ottawa storm

One Ottawa woman is sharing some serious laughs after an unexpected visitor hung out at her poolside over the weekend.

In an edited Facebook cover photo, a wet creature is seen sporting sunglasses with a flamingo pool floaty and a cocktail. But the joke started after a bit of an ordeal on May 28.

It was a noisy wake-up call for Nicole Van De Wolfshaar on Saturday morning. She was getting ready to put her morning coffee pot on the barbeque, following Ottawa's storm power outage, when she heard a familiar sound.

Crows started cackling at a predator but she wasn't sure what kind.

"I hear it all the time," Van De Wolfshaar told Narcity. "When they're in the area you know there's something in the backyard."

Maybe it's a fox, she mused to herself, since the creatures sometimes visit her backyard. Other times dogs wander onto her property. That's when she saw it.

"We made eye contact," Van De Wolfshaar says. It was a coyote and it was hanging onto the ledge of her inground pool.

To Van De Wolfshaar, the creature looked tired. She says she talked to it in hopes of coaxing it out of the pool by taking the steps in the pool's shallow end.

"I thought, he just looks like, 'I'm either drowning here or this human is gonna get me out and that's how I imagined the one photo where I really got in close on his eyes," she said. "I didn't feel afraid. I just felt concerned because he seemed under so much stress."

After about 20 minutes, and nonstop commentary from crows, Van De Wolfshaar says she saw the coyote pass through the cedars on her fence line.