Sightings

The cold snap is over -- low last night was a mere -15C (compared to -27C the night before), high today -5C -- so snow is on its way: 10-30 centimetres promised starting tonight and continuing through most of tomorrow. Not so good that last because I have to go to Belleville tomorrow evening to pick up a friend at the train station. But it is good in that it's time to wipe the slate clean out in the fields. The rabbits have worn trails, trenches really, in the snow so thoroughly that I can't see who all might be using them; and there are so many fox tracks criss-crossing everywhere, and pee stains, I can't sort out the signs anymore.

"This place is mine."
I had a bunch of errands to do this week up in Tweed and environs, so, anticipating the snow, I got them done today (and met other citizens of the hamlet and other outliers up there doing the same). On the way out of Tweed, but still in the village, a muskrat crossed the road in front of me, heading in the direction of the lake on whose shores the village sits, but coming from where? A muskrat is a sleek and elegant creature seen from above swimming underwater, but it is a funny looking, humpy creature on land. And from the side its flattened tail looks like a bit of string dragging behind it.

I got home and a few mintues later I finally got to see what's been bugging the crows all day--a beautiful, big red-tailed hawk flew past the house, crow giving chase.

But these aren't the sightings I am here to write about today. Rather I wanted to report the sighting of an eastern cottontail in a backyard in downtown Toronto, reported to me and documented photographically by the friend I'm expecting tomorrow. He suggests that maybe the rabbit had decided to give up life in the ravines, among the foxes and coyotes, for life on the streets. Whatever the case, the streets of Toronto just keep getting wilder and wilder.

Photo by Michael Solomon

Submitted to the Modulator's Friday Ark