Of Owls,Weasels,Seals and Racoons

This week, a mission of desk clearing. By internet and conversation, a few minor matters have been piling up. I thought I’d deal with some of them.

Owls in the city 

barred owl in Woodlawn

Since we ran Ed Devine’s photo of a barred owl outside his Upper Sackville home, people have asked about owls in the city. The photo sent in by a Woodlawn resident was also a barred owl, the most common species in the province, and from what people told me, it’s likely so were other sightings.

Director Hope Swinimer of the Hope for Wildlife Society says owls are actually not that uncommon in urban habitats. Every year her organization deals with injured owls from city settings, some even from central Halifax, and not all are barred owls. A great horned owl was recently found in downtown Bedford and a few winters ago, a snowy owl was rescued in old Halifax.

Swinimer says anything that draws mice and rats, such as bird feeders, pet food and garbage, will be followed by owls, even where urban road traffic can be a major hazard.

“We’re creating a perfectly good habitat for wild animals,” Swinimer says. “but we’re setting them up.”

The idea that owls and cities is a new combination shows lack of knowledge of mankind's past.  Where humans gathered, always was there trash.  With garbage came rodents, and owls were close behind.  Check writings from ancient Greece and Rome.

Yes, We Have Weasels!

uninvited Meagher's Grant guest

I’m still getting reaction to my piece on weasels in people’s houses, mostly from people with weasels in their houses. I especially enjoyed the Facebook message from Meagher’s Grant thanking me for identifying what the sender had just encountered.

“I spent the last hour chasing out of the house a little intruder who met me at the door when I got home,” was the message. It was accompanied by this blurry phone photo. Given the speed of a weasel, any photo at all is remarkable.

Grey Seal Pup

The seal pup rescued recently from the downtown Halifax waterfront was a grey seal. That’s unusual. Most seals in this area are harbour seals. Occasionally, northern ice will bring a harp seal pup to coastal Nova Scotia, but not that often. Grey seals’ best known habitat is Sable Island.

This one had several puncture wounds and was severely underweight, but in the care of Hope for Wildlife is improving.  See for yourself:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XrX7hSZ5dk

As usual, wildlife workers have put out alerts to people who think seals need to be rescued. It is very normal, more so when there is no sea ice, for seals to haul themselves up on beaches to rest. They should be left alone, even the pups. Unless they are obviously injured, they do not need help. 

Early Racoons

Spring appears to be early, at least for racoons. On Feb. 26, Hope for Wildlife got its first call of the year about a newborn litter. Meanwhile on Facebook, a report of a very fat racoon crawling out of a local Tim Horton’s dumpster.

NS Eagle Population Survived DDT Scare, Flourished In Past 50 Years


 It’s the time of year when bald eagles get restless. Many that spent winter on the coastlines and estuaries of Nova Scotia remember their traditional nesting grounds in Cape Breton or even further north to Newfoundland. By the first weeks of March, they will be moving.

 

Bald eagles at the Sheffield Mills Eagle Festival

When I was younger, it was rare to see a summer eagle in Nova Scotia south of Cape Breton. The DDT tragedy of the 1950s extirpated bald eagles from most of the Atlantic seaboard of North America. Cape Breton Island stood as the southernmost refuge.

As the conservation pendulum swung, birds from there repopulated the rest of this province as well as several American states. The scope of the northward migration these past few years is homage to the protection highlands north of the causeway gave this species half a century ago.

For those who don’t remember the DDT crisis, or never heard of it, it came in the aftermath of the Second World War. DDT was a chemical used to spray battle zones infected with malaria and typhus carried by biting insects. After the war, it became the main insecticide for agriculture, winning a Swiss chemist a 1948 Nobel Prize for refining its use.

By the mid-1950s, however, people realized that bald eagles had disappeared from the lower 48 American states and many parts of southern Canada, and species of hawks were also vanishing. When scientists began to close ranks with bird watchers, it was found many songbird species were also declining.



Eggshells of wild birds were getting thinner and many either broke from the parent’s weight or didn’t hatch. DDT in the ecosystem was judged to be the cause. In the case of bald eagles, fish and smaller birds ate insects sprayed with DDT and concentrated the harmful chemicals in their bodies. When eagles ate them, the concentration increased again.

It was American author Rachel Carson’s 1962 book “Silent Spring” that first conveyed this information to the public in a deeply disturbing way. I was a young journalist in first year university when I read it, and I remember “Silent Spring” as one of the few books of my lifetime that thoroughly shocked me.

Carson’s writing is widely credited with starting the world environmental movement, and changes resulted, if slowly. By 1972, the use of DDT had been banned in the USA. It took Canada another 13 years to follow suit.

