Fauna: Fuzzy long-eared creatures

Going out for winter strolls in the forest is so much fun. Not only does the snow make everything look clean and bright, it adds a pretty trimming to the trees and makes it is easy to visibly detect the presence of the hidden forest dwellers. 

Bunny tracks.    

By the look of the track spacing, it looks like this guy was hopping about leisurely. Apparently when they are running, their hops can be spaced up to 3 m apart. No wonder they can run up to 45 km/h. When I run, my gait spacing is probably only between 50-100 cm.

Hey, bunny, bunny, look at me.  

Good boy! 

As you can see, this one has turned almost completely white for the winter to camouflage with the snow. I was surprised I was able to get so many good photos of this little guy, because being a city girl, I'm not exactly swift and quiet on the feet and was making quite a bit of noise, especially with my puffy snow pants which makes crinkling noises distinctive of the waterproof fabrics. It turns out, it had heard me after all. Freezing in place is one of their strategy when they senses danger. They take advantage of their camouflaging ability first, to access the situation, before running.

Fun facts about the snowshoe hare:
-Their toes can spread out to increase its surface area, so they won't sink in the snow.
-They live in the coniferous areas of the Boreal forest, and are found in all the provinces of Canada.
-They can have up to four litter per year, with a gestation period of only 36 days.

Hare, like moose and other game I will write about in later posts, is a much appreciated food source here. For a city girl,  seeking food always meant going to the grocery store, selecting what I wanted and handing over money. I wouldn't be any good at turning to my environment for food. The skills I have acquired at school are only valuable within four walls. Here in the rural, most families have a culture of passing on their food source seeking knowledge to their children, from skills on hunting, trapping, fishing, berry picking, to cultivating.

Game meat is an important food source for some people, especially those who are of lower income. These people may include those retired, but still healthy, active and capable, or people seasonally employed, or even just people who didn't have the opportunity to advance their education, and thus do not have the skills sought out by the modernized workforce. The irony is that, food source seeking skills are more valuable then my "employable skills" if a disaster were to ever happen. Another reason that catching your own game may be more viable for someone with lower income is that meat at the store is expensive. The price factors in all the labour added to process the meat before it reaches the store display. Processes like bloodletting, skinning, butchering, packaging, shipping, storage and refrigeration until sale all add to the cost of the meat. In addition to paying the cost of processing, food seems to be more expensive in places that are further away  from urban centres. The higher cost is most likely due to shipping, and also with a smaller population, there is a smaller profit margin and businesses need to adjust the prices in order to make it worthwhile to continue offering their service to the community.

Some of my colleagues hunt hares with a bow and arrow! I can't believe that there are still people that hunt with bow and arrow, since riffles are pretty easy to access now that it is mass manufactured. The bow and arrow is probably more for sport. The advantage of hunting by bow and arrow in Newfoundland is that the licence to hunt hare is two weeks longer than the license hunting with gun. The season for hare game is from September to early February. In addition to shooting, people also set up snares.

My colleagues were saying, they need to take me out on the snowmobile and introduce me to Newfie boil up, which involves matches, wood, water, a tin can and a snare. Now I could imagine the use for a tin can and all the other items, but a snare? I had read about snares in The Hunger Games, but I had never seen one or understood how it worked. It turns out a snare is simply a piece of wire, and it would be used as a handle to the tin can. The snare is twisted into a loop where one end is free to slide along the wire. As an animal runs through the snare, they will tug at the loop, making it smaller and smaller as they try to run away.

Here are two examples of rabbit snares.

 Source: schoolofhowto.com "Rabbit Snare"

Source: schoolofhowto.com "Rabbit Snare"

Snowshoe hares are apparently pretty easy to trap. They always travel through the same network of  trail ways, which become really obvious in the winter as they leave behind their tracks in the snow. You would think they would adapt to hide their trails network, but in fact they work hard at keeping the trail maintained.  They keep the trail clear of obstruction in case they needed to escape from predators.

Hunters tie bright coloured ribbons above the snare so that they will remember the location when they come back to check their trap. They need to check their snares everyday to make sure that other animals do not get to it first.

Now why hasn't this bunny changed colours?!

