We live near the wild, so expect wildlife

We live near the wild, so expect wildlife
Two bear attacks in suburban Vancouver
a reminder that we share this province

Ian Haysom
Times Colonist
Saturday, August 09, 2008

This week's bear attacks in Coquitlam jar the senses. A woman who was gardening in her front yard was mauled. The next day a 180-kilogram bear burst into someone's basement. Some food had been left on a table.

Both these animals were shot and unceremoniously dragged away and thrown into trucks. I felt sorry for them. There are few berries in the hills so they come down and start foraging in suburbia and scare the living daylights out of us.

The conservation officer at the scene of the mauling was asked how to deal with a bear, if you came across one. Back off slowly, talking gently to it, he said. (Yeah, but at what point do you run like hell?)

What, he was asked, should you do if a bear attacks?

"Fight for all you're worth," he said. A fist fight with a 180-kilogram animal. I know where I'd put my money.

The irony, of course, is that we who live in urban Canada (that would be most of us) try hard to attract certain wildlife -- hummingbirds, for instance, with our cute little sugar-water feeders. At the same time, we try to repel those nasty animals like bears, that may kill us, or skunks, who might stink out the joint, or -- increasingly -- deer, which will eat all our veggies. They haven't eaten mine yet so I still have a Bambi-like affection for them. A near relative, a pacifist whose veggies are under constant assault, would happily blow them all away with a machine-gun.

My daughter, a couple of years ago, made the top of the evening newscast in Victoria after she was confronted by a cougar while riding her bike on the Galloping Goose Trail. She turned around and quietly left.

I have a friend who many years ago had to shoo a cougar off the hood of her car while it was parked in the driveway. She'd just returned from shopping. Her two daughters were asleep on the back seat and she popped indoors to take in the first two grocery bags. When she returned, there was the cougar.

My friend didn't think twice. She's a mom. Her kids were in jeopardy. So she ran directly at the cougar, screaming for all she was worth. The big cat, sensibly, ran away as quickly as it could.

Bears are dangerous. So if we live close to their territory, we'd better start bear-proofing ours. No garbage cans outdoors. Clean barbecues. No bird feeders. And if it were me, I'd learn how to talk to them real nice. It's, well, a jungle out there.

- - -

So, you (well, not you, I) manage to think up 150 reasons to love British Columbia and suddenly everyone wants to know why, say, architect Arthur Erickson or writer Douglas Coupland or even their Aunt Mabel isn't on the list.

Someone on the list actually sniffed that they weren't in the top 10. There isn't a top 10, I said. It's a list. No top, no bottom. I notice that Les Leyne, across the page on the same day, thought up just four or five reasons to love B.C. and the world isn't beating a path to his column wondering where to find the other 145.

As I said last week, it was my list: If you don't like my list, make up your own. Actually, I've never managed to finish anything that Coupland has written and I'm not a fan of Erickson's designs, sacrilegious as that may seem. But the truth is, I forgot. The list came from inside my head. Or, more specifically, off the top of my head. That's not a great place to be, believe me. The fact I can remember 150 words is an accomplishment.

I wish, in retrospect, I'd put Lui Passaglia on the list. Chief Dan George. Nobel laureate Michael Smith. I wish I'd put the navy on the list and have been rightly scolded for it. I'd thought of veterans as more Canadian than provincial, but our brave British Columbian heroes were wrongly omitted, so I'm happy to correct that. And maybe, as someone reminded me, Nat Bailey Stadium, the best little ballpark in the world, should have been there too.

Fact is, I could have made a list of 150 other wonderful things about British Columbia, which is a very cool thing indeed. I promise, on the province's 200th birthday, that I'll do better.

]Ian Haysom is news director of Global News in British Columbia. He divides his time between Central Saanich and Vancouver

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