Geese What? Goslings Galore! (part 2)

Fun with the geese! This is part 2 of our short video of all those geese at Sasamat Lake. About 24 of them in total, though it's hard to count all those goslings running around. These came in various sizes according to when they hatched.

Geese What? Goslings Galore! (part 1)

While walking on the shores of beautiful Sasamat Lake, we had a delightful surprise - three families of Canada geese with a total of eighteen goslings, in three different age groups (small, medium and large, but all of them still fuzzy and flightless). The peeping was something to hear. I already love this place, and now we have an incentive to come back. These geese are smart to reproduce now, as Sasamat Lake is overrun with people in July and August. We don't usually go near it then. Most years we don't see goslings at all, but this is the second time this spring that we've seen a lot of them at once (ten at Como Lake).

Goosey Goosey Goslings!

Itty-bitty, fuzzy-wuzzy DUCKLINGS!

Such goings-on at the Duck Park! The Duck Park isn't really the Duck Park at all, but is properly called Coquiitlam Town Centre Park, and we walk around it at least once a week. The jewel of the park is Lafarge Lake, a former gravel-pit,  trout-stocked and serene. One day we discovered a tiny cove full of greedy ducks who were so acclimatized to humans that they literally walked right up out of the water and stood 2 feet away from us expecting to be fed. Soon we were saying "Let's go to the duck park" to each other.  For retirees like us, it was a cheap way to get out and have fun.

Then. . . come spring, the flock thinned out. There were fewer and fewer ducks waiting for us. Bummer! Then I had a thought. What if the ducks had other things to do in the spring?

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An incredible rescue

This is one of the coolest things I've ever seen. Note how the elephants work as a team to rescue the baby from the water. He's too slippery to pick up, so two of them gently herd him along to shore. Then he gets stuck in mud, and one of the elephants levels the ground out with its foot so he can walk. Elephants are amazing.

Bugle boy

"I tip a wapiti" is a perfect palindrome, and the core of a much longer one I've lost track of. (A palindrome is a large arena full of one-humped camels, or Alaskan ex-governors or something.) Though I have no desire to tip one of these magnificent creatures (after all, the service is terrible!), I wouldn't mind if one of them would tip me, or at least blow his bugle for me.

On our recent driving trip through the Rocky Mountains, the bad faerie rubber-stamped us, and all sorts of stuff went wrong. Nobody died, nothing like that, but still, it was stuff. A long-anticipated visit to a world-class dinosaur museum in Drumheller, Alberta, was aborted by a sign that read, "Closed on Mondays." (Mondays? . . . Mondays???)

A long construction detour stuck us in six-inch mud ruts and coated our vehicle in thick brown slime. "Falling-off-the-bone" ribs from a promising roadside restaurant had the taste and consistency of shoe leather, and the accompanying chicken breast had been precooked, frozen, doused with bottled barbecue sauce, then shoved in the microwave for 20 minutes. (Someone should write a book about disappointing restaurant meals: the prickly, angry sense of being ripped off, the powerlessness of not being able to fix it, the sensory anticipation raised and then dashed, the dismay and even shame at trusting that this place would live up to its promise. Not to mention good old-fashioned visceral disgust at being faced with inedible glop, or - worse - stuff that's edible, but only just.)

Nevertheless, there were moments, Rocky Mountain rainbows glimpsed: and I have always loved rainbows, I admit it. In Banff, we sighted some undersized male elk by the side of the road: like fat deer with bigger horns. Knowing they were out of the running, they sparred half-heartedly for the tourists. But magic lay in wait. After a too-big dinner in the enchanted town of Jasper, we were driving back to our chalet (OK, it was a fourplex, but still very cozy), and saw cars backed up and pulled over.

"Shit," Bill said. "More construction."

But it wasn't. Breathless travellers had their telephotos trained on a huge bull wapiti, with a rack on him like I'd never seen before. He made a show of wariness, his monarch head jerking up from time to time to interrupt his grazing. But there was no doubt that he owned the patch of ground he stood on.

Then he tipped back his wapiti head, opened his mouth and broadcast an unearthly - what was it? A goblin playing an oboe? The smell of rushing wild streams and fresh-cut cedar rendered into sound? A squealing upsurge of harmonics the colour of the aurora, designed to grasp and pull the ovaries of bawling elk-virgins?

Whatever it was, whale-squeal or loon-shiver, his primal music made my hair stand on end. When Mr. Elk casually sauntered across the highway, stopping once to bugle again, we were rapt, rooted, transfixed, and swearing a blue streak because we hadn't bothered to bring the camera to dinner. (Nothing good would ever happen on this trip, would it?) So, no video, no majestic stills, nothing. This would have to be the one that got away.

How does a mere ungulate (how I love the word!) produce such virtuosic woodwind arpeggios? It takes Tibetan monks 50 years to learn how to chant in overtones. And here this big ol' fur rug on hooves is doing it with no study at all. It's artless art. If Felix Mendelssohn breathed into a glass clarinet in a state of total weightlessness, it still wouldn't come close: wouldn't auger the soul in the same excruciatingly lovely way.

Wapiti

i tipa

wipitika

a tika tipa tika

wapitapi

tikatipa

wapataki

tipa

tipa

tippa

tip -

. . . ahhh.