Just last week-end, I bumped into another bunny. Except, this one confused the city girl in me a lot, because from my first photo shoot with the snowshoe hare, I knew that their fur should have all changed to white by now. When I went back to work, I told my colleagues that I saw a brown bunny. They didn't believe me, since they should be white by now. So I showed them my photo as proof. They all looked at it and said it must have been a house pet that escaped, because there is no way that is the wild ones. Later when I was telling the same story to some of my curling friends, it turns out, that bunny is in fact a tamed rabbit, and had escaped two months prior as one of the family was moving away. Since then, my friend Lorna has found it wandering her house, and she has taken to leaving out food for it whenever she can, because the poor thing chose the harshest month to escape into the wild. Lorna hopes that eventually it'll learn how to find its own food. Other are less optimistic. They are sure some other animal will find it before spring.

Fun facts comparing tamed rabbits and the wild hare:

-Hares are born with all their fur and their eyes open, while rabbits are born fur-less and blinded. 

-Baby hares are capable of hopping about right at their birth.  

Poor bunny, he is doomed, since its specie was not meant to survive in the wild. :( At least it would have tasted liberty.

Freezing rain day

So school is canceled again today, this time for freezing rain. I look out the window, but it doesn't look all too bad. It seemed to me that they are really sensitive to weather here. It turns out, there are more reasons than the freezing rain for closing the school. The schools in Springdale are feeder schools for five other communities up to 30 km away and where the nearest village is still 20 km away. With freezing rain, it is too dangerous for the buses to run, so without the buses, there wouldn't be any students in school, aside from a dozen who live close enough to walk.

View from my bedroom window. 

Looking over Hall's Bay in front of our house.

Hall's Bay

Biking in Newfoundland: King's Point, Rattling Brook

Westbound at the side of the Trans Canada Highway
 outside of the visitor centre at the Springdale junction. 

Saturday was sunny, and a had high of 22 degrees Celsius (the annual maximum high here), so I decided to do some exploring on bike. I didn't really have a plan and had just made note of some of the surrounding towns that I could visit. My first stop was the Springdale visitor centre next to the Trans Canada Highway to pick up a town map, and to try out this much talked about Newfoundland meal, the jigg's dinner.

On my way out of town, I had crossed Kelly, my colleague and some of her friends coming back in town on bikes. They saw me heading out of town a little just before noon. In a way I like the small town community, because if I don't make it back after a solo ride, there is always someone who will notice. Friends back home have already urged that I purchase another cell phone; except the reality is that in between areas of civilization, one is lucky to find reception. The surrounding towns being smaller than Springdale are not serviced by any mobile phone company.  

A RV park at the centre of King's Point next to their hiking trail.
This park is large enough to service about two dozen trailers  

After the jigg's dinner, and chatting with various locals all intrigued by my presence, I decide I would only try out a short bike ride that afternoon. The nearest town is King's Point, and according to the road sign it is only 12 km away.  (Follow me on a map.) Having done some long distances before, not to mention a 30km ride on my first day biking with the women's group, I decide 12 km was doable. Little did I know that the 30 km the ladies took me on towards Little Bay was not representative of the terrain in the region, because the route towards King's Point, had two large hills! The ladies had laughed when they heard about my mistaken assumption. 

I saw a sign saying Township of King's Point,
and followed this gravel path,  only it lead me to a quarry. 

From King's Point, the tourist map had said I only needed to go another 5km before reaching Rattling Brook and the Falls, so naturally I had to go visit this place.  

At the foot of Rattling Brook Falls.

The 800 feet trail leading up to the look out for Rattling Brook Falls is as much of an attraction as the falls. 

The forest floor had such rich texture. In a way it was enchanted,
because the thick layers of moss looked so  inviting.

At the top of the trail with a view of Green Bay.

Near the very end of the town of Rattling Brook is a general store called Joshua Toms and Sons owned by a sweet old lady named Dulcie Toms who has been running the store for 50 years. (I was going to call it a corner store, because that is what we have in the cities, but in small towns, these are more appropriately called general stores, because they supply the locals with most of the necessity.) This old fashion general store full of assorted knick-knack attracted the camera crew of "Land and Sea", a CBC documentary on Newfoundland people, culture and life. http://www.cbc.ca/landandseanl/2012/07/dulcies-in-the-store.html 

Dulcie and I at the counter.
Note the display in the background.

