An Urban Wildlife Adventure

Earlier this week, our local paper ran a story about a beaver (possibly *2* beavers) having set up house in the Hamilton harbour. This is very exciting for our community as it signifies a major improvement in the water quality (the last 15 years has seen a lot of work done on restoring our once extremely industrially-polluted harbourfront area).It's also pretty darn cool to have a beaver build a lodge in such an urban location (right on the edge of one of our biggest city parks). As soon as we read about it, we were all super excited to go check it out, but our family schedule didn't give us a chance to do it during daylight hours up until today. So, we all bundled up early this afternoon, and off we went to the Harbourfront to track down the beaver lodge. We didn't have any trouble finding it, and were able to walk up very close to it to take a good look. We didn't actually have a beaver sighting (they usually only come out at night) but we pointed out to the boys where the beaver(s) had chewed down small trees to build the dam (as well as one that had been partially, but not totally, gnawed through). This resourceful urban beaver also scrounged up several used planks of wood to use in building his lodge! The city is considering planting some willow trees in the spring to help keep the beaver(s) from taking all the shade trees. Apparently, willow is a favourite of the beavers (something I didn't know before!) We've seen beaver lodges in zoos before, but this is the first time we've seen one "in the wild" (if the middle of a city of nearly 500,000 people can be classified as "wild"!)

[Here is where I had planned to insert a photo of the beaver lodge; apparently blogger has other ideas right now as I can't get it to upload-arrgh!]

While we were down by the harbour, we also had some fun observing the winter waterfowl. We actually "discovered" a new species that we'd never observed before. When we got back, we got out our bird books (while enjoying a round of hot chocolate to warm us back up!) and identified it as the American Coot. We found out that we'd never seen them before because they overwinter on the harbour, but leave in early spring, and we're usually not spending much time down there until late spring/early summer. Up until we hunted down that piece of the puzzle, I had been wondering how there could have been such a large number of them on the water when I'd never seen even *one* before!!