Reptiles at Risk

We're Home, at Least for the Moment

Posted by Jeff Hathaway on August 26, 2006 at 12:23 AM

We were in northeastern Ontario for a couple of days, having stopped to visit a couple of friends, Joe and Megan, who are doing small mammal trapping for the summer in the Kapuskasing area, on our way to Esker Lakes Provincial Park, where we did a program last night. As it turned out, Joe and Megan were staying at an Ontario Ranger camp, so we managed to fit in a reptile program for the rangers on their last day of the summer.

Both programs went well; we'd never done one for an Ontario Ranger group in the past, so that's something we'll have to think about for the future. We then headed out for Sudbury, to meet with Laurentian staff to sort out some administrative stuff, but we had to detour through New Liskeard to pick up a couple of snakes from the OSPCA that came from a bankrupt pet store! So we now have a new Florida kingsnake and a sinaloan milksnake to care for, and an emperor scorpion as well that we hope to move along soon to a friend who does programs about arachnids and insects! This detour caused us to be late getting to Sudbury, and so we would have then been late for the ferry we planned to catch from Manitoulin Island to Tobermory for Saturday's program at the new visitor's centre at Bruce Peninsula National Park, our final program of our tour. We could have waited around to catch the 10:00 ferry, but a quick evaluation of the driving times, ferry costs, etc. showed that it wouldn't really save much money to do that, plus going home meant we could set up the new animals right away, and rotate our tour animals for some much needed time off! And so, we have now arrived back home, after seven weeks and nearly 12000 km on the road in northern Ontario, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan! Of course, it's only temporary, as we'll leave again in the morning, but only for the day! It's good to be back!