So even though I regret not having had any time to get out of the city this summer (to get in touch with nature), this move to Newfoundland is making up for all of it. Joy's place where I am boarding at feels like being at a cottage, and just minutes out of town, I am out with the trees and birds (and moose and bear for that matter, but I have not encountered those yet!). Here are some photos from my bike ride that day.

I was never the type to take photos, because with my inherited 3.0 megapixel camera, there was always someone with a better camera than I at what ever social gathering, and always  someone with more patience to upload the photos afterwards, so I never developed the habit for taking photos. However, since I was riding solo this day, I had brought along my camera, and the beeping of my camera signaling the completion of a shot was oddly comforting, to a point I think I might now even consider it a friend. 

While stretching my feet, I serendipitous noticed
this cute little motivating phrase on the tongue of my biking shoe.
"Always lead, never follow."

   

Day 1 in Newfoundland

Hi everyone,

So instead of trying to update everyone by e-mail, I decided to start a blog to document my work year in Newfoundland, and all can read it at their leisure and comment if they desire.

This blog entry is a modified version of an e-mail.

Day1:
Newfoundland, here I am. It was an eventful day. First off, our car broke down on the way to the airport, so we had to call a cab to pick us up from the side of the highway. Thankfully, my mom made us leave early enough that I arrived at the airport in good time despite the incident. Once on the plane, we were about to take off, when there was an announced medical emergency, and we had to turn around to drop off the ill passenger. That delayed us an hour and a half. Thankfully, the teacher I am working and living with, as most Nuffies, is as relaxed as ever, and was not bothered at all by the delay. It was another hour and a half drive before we finally arrived into Springdale. 

Our yard.

I have a great living situation. The place I am staying at over looks the coast on the south side, with a view of a chain of mountains in the distant background. I have yet to learn the names of those mountains. My room is quite large, furnished with romantic white dresser and drawers, and covered in flowery wall paper.  My room is also pre-furnished with a lot of angels figurines. I guess they can look over me. We also have a self-sufficient black cat named Black Beauty, which I am still unsure if I might be semi-allergic to.

View from our porch.

I haven't had the energy to unpack, nor check up on my bike. I live in town and am fortunate to be only a 5-10 minute walk to most amenities, no different than what I am use to in back home and in Toronto and Montreal. The only amenity I have missed so far are the local coffee shops. So far I only know of one coffee shop, and that is Tim Hortons which is near the edge of town. (The Tim Hortons is one of the town's main attraction and dare I say pride.) There are two grocery stores (which open from 9am-9pm!), two thrift store, one clothes department store, one Sears, one Subway, one chicken fast food chain named Mary Browns, which is apparently really popular in Newfoundland, I think two pizza place, one cinema, and two banks (Bank of Montreal and Bank of Nova Scotia), neither of which is my bank. After having lived in Ontario, Quebec and now Newfoundland, if I were to reconsider opening an account with another bank, the Bank of Montreal wins for having a good spread of service across Canada.

Bo Jo's next to the Salvation Army thrift store on Main St.

Across the street from Bo Jo's; two different looking worlds.

I am such an ignorant city girl, because I realize, I probably should have taken in consideration friends' advice on rural Canada and bought some all terrain bike tires while I was still in a big city. The main roads are paved, however when a car comes, the towns' people recommend that bikes squeeze over on to the gravel shoulder until the car has passed. Also most side roads to various residential areas are only paved in gravel. The nearest bike shop is two hours away in Corner Brook, and it turns out, it is advisable to call the shop in advance to verify that the sought out item is in fact in-stock, or that it needs to be pre-ordered by the shop before you arrive. Another reality of rural Newfoundland is that apparently there is a Walmart one hour away in Grand Falls, but that one would be lucky to find what one desired in-stock since the instant that stock arrives, the stock is said to be consumed at great speed by everyone else who have equally patiently been waiting for it.

Neat Newfoundland fact: It was already supper time when I arrived. They eat supper around 5pm. Breakfast is in the morning, dinner is at noon, and lunch is a snack right before bed! If I get invited for a meal, I need to make sure I have the meal time straight!