There was an interesting announcement this week. Apparently a century ago in Dawson City, Yukon they had a problem. They had a big hole that needed to be filled in. (They were converting a municipal swimming pool to an ice rink. This is understandable, as it is the Yukon after all.) As there was no handy pile of rocks or gravel sitting around they tossed any old junk and unwanted stuff they had on hand into the hole. Among the stuff were some unneeded reels of film. You see, back then when you went to the movies, in addition to the movie you saw a cartoon and, most importantly for the story, newsreels. After the newsreels were shown they were sent on to the next theatre down the line. Apparently however, Dawson City, Yukon was the end of the road. There was nowhere else to send them to so the films gathered dust in the city library, until the call went out for fill material. Taking the opportunity to clear some shelf space the lot was tossed into the hole and buried. Now anywhere else that would have been the end of it. The cases would have dissolved, the reels rusted and the film rotted away. Being this was the Yukon though, the ground froze and stayed frozen year round preserving the film. In 1978 the film reels were rediscovered and are being restored and digitized. There is some damage to the edges, but most of the frame is still viewable. In this article;
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/footage-of-scandalous-1919-world-series-saved-by-yukon-permafrost-1.2635519
They featured original newsreel footage of the 1919 World Series. Most significantly the footage was from before the infamous Black Sox scandal broke. Shoeless Joe Jackson and company were still good guys. I can’t wait for more of this material to be released. It’s amazing what you find in the arctic. As it says in the classic Canadian poem The Cremation of Sam McGee;

“The Arctic trails have their secret tales that would make your blood run cold”

All sorts of things get dug up out of the permafrost. It’s not uncommon to find carcasses of extinct animals, wooly mammoths, and such, in very good condition despite being frozen for thousands and often tens of thousands of years. The preservation is often so good that hair, the remains of the last meal, even DNA can be extracted. This has led to the idea of trying to use modern cloning technology to bring these extinct animals back to life. Personally I think it would be really cool, though I understand there is a bit of controversy about this. Some question the ethics of bringing Woolly Mammoth, Mastodon, Passenger Pigeons, Dodos and such back from extinction. For myself I don’t have a problem with recreating animals that we drove to extinction. I mean the Dodo was part of our modern environment till just a few hundred years ago. It’s not like we’re talking dinosaurs here. As we learned in Jurassic Park, THAT would be a bad idea. I understand that we might not want to resurrect sabre-toothed cats or entelodonts, but I have no problem with bringing back creatures we killed off. It’s just seems like fixing what we broke would be the responsible thing to do.

And it might be just in time. It seems like the animals are starting to get ornery with us for all that we’ve done. Remember the angry beaver that was causing all sorts of trouble in New Brunswick last week? Well, things have escalated a bit. Last weekend there was a landslide near Enderby, BC. You know you’re in an isolated town when one landslide takes out the only road, the only bridge, the only electrical line, the towns water supply, and decimates the big salmon hatchery in town, The Kingfisher Interpretive Centre. They say it happened when an ice and debris jam caused the beaver dam on Dale Lake to collapsed, but I’m wondering if it was really a part of a clever plan by beavers bent on world domination. They might have waited until the right moment and then gnawed away at one critical branch to start the whole thing moving.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/beavers-cause-of-landslide-stranding-hundreds-near-enderby-b-c-1.2631023
Today Enderby, tomorrow Vancouver!!!

Not that there wouldn’t be cause for the animals to revolt. This week it was announced that the one remaining caribou herd in the contiguous United States has seen their numbers collapse from 48 to 18 in the last few years and will likely be gone in just a few more.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/u-s-ranging-selkirk-mountain-caribou-on-track-to-oblivion-1.2638670
At one time, caribou wandered around much of the northern part of the US. Unfortunately, now you’ll have to head toward the arctic to see them.

Of course people claim to see all sorts of things up here in the woods. Last week there was an article about somebody that thought they saw a Sasquatch, aka Bigfoot, hiking through the snow in the Tantalus Range near Squamish, B.C. The giant ape is supposed to live in the forests of the Northwest, and stories of them persist despite a conspicuous lack of solid evidence. Footprints are inconclusive. Hair samples have always have turned out to be something else. Despite the prevalence of high quality cameras on phones and such, photographic evidence is fuzzy and shaky at best. Here’s the latest claim to hit the CBC:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-hiker-films-possible-sasquatch-in-mountains-near-squamish-1.2631232
My favourite part is where they say it has to be a Sasquatch because “If that's human why would you walk up that ridge or that snow line? Why would he not just go straight down?” How about because it’s human? I find it more likely that a person would engage in this odd behaviour than a wild animal would. However, I still find the most compelling point to be the lack of fossil evidence for Sasquatch. We find the bones of all sorts of things in the ground, including small primates, yet there’s no evidence of primates of any kind in North America after about 33 million years ago, the time of a great cooling and mass extinction. Living creatures leave traces behind yet none have been found for Bigfoot. I’d like to see a Sasquatch, but as Carl Sagan said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” and until such extraordinary evidence turns up, I don’t expect to.

But it’s not all bad news for the animals. This week the City of Vancouver was holding an online poll to select the cities official bird. People get to vote on which one to honour. I have to admit though it’s not as big a deal as it sounds. They do this every year for Bird Week. This year the official bird is the crow. The one people choose this week will be the official bird for 2015 Bird Week.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-city-bird-competition-down-to-the-wire-1.2638206
However as far as I’m concerned here in Lantzville the official bird has to be the quail. I see them every morning running around in pairs and very soon the pairs will be accompanied by a string of tiny chicks. I look forward to seeing them every year.

Hope all the Mothers out there had a great Mother's Day!