Showing posts with label Hinterland Who's Who. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hinterland Who's Who. Show all posts

Friday, May 19, 2017

They're back: and still kicking ass!





Beavers have been an ongoing concern - read, "plague" - on Lafarge Lake for many years now. This is a small lake in the centre of Coquitlam, a seething urban community which for some reason attracts all manner of wildlife. But beavers aren't particularly welcome here when all they do is chaw down every tree in the vicinity and chew up branches all over the place to make their twiggy, branchy lodges.

I wasn't even sure what a beaver lodge looked like, until I saw this. I knew beavers had moved in, been relocated, and come back, many times already. There are even articles about it in the local papers. And it was obvious something was going on when I saw that wire mesh around the bottoms of most of the trees. 




Then this! Proof positive that the Lafarge Lake beavers have made a triumphant return. It was actually pretty cool, and now I'm having fantasies of seeing a real beaver, which I never have in the wild before. (And I call myself a Canadian!) And a baby beaver - I think I'd die with joy. They're pretty secretive, and they must do most of their work during off hours, because dams and lodges seem to spring up overnight. But there is babymaking going on in there, make no mistake.




Deep inside the burrows of the nightmare (to the Park Board, which is getting sick of setting out humane traps and relocating beavers a few hundred miles away, only to have them come back in a month), we can see the inner workings of the lodge. It's cleverly constructed so that you can only access it from underwater. Unless you're the Park Board, carrying dynamite.




But they'd better not! WHO could blow up a baby beaver (also known as a kit)? You'd have to have a heart of cold, hard steel.

For more information, see the aged but still relevant blog post below (which got over 6000 views when I first put it up! Still trying to figure that one out.)

Beavers kick polar bear ass!



Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Hinterland Who's Who





































NOTE. There are LOTS of parodies of these on YouTube, but I decided not to post any of them, not even the SCTV one which is sublime. I like the originals. They evoke. . . something. Some quality of innocence which I perhaps never had. I've been on this "if you grew up in Chatham" Facebook page. . . in it, rather, disappearing into it, and connecting with people who knew my dead brother and my estranged sister and my thuglike Dad who was a pillar of the community. Sometimes I see my own face staring back at me from some other lifetime. It's like something out of the Twilight Zone. 

It's quite a weird feeling, unsettling, and addictive. Sometimes you need the hinterland.