It was around 7:30 a.m. Saturday morning when Nicole Van De Wolfshaar heard a scream outside her Glabar Park home.
After running out of electricity since a major storm devastated Ottawa last Saturday, Van De Wolfshaar was boiling water on his barbecue to make a cup of coffee.
“Do you know that when there’s a predator in the neighborhood, crows always make a huge racket?” she said. “I went out to see what was in the backyard.”
He didn’t see anything right away, but then he went to his pool and found her: a coyote not only dived in, but was struggling to get out.
Van De Wolfshaar says the coyote looked pretty tired when he found him in his pool Saturday morning. (Nicole Van De Wolfshaar)
Van De Wolfshaar said he wanted to help the coyote, but throwing him out didn’t seem like the safest plan. Instead, he tried to pull her toward the pool steps so she could get out easily.
It didn’t go as well as she had hoped.
“He swam a little bit, and then he tried to get out by the side of the pool. And then he would really fight and then he would swim a little more and he finally got out,” he said, adding everything. the test lasted about 15 minutes.
“But he looked tired.”
Van De Wolfshaar says he tried to drive the coyote from his pool to the steps so he could get out easily, but without success. (Nicole Van De Wolfshaar)
Van De Wolfshaar said she was also worried about what to do if the wild animal drowned at the bottom of her pool.
“What does one do when he has a drowned coyote in the backyard?” she wondered.
In the end, it was a happy ending. The coyote ran to the back of his yard and crossed over to his neighbor’s property, he said.
Van De Wolfshaar said he later posted the images on a neighborhood Facebook group as a rest stop for everyone who complained about not having electricity.
Van De Wolfshaar says she was worried the coyote might come out of her pool. “What does one do when he has a drowned coyote in the backyard?” (Nicole Van De Wolfshaar)
Living without electricity “a nuisance”
Van De Wolfshaar regained power on Saturday later, and while the one-week break was annoying, he said he really couldn’t complain about all the support from friends and family.
“We haven’t had hot water, we can’t cook, we can’t heat anything except the barbecue,” he said, adding that he was showering at friends ’houses and others were bringing him meals and doing laundry.
“It’s a nuisance, but I’m not suffering,” he said before the lights came on.
Hydro Ottawa’s lack of clear communication was the most frustrating, he added.