Country Style: Part 2

One or two things about my mother...

* She was raised on a Depression Era farm by her grandparents in north Hamilton, Ontario.

* After raising a family and retiring from her editor's job, she fulfilled a lifetime dream in buying a chunk of northern Canadian wilderness. She lived (with two cats) in a trailer for four months on this land while workers chainsawed, bulldozed, and dynamited their way through the forest and built her house. She supervised the project while in her mid-sixties.

* Now in her mid-seventies, my mother loves the forest vegetation which surrounds her home. Whatever tree felled for winter fuel must be dead already.

Ruffled Grouse

* She's in daily contact with wildlife. The Ministry of the Environment provides her with salt licks and feed for deer to cover shortfalls over the winter months. An old Ruffled Grouse, "Miss Cluck-Cluck" was her constant outdoor companion until the bird died a few years ago. Bird feeders are filled year round for colonies of migrating birds. A real life Dr. Dolittle who has a way of communicating with the animals.

Black Bear

* Black bears occasionally wake her up at 6 am as they try to steal a hummingbird feeder from the front of her house. Instead of having the bears relocated or shot, she "scares them away" by bursting through the front door, banging pots together and yelling 'Get off my deck! Scram!!!". Yes, she's willing to risk her own life to save the life and lifestyle of a bear.

Fisher

I give this sketch of my mother as background for an exception to her conservation philosophy. A few years ago a fisher, a vicious forest predator, killed one of her cats.

Mom and one of her current cats, Silly.

Where the safety of the cats are concerned Mom will make an exception. All fishers on the property are to be destroyed. Mom got her firearms license for a .22 caliber rifle (with scope).

A local trapper gave her a spring loaded 'live trap' which will catch a fisher inside a box placed in the forest. She has caught five fishers that I know of. They're still alive when she finds them. Shooting the animal in this way seems the most humane way to kill it. I asked her, "Where is the best place to shoot a fisher dead?". She replied, "Between the eyes seems to work".

In winter a fisher bounds and
slides over the snow.

In the past Mom's given the carcasses to the trapper who can sell the pelts for about $40 on the current market. She doesn't do that anymore as I think she doesn't want to supply the fur trade - no matter why. I wanted to have a coat (or even a winter hat) made out of the fishers she's killed for symbolic reasons, but she'll have none of it. Now mom just throws the dead fishers onto the forest floor, a warning to their kind.

Fisher tracks with my glove for scale.

A lot of people who haven't lived in the country, haven't tried to live in harmony with nature, won't understand my mother's actions. It pains her deeply to kill these animals, but if it must be done it will be done.