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Home » Canadian-ism (s), The Saturday Series

The Animals Kingdom (6/10)

Written by on February 16, 2008 – 2:00 pm19 Comments

Granted, when it comes to dan­ger­ous and weird ani­mals, Aus­tralia is prob­a­bly num­ber one (I will never for­get dri­ving at dusk in Alice Spring… bloody kan­ga­roos!). But Canada, with its huge land mass and small pop­u­la­tion den­sity, also has a great wildlife.
animalkingdom>

Granted, I don’t get to see bears every­day, which is all in all prob­a­bly a good thing. I mean, it’s not like they look like Win­nie The Pooh — or so I’ve been told.

How­ever, despite liv­ing in Ottawa’s close sub­urb, I get to see a bunch of ani­mals on a daily basis. Rab­bits run around the house and scare me when I go out for my last smoke at night. Squir­rels are cute ani­mals but they drive us nuts (no pun intended) in the sum­mer, when they dig in pot­ted plant and cause power out­age by chew­ing on power lines (seri­ously). Rac­coons are cute but also clever and per­sis­tent, and in res­i­den­tial and urban areas they can be con­sid­ered as pest. They can open garbage cans with their hands and feast before the garbage truck even has a chance to come… Finally, skunks are best known for their strong odor secreted if fright­ened or dis­turbed. We usu­ally don’t get too close to them in case of… but they don’t mind get­ting close to us!

Quite a few ani­mals became Cana­dian sym­bols. The beaver, for exam­ple, which is on the 5¢ coin. Lots of places also bear the name of an ani­mal: the cities “Moose jaw”, “White­horse” or “Goose Lake” for exam­ple. And gen­er­ally speak­ing, Cana­dian are quite proud of their wilder­ness and fauna. A true ani­mal king­dom, I’m telling ya!

Related posts:

  1. Pic­ture of the Week: Curi­ous Ant
  2. Par­que National Manuel Antonio
  3. Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism (7÷10)
  4. The Thai Adventure
  5. The New OZ

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19 Comments »

  • Hi Zhu,

    My first time here and the site looks cozy and friendly. So you’re look­ing for a com­rade to widen your left wing lib­eral base? Well, it has now grown by 100%. There’s two of us.

    Speak­ing of weird ani­mals, the most I’ve seen in a sin­gle place is a lit­tle over 300 of these weird crea­tures, and it’s close to where you’re com­ing from — the US Con­gress. :-) –Durano, done!

    Durano Lawayan’s last blog post..Keep­ing Kosovo on even Keel

  • Theresa says:

    Well, we do have a lot of exotic human-type ani­mals, but I don’t know if those count. No thanks, I think I’ll stick to the spi­ders. :)

    Theresa’s last blog post..Get Some North­ern Exposure

  • Gledwood says:

    :roll:
    Hey did you know N Amer­ica seems to have lit­er­ally x2 the vari­ety of wildlife as North­ern Europe… almost every­thing we have you seem to have… loads of other things like coy­otes, racoons, skunxx, bears, wolves etc etc…

    btw: do you have foxes where you are? I mean: do you get them at all? Or just some­times? Some­one sent a real odd com­ment back from Amer­ica I think about “des­per­ate” foxes being forced into British towns… after a post where I men­tioned them…

    foxes aren’t “forced” into towns they love it there… very often you’ll see this thing that looks just like a red dog… very cute and unafraid either stalk­ing down the street or just sit­ting in next door’s front gar­den look­ing at me… one time I saw two babies frol­ick­ing at 6am in my back gar­den… excel­lent stuff!

    :roll:

    Gledwood’s last blog post..Secret Pas­sage

  • Graham says:

    The thing I remem­ber most about vis­it­ing Canada was the black Squir­rels. We have red and grey squir­rels, but I had never seen a black one until vis­it­ing Stan­ley Park in Vancouver.

    Awwwww, I wanna go back to Canada sooooo badly!!!!!!!!

    Graham’s last blog post..What I am lis­ten­ing to at the moment.…

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