Things have changed in Nova Scotia since then. After ice-out, there is rarely a day when I don’t see an eagle from my Waverley home. Whatever the cause, the bald eagle has gone from rare to regular in my lifetime.

That’s something I’m grateful for.



It's a winter of weasels, says Hope for Wildlife

One jumped to a table top and swiped a sandwich from a little girl’s hands. Another made a tea towel drawer its home and came out at night to steal cat food.

Weasels have a reputation as nasty, fearless little creatures, but until I talked recently with Hope Swinimer of the Hope for Wildlife Society, I’d never heard of this sort of behaviour. Until this winter, neither had Swinimer.

“Every winter, I get calls on squirrels in people’s houses. This year it’s really weird. It’s not squirrels. I’m getting dozens of calls about weasels in people’s homes,” she explains. “It appears that for some strange reason, they just want to live inside this year.”

Swinimer says that every weekend, calls come in about house weasels, and people’s reactions to them differ widely.

“Some are like ‘Get this thing out of here’. Others say ‘I’m really enjoying this. It’s truly amazing to watch this animal ‘. People either hate it or are kind of enjoying it”, says Swinimer.

This past weekend was the first time someone called wanting to kill a visiting weasel. Most people are only looking for information. Hope for Wildlife is a wildlife rescue and rehabilitation society, not a pest control service.

For the size of its reputation both in science and folklore, the weasel is really a very small animal. In Nova Scotia, we have the short-tailed weasel averaging 30cm in length and weighing some 70 grams. It is brown and yellow in the summer and white with a black-tipped tail in the winter. The white pelts are called ermine, and for many centuries they have been the fur used to decorate royal robes.

Legendary hunters, weasels kill prey several times their size. They are hugely effective mousers and can clean rats and mice out of a barn or house very quickly. Several years ago, Hope for Wildlife was taking care of a weasel litter when someone forgot to lock their cage and they escaped. They found a small hole in the barn floor and disappeared into the foundation space, and for the rest of that year, mice problems in the feed storage room disappeared.

Weasels have been used since ancient times as pest control and it’s believed their near-cousin, the ferret, was first domesticated for that reason. Still, choosing weasels over rats and mice is one thing. Coming into your kitchen to see a pizza crust being carried off, as one person reported, is another matter. Even worse, the lightning-speed theft of a pork chop from a frying pan.

Is there a shortage of rodents in the wild this year? Are older farm houses now the prime source of food? Have weasels suddenly lost their fear of humans?

“It isn’t even that hard of a winter,” says Swinimer. “It’s baffling.”

Rare Animal May Be Headed Back To The Wild

Most Nova Scotians have never seen a fisher in the wild. This large member of the weasel family, valued for its fur, has been driven by trapping and lost mature forest to the brink of extirpation in this province. Not many remain. However, one is at the Hope for Wildlife rehabilitation center in Seaforth and it may soon be headed back to the wild. 




Ronda Brennan photo

  The fisher is one of the larger members of the mustelid (weasel) family, second in size in Nova Scotia only to the otter. Its general coloration and features in some ways suggest a smaller version of an even larger and geographically more distant cousin, the wolverine. However, the largest males seldom weigh more than six kilograms.



In July 2010, when a six-week old fisher came to Hope for Wildlife after being injured on a highway near Weymouth, probably by a car, the staff at that rescue and rehabilitation center faced a formidable task. The animal, named Henderson by a local veterinarian was not expected to survive, but he did. This left Hope for Wildlife with the task of healing and raising a rare animal whose species they had no experience with.

Because the fisher is a predator, it’s natural to learn survival skills by spending year or more with its family group. The problem was, this animal’s family group was somewhere on the Sissaboo River, far from its pen at Seaforth.

For Hope for Wildlife director Hope Swinimer, the fisher’s recovery, maturing and acquiring survival skills all needed special attention.

“I try to go by the rules that all the animals that come to our facility are important,” says Swinimer. “However, when an animal like this comes in, there’s so much to learn and so much help is needed. I even contacted people in the United States on their techniques on how they rehab fishers. From the point of view of a learning experience, it was huge.”

The fisher is now a young adult and will be released in a large enclosure at the Shubenacadie Wildlife Park to see if he has skills to provide for himself. If he proves to Natural Resources officials that he has, he will be freed, likely with a monitoring device to track his progress

Fortunately, a few pockets of fisher have survived and there has been a reintroduction program on the Tobeatic sanctuary of south western Nova Scotia. That may be where Henderson’s family originated, since the Sissaboo rises there. Sending a member of a threatened population home would be a good thing.

