Welcome Back, Inukshuk!

Inukshuk patrolling familiar ground

Yesterday I headed to the Zoo again, this time to attend a class on how to use the AEDs (Automated External Difibrillators) on site. It was a very short class, running from only 9:30 to 10:30—at which point the Tuesday Volunteers practically ran us over trying to set up the room for their pot luck lunch, but that's another story—so once it was over I had plenty of time to take advantage of the mild temperatures and occasional brilliant sunshine and walk around a little bit. I was especially interested in making my way to the Tundra Trek and specifically the polar bear exhibit, because last Thursday night—just in time for the "big storm"—an old friend returned: Inukshuk, father of Hudson. He's been off in Cochrane at their Polar Bear Habitat since last October (because Aurora was pregnant with three cubs that, sadly, didn't survive) and will be returning there at the end of March. He's back here purely for "stud duties"; a pretty good gig if you can get it! The keepers have their fingers crossed that he might actually "hit the jackpot" with both of the sister bears currently at the Toronto Zoo, Aurora and Nikita, the latter of whom has never been pregnant. It would be pretty special indeed to have more than one "Hudson" roaming around come the fall, but a lot has to go right for that to happen. Inukshuk won't really care either way: his job is done once he gets back on the plane for Cochrane.

Walk out to Winter

Walk out to winter, swear I'll be there.
Chance is buried just below the blinding snow. — Aztec Camera

Late in the storm on Friday

After weathering the Snowmageddon™ storm on Friday (or "Nemo" if you live on the east coast), Sarah and I awoke yesterday to a stunningly beautiful vista in the park next to our building. As promised in yesterday's post, we went out and took a walk through the still-fresh snow in the brilliant sunshine. It won't last long on the ground—it's supposed to be six degrees tomorrow and raining off and on, starting this evening. When the temperature then hovers just below zero the next day the roads should be absolutely perfect for driving back out to the Zoo...assuming Tuesday is opposite day. I had no trouble with the commute on Friday; I expect to have all my Spidey Senses tingling both ways on Tuesday. Snow = no problem; black ice = not so much. It might require another non-highway commute. In any event, during our walk yesterday the light conditions were perfect so I snapped off a large quantity of photos. For most of them, adding a lot of extra verbiage will accomplish nothing, so I am going to post my favourites here with a minimum of loquacious distraction. Besides, if the Old Math holds true, then this "plog" post should be worth nearly 25,000 words. So, without further ado: a pictorial of our hike on The Day After Snomageddon 2013™.

Snowmageddon™ 2013

♪Oh, what a beautiful moooooor-niiiiin'...♫

It's a stunningly beautiful day here in Toronto. Sunny and crisp with nary a cloud in the sky—a picture-perfect winter's day. A friend of ours posted on Facebook yesterday that he was taking his kids tobogganing this morning in Riverdale; we opted not to go because the side of the park he chose—the west side—is difficult enough to get to and park at when snow isn't piled up on the narrow streets in the area. We'll make sure we get out for a good, long walk a bit later, though, to make up for it. In this area of the world, days like this are woefully rare indeed. I love the long shadows and pristine snow you can see in the photo here; the mounds on top of the cars, though, don't seem nearly as high to me as the hand-wringing on social media yesterday led me to believe they would be. The City of Toronto received 24cm of snow yesterday (actually, 1/10 of that amount if you check the official Environment Canada site, which clearly is having some math issues today), which is only single digits in inches, the scale many of us still cling doggedly to when discussing precipitation.

Neither Snow, Nor More Snow, Nor Snowmageddon™...

Om nom nom—brownie kebob!

Today was supposed to be our final Volunteer training class at the Zoo, complete with a pot luck lunch. When I attended the presentation on "To Theme or Not To Theme" yesterday, Karen was wrestling with whether to postpone the class for one week because of the impending storm, but had not yet decided either way. So "Aussie Tom" and I got into Babar at about 7:45 this morning and, after five or six tries to get up the steep ramp leading out of our underground garage, began to forge our way out to the Rouge Valley (avoiding all highways along the way). When we had reached Markham and Kingston Road, a little over halfway to our destination, Karen reached us in the car to let us know the class had, indeed, been postponed. We decided to continue on to the Zoo, if for no other reason than to hand out some of the "brownie kebobs" that Sarah and I had made for the pot luck and which would not last until next week in any event.

