Owls, and beavers, and bats, oh my! How to critter-watch in Vancouver

Have you ever seen a pack of raccoons hobbling over a fence in the evening, and found yourself slightly mesmerised?

If the answer is yes, you might want to try critter-watching — the timeless act of gazing at wild creatures that fly and crawl not too far from home.

"As we enter the fall, the nights are just getting longer — so it's a great time for us to get outside and enjoy nature in a different way than we can in the summer," said Stanley Park ecologist Greg Hart.

In Vancouver , there's a host of wildlife that can be found in community parks and woodlands, and they can be easy to spot — if you know the right tricks.

Beavers

In Stanley Park, it's no secret that Beaver Lake is a perfect spot beaver-watch.

The first trick is to find the beaver lodge — a large pile of sticks and mud that rise above the water where families of beavers dwell.

"Recently they've moved back in — and now they call Beaver Lake their home," said Hart.

Try going there at dusk — the time of day where they go out foraging. Look for a ripple across the water's surface — odds are, it's a beaver coming home with some supplies.

Owls

"Owls are really cool animals that people are really passionate and try to connect to," said Hart. "They're well adapted to their nocturnal lifestyle and living in our city — eating small rodents and shrews that live in our parks and yards."

Owls are notoriously hard to spot. They can fly almost without any sound and their feather patterns tend to mimic their surroundings. Around dusk, they wake up from their daily roosts, and perch up high to begin hunting for food.

Hart says finding one takes patience — and putting yourself in a strategic location.

"Being on the edge of kind of an open area and a forest is actually a really productive place to be," said Hart. "You find a lot more of an increase of biodiversity in terms of your rodents, which are going to be a lot of the prey species."

Place yourself in areas where the forests meet the open, and listen for birds' hoots.

Bats

Bats might horrify most of us, but they also do society a huge service by eating mosquitoes and other insects. In fact, a little single brown bat can eat up to 1000 in an hour.

According to the Stanley Park Ecology society, seven species of bats have been identified in Vancouver seasonally, including the little brown bat, the big brown bat, and the Yuma Myotis, making their homes in buildings and under the bark of trees in Stanley Park.

"If you take the time to look up, this is the time where bats start to flutter around. They haven't gone into hibernation yet."

Stanley Park is a great place to see them before they enter winter hibernation in late October. Just look up into the sky at dusk.

With files from CBC's North by Northwest