Coywolf: A New Name For A New Animal

Sometimes, the name we call a thing is the key that shapes our knowledge of it. In Nova Scotia, that is very true of the animal we call the Eastern coyote. That name carries baggage from cartoons and the old west of a scrawny scavenger. It would be more accurate if we used the name it has in parts of Ontario and the USA. There, some people call it a coywolf.

From the mid-twentieth century on, this animal undertook a complicated eastward migration, filling habitat left vacant by a near-relative, the red wolf, whose bloodline goes directly back about 700,000 years to the ancestor of all wolves. When what started as a coyote reached our coast, it showed a hefty dose of wolf genes. The nature of the beast had been changed,

The history of wolves is complicated and hotly debated, but the red wolf provides the link. This was what the first Europeans encountered, smaller than the grey wolf and occupying the hardwood lands east of the Mississippi and south of the Canadian Shield. By the 1980s, hunting, trapping, poisoning, and fire had wiped it out in the wild. It was re-introduced to several preserves, with limited success only in North Carolina..



Somewhere between ancestral wolf and red wolf, two things happened. The western family branch evolved to suit the habitat and became coyote. Meanwhile, primitive wolves crossed the Bering land bridge to Eurasia and developed into the wolves known there. Later, some returned, larger and of a different colour, to become the grey wolves of our north,

As the coyote travelled east, it would have met both wolf species. The last remnants of the red wolf, its close relative, it interbred with. Grey wolves normally kill coyotes, but somehow, according to some scientists, the genes still got mixed in.

To make things even more complicated, Ontario’s Algonquin National Park has wolves that may not be part of any of the other species. They are called the Eastern wolf. There’s a scientific tiff ongoing about whether they are an offshoot of the red wolf or a separate sub-species.

In any case, some or all of these wolves beefed up the coyote. By the time it hit the Atlantic coast, it was no longer the 14 kilogram plains scavenger. The new version often weighs 20 kilograms or more and tests done in Maine show some to be genetically as much wolf as coyote.

More changed than just size. From the Western coyote, a tolerance for humans and their habitations was inherited, but hunting habits became wolf-like. While the western coyote is a loner, wolves hunt in packs. So does this newcomer. I’ve seen a group of them drive a deer onto February lake ice so they could pull it down.

You may call that an Eastern coyote act if you wish.  I prefer coywolf.

The larger, highly adaptable animals "have the wolf characteristics of pack hunting and aggression and the coyote characteristics of lack of fear of human-developed areas," says Trent University geneticist Bradley White, who's been studying the hybrids for 12 years. 

(from The Toronto Star)







First Wildlife Hospital Announced for NS

Injured Nova Scotia wildlife now have their own private place in the province’s world of veterinary medicine. The Hope for Wildlife Society, based in Seaforth, Halifax County, has opened a veterinary hospital that will treat nothing but wildlife. It is the first of its kind in the province.



Hope for Wildlife staffers (l-r) Allison Dube, Dr. Barry
McEachern,and Hope Swinimer examin an injured bald eagle

 

The new professionally-staffed hospital will allow injured animals to receive medical care at the Seaforth rehabilitation center without being transported off-site. Currently, medical care is provided free of charge by the Dartmouth Veterinary Hospital and the Metro Animal Emergency Clinic, both more than 30 minutes away.

The organization`s founder and director, Hope Swinimer, says transporting injured wildlife causes them unnecessary stress, which can be harmful if they are already weakened. In the future, says Swinimer, birds and animals will be stabilized and receive primary treatment on-site in Seaforth. Only a most severe surgical case may require transfer to a city hospital.

“The vet hospitals are still really important to us and I want them to know how much we appreciate what they do for us, and that we still need them,” says Swinimer. “More than anything, we want to lighten their load while giving the best care possible to the wildlife.”

Local veterinarians will staff the hospital as volunteers. One of them, Dr. Barry MacEachern of the Dartmouth Veterinary Hospital, has been helping Hope for Wildlife for several years. He hopes having this unique on-site certified wildlife hospital will elevate the stature of the organization and make clear the nature of its work.

``We`re not a band-aid place for wildlife,” says MacEachern. ``We`re not a sanctuary. We truly are a rehabilitation center. “

The society, known internationally for its animal rescue and rehabilitation, worked for several years to assemble and equip the hospital. Much of the equipment was donated by local veterinary hospitals. The new facility is certified by the Nova Scotia Veterinary Medical Association, which means all standards, licenses, and inspections have been met for it to be a legal veterinary hospital in Nova Scotia.

Hope for Wildlife relies on volunteers for most of its rescue and rehabilitation work. It is a non-profit charitable organization operating with both federal and provincial permits and annually releases about 2000 rehabilitated birds and animals.

In 2011, Hope for Wildlife`s name was also known as the title of an internationally-syndicated television show seen across Canada as well as in the United Kingdom, Czech Republic, Singapore, and Thailand. It is now shooting its third season.