Zoo Presentation and New Pictures

Spectacled owl pair at the Zoo (a bit fuzzy due to the low light)

My triple-decker presentation day was last Friday. I followed the three scripts I posted on this blog pretty closely, but I ran out of time and was "cut off" long before I could finish my talk about the owls or tie it all together at the end. This was pretty frustrating, especially since: 1) I was the only one this happened to, even though others in my group ran over their time limits; and 2) the other two groups had quite a bit more time allotted to them to get through their three animals. Luck of the draw, I guess, but a bit annoying. In any event, the prairie dogs were still "off exhibit", but that gave me more time to talk about the signage at the Zoo. (Unfortunately, the trainee who was supposed to talk about the black-footed ferrets immediately before me was absent which meant I had to touch on those animals briefly as well in my prairie dog talk.) Only one of the two spectacled owls (the male) was visible, too; I learned later that the female is brooding at the moment in a hollow trunk in the exhibit. But the wonderful octopus put on an amazing show for us: she was up in the corner of the tank when she noticed the whole clutch of people standing there, so she came down and pranced around in front of us for a while, sizing everyone up with her eyes and showing off her underbelly. It was pretty obvious she was interacting with the group and I'm finding the giant Pacific octopus to be more fascinating every time I see her.

In the Shadow of the Groundhog

How could he not see his shadow??

It's Groundhog Day again today, or, as I like to call it, "Rodents Suck at Math Day". Or maybe it's not their fault: after all, they didn't choose the date of the "holiday". February 2nd is "Candlemas", supposedly midway between the start of winter and the start of spring, but somewhere along the way our calendars changed just enough that it's actually not the midway point any more, if it ever was. "Candlemas", by the way, is yet another Christian holiday that was co-opted from the pagans (who called it Imbolc); another story in their long tradition of demonizing "witchcraft" while simultaneously "purifying" the important days of Celts and Pagans everywhere. That, of course, is a story for another time: my main point here is Candlemas or Imbolc or however you like to refer to it comes forty-two to forty-three days from the beginning of winter but forty-six to forty-seven days before the beginning of spring. Remember those numbers; I'll return to them later.

Goodbye Hudson!

CEO John Tracogna on Undercover Boss

One especially nice thing that our Volunteer Coordinator, Karen Conway, has arranged for us this month is a tour of the Nutrition Centre at the Zoo. This is a very rare privilege and I hope that our whole class takes advantage of it while they can. We had several days to choose from but each day's tour group was limited to fifteen people maximum—many existing Volunteers signed up as well—so it was difficult to find an opening. I decided to book it for yesterday, a Saturday, in the hopes that it would be a bit calmer and it was. As it was also the final weekend at the Zoo for our beloved polar bear cub, Hudson, who is leaving Monday for the Assiniboine Park Zoo in Winnipeg, Sarah came with me and did her own thing while I was on the tour. I took copious and quite detailed notes on the experience but I get the impression that the Zoo would be most happy if I didn't share too much of the specifics of the centre's operations. If you have a chance to watch the very first episode of Undercover Boss: Canada you will see the CEO, John Tracogna, working at the centre for part of the show. I can report that the mural that was commissioned for the centre at the end of that segment is really quite nice. I wish I could show it to you, but I can't find a single picture of it on the web. (The Zoo has some pretty severe privacy issues with their behind-the-scenes tours.) In general terms, the work that goes on every day with respect to food preparation is astonishing. The budget for animal sustenance is approximately $900,000 per year, which is almost perfectly offset by the yearly revenues from the parking charges. We were quite lucky yesterday: owing to quite a few people being off for various health or family reasons, the two "big cheeses" at the centre, Jaap Wensvoort and Karen Alexander, were the only two people working so we got our information straight from the top. There was a very good article in Maclean's a couple of years back concerning Jaap's "browse diet" for the gorillas; there are many other innovations and concoctions that the Toronto Zoo's nutritionists have come up with over the years, some of which they receive royalties on when they sell them to other zoos. It was a fascinating tour and I'm really glad I participated!

Friday is Zoo Day!

