The Editor,
I really don’t think I need to say anything about what these pictures represent.
However, it is clearly obvious to me watching this doe with her fawn on Thursday morning that they just cannot understand what happened to their home that used to be trees, trees and more trees at Cedar and Victoria drives opposite the Deboville Slough.
To me it is a sad statement of what is important to municipalities (money) versus the respect for wildlife and having some quality green space for the wildlife to roam and live their lives.
This is not the only time I have seen wildlife disrupted.
The Dominion Triangle is another area that used to be so rich with wildlife, specifically deer as well as coyotes and bears. At the start of the destruction of that wonderful green space so that Port Coquitlam could reap dollars from the developers, at the expense of utter destruction of the home for the wildlife, I distinctly remember driving west on Lougheed Highway after the Pitt River Bridge and seeing three deer on the top of a large mound of partially dug up ground. They were just standing atop the mound looking over the landscape surveying the disruption of their home area.
Currently, with all the latest development on Burke Mountain, especially along the Victoria Drive area to the north and east, there have been a lot more bears (along with some cubs, too), that have been seen in the lower blueberry field area this year; far more than in the past as I see it and in chats with locals that live in the residences adjacent to Minnekhada Park. Make no mistake, many of these bear dens have been disturbed by the willful destruction of the local wild space area there, too.
The point I want to make is that this was their home. It has been forever. But no more. They don’t pay taxes, so they mean nothing to municipalities, councils and developers. They don’t generate cash; nor does undeveloped green space.
In the end, not only does the wildlife suffer and pay the price, but so do we as humans with the loss of green space to enjoy. Replacing that with a postage stamp size of grass or the odd tree or the supposed re-fit done at the lower end of the PoCo Trail that backs onto the Dominion Triangle development just doesn’t work.
Maybe someday things will be different, but not likely in my lifetime.
Philip Warburton, Port Coquitlam
