Henke writes a regular Outdoors column for The Post-Star.