Hope for Wildlife was also in 2011 the title of a best-selling Nova Scotian book telling the story of the society’s work. At present it is sold out across Canada and a second printing has been ordered.
Hope for Wildlife is now in its 16th year of operation.

For more information, please contact
Hope Swinimer, Founder and Director, Hope for Wildlife Society, (902) 489-4673, hopeswinimer@gmail.com
Ray MacLeod home:(902) 434-5491 mobile: (902) 489-3502 raymacleod@eastlink.ca


For additional background
about The Hope for Wildlife Society: http://hopeforwildlife.org/pages/home
about the television series: http://hopeforwildlife.org/pages/news_and_media/the_TV_series
about the book: http://hopeforwildlife.org/pages/news_and_media/the_book

A Pelican Called Ralph (and other stories)

I really can’t get out of my head (and believe me, I’ve tried!) the image of noted wildlife rescuer Hope Swinimer with a blanket draped over her arm begging entrance to Dartmouth’s home of “adult entertainment”, Ralph’s Place. That has been one of several enduring images from Hope for Wildlife in the four weeks following their late-August Open House, a time of year when things usually mellow out and slow down. Not this year, however. Strange and uncommon events kept Hope for Wildlife in the news across Canada and around the world.

First there was a seagull who decided to impale himself on the lightning rod of a downtown Halifax church. He was up there for two days before the fire department helped him down. Pictures from that event went everywhere, including news services in Europe and India. The media focus was so tunnel-visioned on the gull story that they almost missed the Department of Natural Resources nabbing people trying to sell a fawn on the internet as a house pet. Both the gull and the deer ended up at Swinimer’s Seaforth farm, and with them came a wave of media attention.

The dust had barely settled around those incidents when hurricane Earl swept in, bringing with it many surprises. Newborn squirrels, raccoons, and song birds began showing up, just when Hope for Wildlife was releasing akin foundlings from last spring. What followed them was not pretty. More than one hundred birds, some merely needing food and a place to rest but others smashed by the gales, started to pour into the Seaforth facility, and many were deep-sea birds of unusual kinds. Two were Royal Terns, a species that summers off Florida and the West Indies and should have been heading for Argentina and Africa for the winter months. Neither survived. There were many Storm Petrels, another bird rarely seen by land folk, and most of them made it.

As this mass of birds was being sorted out, the Department of Natural Resources got itself into the news again. Using undercover agents, plus sea and air transport, DNR raided Tancook Island in Mahone Bay to rescue a captive deer. The three year old doe was crated and air-lifted off Tancook , then trucked to Hope for Wildlife. She was placed in a deer enclosure full of orphaned fawns and became an instant celebrity.

That same day, Hope Swinimer was sitting in her office at the Dartmouth Veterinary Hospital when someone rushed in to tell her there was a pelican on Main Street in front of Ralphs’ Place. Pelican spottings in Nova Scotia are on the rare side, so it took a few more reports before she felt this one deserved checking out. Since the sighting was only two buildings away from her office, she decided to go herself, and quickly met witnesses who said the bird had left Ralph’s parking lot but now was up on the building’s roof. Without really considering the ramifications, Swinimer took her capture blanket, swung open the front door of Ralph’s Place, and asked to go up to the roof. A startled clerk denied her and called for the manager. Patrons began to stare and Swinimer quickly became aware of her situation and what pub people must be thinking of this strange woman with a blanket trying to talk her way into an adult entertainment facility, claiming to be looking for a lost pelican.

Thankfully, someone outside called to her that the bird had left, so she quit in pursuit, tracking it to the parking lot of McDonald’s next door. Swinimer was able to identify it as a Brown Pelican, a bird that lived from the Carolinas southward, and knew it was another guest courtesy of Earl, but before she could act, the bird flew to the top of the Dartmouth Veterinary Clinic, then to Burger King where it began mooching fries and hamburgers, and causing traffic problems. It fled when she approached, but this time showed just how weak storm travel had made it by slamming into the glass front of a nearby building and stunning itself. Swinimer made the capture and took her new guest, now known as Ralph for obvious reasons, to Seaforth for rehabilitation,. Meanwhile, media were once again all over her for the story, including a live interview on CBC Radio’s Information Morning. Host Don Connolly tried to sum up the adventure.

“Going from Ralph’s to McDonald’s, to Burger King, and then knocking himself out. Sounds like a Saturday night, doesn’t it?” he suggested. “Sounds like a bad Saturday night,”

Bad for the bird,perhaps, but not for Hope for Wildlife. However, it was definitely part of a September that had not been normal. Perhaps "unusual" would have been a better word.