The older of our two female otters

Our training doesn't officially resume until next Friday so I had another opportunity today to do a walkabout at the Zoo on my own. I decided to drop in on some animals I hadn't seen in quite a while; I had hoped to catch up with the jaguars at the Mayan Temple but the whole area is closed for the season. I don't know why this fact had eluded me until now, but it did. While I was contemplating this turn of events, I heard a rustling from the ground around the pool off to my left and below me. When I went over to the railing I saw one of the otters was very interested in me—possibly expecting some food—and had come bounding out of the light brush in the exhibit to perch on one of the logs and stare at me. Unfortunately, my camera was still in its case and the case was still inside my knapsack; by the time I got it ready to go, she (the otter, for I have yet to anthropomorphize my camera) had slipped into the water and was swimming around, still watching me closely. I was there for quite a while, but could not coax her back out of the pool and onto that log, so I had to settle for a series of swim-related pictures, of which I think this is the best. None of them were remarkable but who doesn't love looking at otters? Obviously I had to include one here.

Wintertime at the Zoo

Sarah ♥s the Zoo!

As I mentioned in my New Year's Eve blog post, I got a fantastic Christmas gift this year (well, last year, to be technical): a Canon EOS Rebel T3 (EOS 1100D) DSLR camera. For regular—or even casual—readers of this blog or my Facebook feed, it should have been painfully obvious where I would almost immediately be heading to put this beauty through its paces: the Zoo. Sarah and I went on a little "walkabout" last Friday not long after the new (and first) snow of the Toronto winter had fallen and from the very first impressions I can honestly say that I am going to love this camera for a long time. I had an old Ricoh 35mm SLR for nearly two and a half decades which gave up the ghost in late 2003 (sadly, it was on a trip to the maritimes and the disposables I had to buy to fill the gap were really quite terrible). In the years since that loss I have made do with a series of crappy-to-decent point-and-click digitals (the most recent of which I actually won in a radio promotion a few years back) and, having abandoned thoughts of obtaining a DSLR for myself (out of my price range), I had my eyes on a Nikon Coolpix P500 that I was thinking of buying used from a friend of mine. Great little camera, but at the end of the day it's still a point-and-click. So when I opened my new Rebel on Christmas (and Sarah unnecessarily apologized for not getting me the Nikon!) I was absolutely thrilled; however, it wasn't until I actually took some pictures with it that night and viewed them on the computer that I realized just how much better my photo-taking life had just become. Over the following couple of days, as I read up on the functions and settings of my Canon, the old feelings started to come back and I realized how much I actually missed my old Ricoh and, consequently, how much I had pushed that to the back of my mind for the past 9 years.

What the Hockey Lockout Means to Me

Nothing. 

Thanks for dropping by.

All right, all right. Since you went to the trouble of coming here, I guess I can muster up some reasoning.

I'm sick of the NHL. I have loved the sport of hockey since I was a very small boy. I've played it since I was six years old. I've coached kids in the game for ten of the past twelve years. My dad used to put a rink in our backyard and some of my fondest childhood memories are of the myriad Sunday afternoons he and I spent at Maple Leaf Gardens, watching the Toronto Marlies (Junior A team) from the Greens, because they were "high enough up in the stands so you can really get a feel for the game".

But the NHL doesn't share my enthusiasm for the sport. The NHL doesn't care about the fans, the players or even the integrity of the game itself and it hasn't for many, many years.

Hot Enough for Ya?

The sun was angry that day, my friends...

It's stupid hot in Toronto today. It was over 30C before 10AM and eventually reached 35C in the early afternoon, refusing to budge from that mark for several hours. If you didn't go outside, you likely still had a pretty good idea of how hot it was if you checked Twitter, Faceboook or any news sites, listened to the radio, watched local news, or just tried to look out of your window. I had to go out: we were out of beer. Had we been out of, say, food there's no way I would have gone outside. And when I did go out - brief as it was - I felt like I was asphyxiating, slowly. Sarah said it felt like she was "standing behind the hot exhaust of a car". Yes, it was that hot here. So I've decided to do something a little different with my blog today, because you know the old saying: "Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it."

Well, I'm doing something about it. I'm going to tell you all about a trip to Minden, Ontario that Sarah and I took in February of 2007. In the winter. With snow and everything. I hope you enjoy it.