April Foolery in the Lakes Region

Not only did people in the Lakes region help mark April 1 with some fun, the police even got involved with April Fool’s Day pranks.

The Alexandria Police Department posted a photo of a military-style armored vehicle with the message that it had purchased a new “support” vehicle that will be shared by its SWAT team and its patrol division, so “people will finally understand that speeding will not be accepted.”

Contributing photographer Bill Hemmel provided a photographic representation of the MS Mount Washington plying the ice-bound waters of Lake Winnipesaukee as an ice-breaker.

Over in Holderness, the Squam Lakes Natural Science Center posted a press release about its streaming video camera in the “Fox Den” that was established to track the growth of the kits. “However, on the evening on March 31, 2019, no one was prepared for what they saw on the camera,” the center reported. “At approximately 8:33 p.m. Eastern a strange creature was seen walking through the field of view of the camera. A follower of the fox den stream was the first to comment and post a screenshot. The image appeared to show a velociraptor walking through Holderness, NH.”

It continued, “We always see interesting things on our remote cameras and livestream,” said Iain MacLeod, Executive Director of Squam Lakes Natural Science Center. “However this is a first.”

“Velociraptors are a dinosaur that lived approximately 71 to 75 million years ago. They were roughly the size of a turkey with widely spaced serrated teeth. It is suspected that they also had feathers much like today's modern day dinosaurs, raptors.

“Squam Lakes Natural Science Center is speaking with palentologists and paloebiologists to help identify this species and understand why it was in New Hampshire,” it said, adding that video footage of the creature is posted at https://www.nhnature.org/dino/video.php.

It actually was a clever spoof to announce the upcoming exhibit on dinosaurs at the Science Center.