Monday, 1 February 2016

Wildlife Updates

I have to keep you informed on the flying squirrel activity in the house.  After the cupboard chewing, I was allowed to start feeding the flyers in the garage again to reduce their incentive to raid inside the house.  This has worked very well.  However, there have some interesting repercussions.  Instead of coming into the house to steal peanuts, they are now coming inside the house to hide the peanuts found in the garage.  I was doing the laundry this morning, and voila! a peanut fell out from the laundry basket.  Brian needed to wear his dress shoes last week, and found one uncomfortable.  The reason became apparent quickly.  I think we are now on an Easter peanut hunt.



This last weekend I had the marvelous opportunity to attend a weekend workshop on animal tracking in Algonquin Park.  A group of us were at a remote research station on 30,000 acres of truly wild park with no public access.  We had three instructors with the most immense knowledge of bush/nature lore I have ever seen.

We first started out learning about tracks and how to determine the direction of travel.  This area of land had a large marten population, and we quickly learned what their tracks looked like.  The tracks were everywhere, but to the disappointment of the guides, we never did see one.



On the other hand, we did see a moose and an otter playing on the ice.  The otters were active in the area, and although I did not get a picture of one, I did get a picture of one of their access holes in the ice.



We also got a good look at some beaver lodges, and learned how to tell if the lodge was active by the ice crystals formed around the breathing hole on top.



We were extremely fortunate in having warm weather although it meant more water around than we might expect, and some crossings of water were a bit more challenging than others.




We are getting warnings of some very active weather in two days, so the next pictures may be those of snow.  I know, I promised you that last time, but it is mostly melted.  Perhaps soon!

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