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.