The first day of a trip is always a slightly exhausting leap into a new world. Jumping from the security of home (even borrowed homes, as I’ve been aggressively couch-surfing for three weeks) into another life of bags and gear and rope and bicycles and buses and ferries - it’s an exhausting prospect.
Luckily, some happy […]

It’s past midnight, and I’m still up, trying to learn how to re-size photographs on my camera and digging up American dollars in old wallets. I haven’t slept in my own bed in over a month, and won’t be back in my apartment until February. So why am I insisting on rattling my own cage […]

An equation: Take one week with grey whale researchers, multiply by eight hours per day in a 22′ aluminium skiff, add 3′ swells on the open Pacific, and you have one seasick traveller. On the first day, I puked once over the side of the boat. Every day following began with my breakfast of Gravol, […]

I’d like you to meet my friend Charlie, the gargantuan local spider who comes up my bathtub drain on a regular basis. Positively prehistoric, Charlie is so large and scary-looking that I think he’s partly related to dinosaurs.
Whenever he shows up, I gently pop him into a tupperware container and bring him outside to the […]

Baby birds, baby birds: a bald eagle’s nest (see the white head inside the pink circle?),  13 baby ducklings, and a bush tit’s nest (it looks like a mossy football)…all on my walk to work.
(Did someone say “spring”?)

<>In Tofino, I spent a few hours bouncing around in boats hoping to spot migrating gray whales. In celebration of this experience, here are a few notes:
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It gets REALLY cold on the ocean in the winter
A group of male sea lions hanging out on a rock is a “colony”
Gray whales have two blowholes, […]

Tonight I experienced one of those mini-miracles that makes life so fabulous…my neighbours knocked on my door at 7:30 p.m. to tell me that the lunar eclipse was visible from our backyard.
The heavy cloud cover had broken and we were able to watch the eclipse for 15 minutes from the deck, passing around binoculars and […]

Despite their grim collective noun (surpassed only by the Ruth Rendell-ish “a murder of crows”) and croaky demeanour, I love ravens. Big, clunky, with a wedge-shaped beak and a throaty croak, Corvus corax principalis are a dominating presence in the woods and mountains of the west and north.
Fabulously smart, I’ve seen them steal eggs […]

See this article in last week’s New York Times about findings released by Canadian researchers regarding the threat to wild salmon stocks in British Columbia from parasites from intensive fish farming. (This has been an issue at the forefront of environmental discussions in B.C. for a number of years, but this week had the […]

” ‘Let’s stop panicking for a minute and look around us…[l]et’s stop thinking about the end of humanity all the time and focus for a minute on how wondrous this world is. This is where we live. It seems to me we are healthier if we actually see the world around us, all this […]