Mr. Shiny Shell: TURTLE stretched out on log

See how little it takes to make me happy? A shiny-shelled turtle lazing on a log is all I need. I have recaptured the sense of wonder I knew as a child, when I would spend hours in nature and never get bored. I would have been enraptured with all the wildlife I am privileged to see now - just a few minutes'  drive away, and we're practically in the wilds of B. C. To have  a bird eat out of my hand - I never would have dreamed!

💚I LOVE TURTLES!💚

Some truly outstanding video of three huge turtles sunning themselves on a log in Lake Lafarge, Coquitlam. 

COOT FEET!

This is the first time I got a good look at a coot's feet, which are big spongy things that are nothing like the feet of ducks or herons or anything else. They're just weird! But I like them, and I like the way they disappear into the water, the conviction with which they do it, the - commitment. The head goes down first, then - thwip! 

I haven't posted too many of my hundreds of nature videos - some of which I think are quite good - just because I seem to get side-tracked. This is all that is left of a "series" which just never happened. The videos are still on YouTube, they haven't gone anywhere, at least until they close my account for piracy (10-second clips of movies that have been in the public domain for 50 years). So my series will no doubt happen eventually. Or not.

Cormorants diving in LaFarge Lake

Increasingly, I find my peace, if I find any, walking around lakes. Now that I am aware of birds, it's amazing what that bird's-eye view can reveal. For example: there may have been cormorants in LaFarge Lake before, but we never saw them. Cormorants aren't fresh-water birds for the most part; they hang around the coast, probably because the fishing there is easy. But LaFarge is stocked with fish for sport, and right now those fish would probably be right-sized for the cormorant's diving.

Another thing they do - and this almost freaks people out, it looks so strange - is perch on a rock and stretch out their enormous wings and wave them gently, as if drying them. I hope to get a better video than the one below, taken at a great distance, but that one at least gives you an idea.

Their wings look batlike and a little frightening. There is something of the pelican about the cormorant, something of the heron and something of the seagull, and yet what they remind me of the most is the dodo bird.

Photographing these marvels is tricky, because without any warning at all they disappear into a straight-down dive, coming up somewhere quite else. They stay down an amazingly long time. Lately we've been treated to various different deep-lake divers, most notably the hooded merganser (and were THEY there all along, for years and years, and we never saw them?). In full hoodedness, the male's heads look like small china dinner plates, very white and flat.

I know this is only the beginning of my birded-ness, and I find myself literally running after them with my camera like some demented old-lady birder crashing through the underbrush. Even the back yard is exciting. It's different every day, and we've had some spectacular moments - a couple of months ago I was swarmed with blackbirds wanting to eat out of my hand, and a year or so ago when everything was iced over, all the birds congregated on the open water on Burnaby Lake. I've never seen so many different kinds of birds in one place, at one time.

The orphan duckling

I love seeing and filming the first ducklings of spring, but I was saddened to see this little guy running around peeping frantically. I am almost certain he was separated from his mother, or she lost track of him (not hard to do looking after 24 babies at a time). Ducklings can swim and feed themselves immediately upon hatching, but they have little sense of direction on their own, and have to be herded and tended to keep predators away. A duckling this tiny would be a tender morsel for a crow.

My hope is that he or she found a new flock or clutch or whatever you call those darting swarms of golden fluffballs in the lake. If Bosley can make it with a flock of mallards (I deal with Bosley in another post), maybe this teeny one can rejoin the duck race. 

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!

Christmas waterfall

The most amazing light display at Lafarge Lake was the waterfall, reflected in the lake. I've never seen anything like this. I want to go back just to see this again and get a better shot of it.

Christmas Wonderland

This video does not begin to reflect the beauty of the light display at Lake Lafarge. We nearly froze to death, but it was worth it. No longer do we need to drive all the way in to Stanley Park to see an impressive light display! The reflections in the water were particularly beautiful.

Mystery duck

The duck mystery deepens. For years now, Bill and I have been walking around Como Lake in Coquitlam - a very pleasant alternative to the "duck park" that has been bulldozed to make way for a Third Reich-scale cement amphitheatre that will blast loud rock music night and day. Obviously, all the wildlife within a 5-mile radius has fled. 

