Yesterday was the second time we'd come across the pair. Outdoor staff tasked with looking after the extensive area park system for the municipality. They were taking measurements, assessing the condition of the bridges located within the ravine, where we take our daily leisure activity.

The bridges are only about five years old, built to replace flimsier bridges that had been in place considerably longer, and were then in increasingly bad shape. Thanks in no small way to the anti-social activities of local teens who think it's good, clean fun to destroy public property. It's not only infrastructure like the bridges, but when the municipality had put up signage at ravine intersections, and when they had installed exercise bars for those who wanted to use them, and where good, stout benches had been put into place at various points, they had all attracted the attention of neighbourhood louts who did their best to set them on fire, or hack them up.

Our topic of conversation with the two, one a younger, amiable man of rather large proportions, the other a grizzled veteran of life, white-haired, short and stubby, was the silly nature of an elderly woman daily scattering peanuts for the wildlife, primarily squirrels and chipmunks. And the fact that she had a devoted following of local crows who knew, just as the squirrels and the chipmunks did, where those peanuts would be deposited.

About the proliferation of squirrels, crows and chipmunks, the older of the two men had much to say, that squirrels were nothing but loathsome rats, and crows were flying rats, and there was a time when both populations were held down and a whole lot scarcer in number than they are now. He should know, he said proudly, he was one of a legion of young boys who had grown up using slingshots and B-B guns to lethal effect.

The elderly woman smiled at the man, her husband said nothing additional, hearing his wife tell them both, the municipal workers, that she liked all wildlife. No point telling them that the crows and the squirrels and the chipmunks exhibited intelligence, perhaps on a par with the grizzled old fellow who so fondly recalled his childhood escapades.