Photos of a Moose Rescue in Northern Ontario

This happened a while ago (spring of 2012), but I was just looking at some photos and thought of this again and thought I'd post it to share it to a wider audience.  It's the story of a moose that got trapped in a fiber pond in Ontario.  The notes below are taken from the email that I received about it:

Sunday April 15, 2012 dawned cloudy and cool in the little community of Terrace Bay, located along the north shore of Lake Superior.  My friend and fellow Conservation Officer Jeff Anderson stopped by the house, my wife Eleanor made fresh coffee and we were enjoying a day off now that the fishing season for walleye had finally closed.

When the phone rang that morning, it was to alert us that a moose was helplessly mired in a spillway next to the towns pulp mill. Normally, the hustle and bustle of a busy factory would discourage wildlife from getting too close, but in this case, the mill had been idle for quite some time and the mill yard was quiet and tranquil. 

The large man-made ponds that surround the property are part of a system used to treat waste water. They are all fenced except for the one closest to the buildings. Its unclear as to how the young adult bull wandered into the first one, maybe he was fleeing a vehicle on the nearby road, or perhaps he just thought it was a marsh. Whatever the reason, he attempted to cross the football-field sized settling pond and began breaking through the deep layers of sodden wood fiber. 

We quickly hatched a plan and began gathering some rope, hip waders and snowshoes while Jeff grabbed a patrol truck, uniform and shotgun. It was important to be prepared for any eventuality! When we all rendezvoused at the site, we were faced with the saddest looking animal you could imagine. Utilizing the snowshoes to stay on top of the layers of fiber, we were able to approach the bull, fasten a chain knot around his neck and attempt to pull him free utilizing the winch on Jeff’s patrol truck. Unfortunately, we could not pull him horizontally with sufficient force to drag him out without the risk of injuring him, so we needed a new approach.

Mill staff came to the rescue and arrived on scene with a large, tracked loader equipped with a boom grapple. The rest of us shovelled a space around the moose’s chest around which we were able to secure a heavy line. With this new ability to lift and pull from around the animals girth, the big bull was slowly drawn out of the muck and onto the bank. 

It appeared as though he had been there overnight and he was near death from exhaustion and stress.  Remarkably, by supporting him in a prone position, giving him a couple bottles of water to drink and rubbing his legs to restore circulation, he began to perk up! After 20 minutes and several attempts, he stood up on wobbly legs for the first time in many hours. He tolerated us as we held him up and later, as he began walking with our assistance. It was a very strange experience to calmly accompany him for the long walk around the ponds perimeter, but we all felt the same heart-warming feeling when he quietly stepped into the bush under his own power, and disappeared from sight.

Terrace Bay is a town on the north shore of Lake Superior in Ontario, Canada about 150km East of Thunder Bay.

This was written by Paul Dennis, Conservation Officer, Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources.

How to Save Yourself $7,500

A few months ago, I sold my house. I spent about a day of effort putting the information online myself, and saved myself $7,500. Well, almost half of that amount, anyway. Let me explain ...

In Canada, when you buy or sell a house, the seller usually loses about a 6% commission to the real estate agent. My house sold for about $130,000, but I didn't have to pay any commission to an agent. It's not that hard to save yourself the same money if you're selling. Here's how:

I started off by making a web page about the house. Granted, I find it pretty easy to throw together a quick web page, and I have my own server account, so that's not exactly the easiest thing for everybody. But if you're trying to sell, you don't have to create your own personal website to benefit from this post. There are ways around that, as I'll explain in a minute.

Once I had the web page together, I put an ad on Kijiji. Anybody can figure out how to do this. You don't even need your own web page - you can let Kijiji "be" the web page. The only reason I made my own was so I could add a bunch of additional information (several pages worth, plus a ton of photos) so interested buyers could figure out more about the house themselves, without having to pester me with questions. Basically, I wanted a filter to save myself some time.

Once the Kijiji ad was posted, I decided to invest a bit of money. I spent a little under $100 and got some major extra publicity for the ad with things like highlighting and home page rotation. You don't actually need to do this, because you can post an ad for free, but I figured that if I was [hopefully] going to save myself several thousand dollars in commissions, it would be worth trying to make sure that more eyes saw the ad.

After that I sat back and waited. I got my first call from someone wanting to look at the house about seventeen MINUTES after it was posted. I definitely did not expect those kind of results. That person didn't turn out to be solid lead, but over the next month I had about a dozen calls. And one of those calls led to the sale.

I wasn't in a huge rush, otherwise I probably would have throw a few extra weapons at the fight. For instance, I had considered buying a professional listing on PropertyGuys.com - a full-package there is definitely more pricey than just putting an ad on Kijiji, but at $1,400 they agree to market your house basically "forever," until it sells (and they also have much cheaper packages). After a bit of investigation, that seemed like a smart idea, although as it turned out I sold the house before getting to that point. I was also considering using Google AdWords to bring more traffic to the Kijiji ad, but again, I wasn't in a big rush.

Of course, most people don't have their own real estate agent training, and selling a house is a complicated issue. I went down to one of the local lawyers, explained what I was doing, and he took care of everything for me for a total of under $700.

The reason that I am mentioning this is because I just read an interesting article in Report On Business that talks about the major changes that are about to happen within the Real Estate industry due to the influence of the internet. If you think you might either buy a sell a home in the next five or ten years, it's definitely worth a read:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-battle-to-unlock-the-housing-market/article1450088/

And by the way, remember something else. You may think that you're not going to benefit if you're a buyer, because only the seller saves the commission. However, when I was picking a price to sell, I had originally wanted to list it for $134,000. But then, when I realized I was going to lose almost $8,000 in commissions, I thought that I'd "split the difference" and list the house for four thousand less, to help sell it faster, and still come out $4,000 ahead. So if you're thinking about buying a home, it's definitely worth your while to go through Kijiji and the other non-MLS websites out there.

Good luck ...