But we still have Como Lake! We noticed some time ago that there are some pretty strange ducks amongst the mallards and wood ducks. This one, for example. This is a very big duck, almost the size of a goose, and he is brown-and-white  (several different shades of brown, from quite dark, almost coffee bean, to cocoa brown). Then we discovered, to our delight, a second brown-and-white duck, somewhat smaller than this one, likely a female. And yet, strangely enough, we've never seen them together.

I made this gif from an eight-second-long YouTube video labelled "Ducks at Como Lake". I know it's the same duck. Not my video, of course. There was no information with it, not even a description. This is not much help.

Do you think I can find ANYTHING on this duck, or on any duck remotely close to it? If I google "brown-and-white duck", I get professional photos that are labelled "brown-and-white duck". They appear to be of barnyard animals, but I can't be sure because there is no information with them at all.

NOBODY knows anything about these two ducks (or are there more? Or will there be babies?), which both intrigues me and drives me crazy. It's possible these are domestic ducks that have gone native, or whatever-it-is they do when they answer the call of the wild. Or maybe they're hybrids - it's just crazy enough. 

There were beavers living in LaFarge Lake (in the famous "duck park" which has now been paved, like Paradise in the Joni Mitchell song), and no one could explain that either. Nine beavers, to be exact, two adults and seven kits. Seems like some fever dream, except that there were nineteen trees felled or seriously gnawed in the park - we've seen some of them - and many still have wire mesh wrapped around the trunks. Beavers in a lake is no big deal, right? How about beavers living in a STONE QUARRY in the middle of a major city, in the residential area right next to a community college?

To make it even stranger, we saw an otter in the lake one day which scared the bejeezus out of the ducks. We've never seen them do this before, but they all, to a duck, beat it out of the water and just huddled in a line along the shore until the otter was well away from them. It swam around on its back like they all do. No way can there be ONE otter in a lake. Or a stone quarry.

Today we went to a place in Burnaby called Piper Spit and saw ducks and ducks and ducks: a mother duck with THIRTEEN babies, so newly-hatched their fluff was wet even when they were sitting on the ground. And we saw a pair of Canada geese with goslings so new they still had that pollen-y-looking yellow stuff on them, almost like vernix on a newborn.

One of the geese kept kinking its neck and bobbing its head at us. We knew why, of course. We were too close to its young. So I said to Bill: Do you know how you can tell it's a Canada goose?

Because it stands on guard? (Moan. It's too late at night.)

Special bonus news item from the Tri-City News!!

They may be one of Canada’s most iconic animals, but the beaver is not welcome in a popular park in Coquitlam.

City officials are once again dealing with the large rodents at Lafarge Lake after the animals appeared in late fall.

While the city isn’t sure how many beavers are in the park, Lanny Englund, the city’s urban forestry and parks services manager, noted a process is underway to have them removed and relocated.

The problem with the beavers is they damage trees and dig tunnels, which can undermine the trails around the lake and cause a hazard.

“It does seem to happen on and off and eventually it gets to the point where the impact is too great,” Englund told the Tri-Cities NOW, noting the city experienced a similar situation with beavers a couple of years ago.

“Town Centre Park is such a high use [park],” he said.

“There’s too much risk allowing them to do their thing.”

In the short term, the city has wrapped trees close to the lake in a fencing wire to protect them from the animals.

The city has also brought in a contractor to live-trap the beavers and relocate them to another part of the province.

It’s unclear how long it will take to trap and remove the animals from the lake.

Meanwhile, the big mystery is exactly how the beavers made the lake their home in the first place.

Englund noted the lake is connected to Hoy Creek and the Coquitlam River by underground pipes, but suggested it would difficult for the beavers to travel through them.

There is also a small creek in the northwest corner of Town Centre Park that has been home to beavers, but it would force the animals to cross over land.

Englund said an even more unlikely scenario is that someone intentionally put the beavers in the lake.
     

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Itty-bitty, fuzzy-wuzzy ducklings: DUCKLINGS ON LAND!

Part 2 of our Duckling Adventure! The fluffies preen themselves on shore.

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