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Reminiscences of Norm Walker, retired Boundary animal control officer

Working with animals for 19 years has given Norm Walker a lifetime of stories and experiences.
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Norm stand at the entrance of his property

It was like I stumbled upon a bird sanctuary. Trees filled with houses big and small, made for winged creatures of every description. Swallows, hummingbirds, sparrows, California quails, robins, starlings and flickers, to name a few, were eating, playing and singing amongst themselves.

This must be Norm Walker’s house, the soon-to-be 80-year-old man who’s known around town for his 19-year stint as an animal control officer.

The bespectacled, lean gentleman greets me with a mischievous but warming smile.

“How are you doing?” I ask.

“Fifty-fifty,” he says. “It’s not bragging and it’s not complaining, it’s right down the middle.”

Norm gives me a quick tour of the yard and shows me his Kettle Riverside, 1.4-hectare property, which was just a flat piece of land when he and his wife, Lizza, moved onto it 43 years ago.

He has 80 bird feeders scattered throughout the yard.

“I hate cats with a passion,” he says with a British undertone in his voice. “Well, when you feed as many birds as I do, you are going to have cats around.”

He gives me a run down on some of the birds that he tends to and then it’s my turn to ask him about life here in Canada.

Norm first came over from England and landed on the East Coast of Canada in 1952.

“I was almost 19 and I came on my own, not with the intentions of staying. I was going to drift down through the States. I had a couple of friends, one in South Africa and one from Australia and I was trying to make my mind up which way to go,” he says as we sit down on his front porch overlooking his property.

He managed to make his way up to Northern Ontario. “I just loved that country. I got married up there and that lasted 14 years.”

Soon before his first marriage dissolved, he joined the army and moved out was sent out to Vancouver Island. After too many years of “predictable rain” he got tired of the island and decided to trek eastward in the late ’60s.

“I was fed up with the island, I lived there for nine years.”

He found Grand Forks and thought it was a “beautiful valley.”

Norm soon married a local gal (Lizza) in 1969 at the Yale Hotel.

“We got married in a Russian ceremony here and then got married again in Victoria at the Parliament buildings.”

Norm remembers the ample job opportunities in the Boundary in the early ’70s.

“There were jobs galore at the time,” he says, as he reminisces about his early days in Grand Forks.

“I was blasting for Greyhound Mines in Greenwood but they went belly up, so I went to Merritt, B.C. and stayed there for a year.”

When he came back to Grand Forks, they began to spruce up their property, which had belonged to his wife’s father before he subdivided it, and the Walkers got a portion along the river at the corner of Darcy and Popoff Roads.

I asked Norm what his fondest memory of Grand Forks was and right away he said it was the birth of his daughter.

“I was right in there during the labour and the doctor said to me, ‘You either put a mask on or get out of here,’ so I put a mask on,” he says, as he described the joyful moment of welcoming his daughter, Angeline, into the world.

“When she started school I wanted to be around, I wanted to see her growing up, so that’s when I quit this construction work.”

Leaving construction behind led Norm into animal control.

“They kept talking about this animal control and they were trying to get somebody to do it, so I took it on,” he says, somewhat reluctantly.

“When we took it on, (referring to his wife and himself) we took it on seven days a week 24 hours a day. We were going steady and then soon after that, I got a contract with the conservation service for the nuisance animal control.”

Norm says the job didn’t offer much in terms of financial reward.

“I kept it hopping with no money to speak of but we didn’t need a lot, we never had a lot of bills or nothing.”

Norm’s daughter would tag along on numerous work excursions.

“We had two bear traps going and it takes a good eight to 10 hours to release a bear to get it out of one watershed and into another. Quite often Angeline would come along and she would stand on the trap and I would open the door and she would take pictures.”

He smiles as he remembers how his daughter used to take care of baby fawns.

“We raised fawns here in the living room and my daughter used to sleep beside them. We used to have them in a TV box, we would have bottles here and then a fawn would wake up and squawk and she would feed it.”

The sheer number of deer in the valley in the ‘70s and ‘80s kept Norm and his family so busy they would tend to injured deer calls up to three times a night.

“I kept getting called out for injured deer, most of them you would have to destroy,” he says. “At that time we were killing several 70 to 80 deer a year.

“We had a good deer population at that time and now there are literally no deer left, just a few in town.

“The police called us constantly for injured animals,” and he said his wife was the one who actually got the majority of the work.

“She suffered the worst I think because we had a radio in the truck and then she had the base at home and half the time I’m (talking nonsense) with someone and poor old Lizza is getting call after call after call, she had to take the brunt of it really.”

Norm has looked after and tended to numerous animals during his 19-year career as an animal control officer with the Regional District of Kootenay Boundary, including cougars, bears, coyotes, beavers, muskrats, snakes, deer, dogs, horses, cattle, goats, pigs, rabbits, bats, birds, squirrels, skunks and even monkeys, to name a few.

“And another thing is we castrated more animals and put in more stitches than you could shake a stick at ’cause there was no vet in town when we started the job.”

Norm got numerous calls throughout the year to put down rabbits causing a ruckus in people’s gardens. “There were two rabbits in particular on Valley Heights and everyone was making a fuss and complaining about them.

He said that he eventually had to shoot them.

According to Norm there was a doctor on the neighbouring property who complained to the regional district.

“At that time we were putting down 30 to 40 rabbits a year in people’s lawns and gardens,” he says.

Norm retired in 1994 after 19 years with the RDKB.

When I asked him about shooting animals, he stressed that he never liked doing it but sometimes it had to be done, and he would only shoot an animal if there were good reasons for doing it.

“I could never just go out into the wild and kill an animal for the sake of shooting something.”

Now that he is retired, he tends to the birds, the yard and the animals.

“We still get people bringing animals to us,” he says.

And when I ask him if he misses the job, he takes a long pause. “Yes,” he finally says. “There were some good times.”