Sooke Hills Golden Moments

Sometimes the best of peregrinations can be the one closest to home. There is hardly anything I like better than a ramble in the Sooke Hills wilderness with Jan and best buddies Mary, Mike and Judith but Sunday’s excursion was particularly rewarding—and especially serendipitous.

Mike’s quartet of followers pursued him up a new route to the top of Mt McDonald. While much of the rest of Canada remains locked in winter’s grip McDonald provided an eye-feast of superb vistas and early spring wildflowers: satinflowers, fawn lilies, shooting-stars, saxifrage et al. Two eagles caught Jan’s eye. Just a couple of bald eagles, I shrugged, big deal. But hell no, the big fliers turned out to be golden eagles, anything but an everyday bird in these parts.

The birding is not often so rewarding in these hills, but that wasn’t the end of it. We came upon our first yellow-rumped warbler of the year, a male singing his heart out on the McDonald summit. Then a small band of red crossbills flew overhead, one of very few sightings we have had this winter. Later in the day we heard the unmistakeable tooting vocals of a pygmy owl, a bird aptly named: you could fit one in your morning coffee mug and have room to spare. Any day that features an encounter with pygmy owl is a day to cherish.

All those sightings should have been gift enough but there was more. Mike proved himself not just the man of the hour but of the entire day by finding an honest-to-goodness rarity: Contia tenuis, sharp-tailed snake, which reaches the northern extreme of its west coast range on south Vancouver Island and environs. It is endangered in BC and rarely seen. It was a lifer for all, one that remains on my yet-to-see list because, well, when Mike hollered out that he’d found a little snake I was elsewhere on the slope we were climbing and decided it would probably be just another garter snake. What a blunder that proved to be. For a look at Mary’s fine portrait of the sharptail go here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/msanseve/13374134605/

Contia tenuis likes Douglas-fir forest with rocky south-facing openings, precisely the habitat in which Mike found his little friend. The sharptail was never numerous in these parts but human intrusion into its preferred habitat has likely made matters even worse. Though I’d skipped the opportunity to see it with my own eyes I read all about it after Mary cinched the ID. The sharptail has no close relatives; in contrast to garter snakes, which produce live young, the sharptail is an egg-layer. Once upon a time I wondered why nothing likes to eat the Island’s omnipresent slugs. Turns out I’m wrong: slugs and slug eggs are the sharptail’s principal staple of life. How excellent it is to imagine that to a sharptail, slugs are better than lobster or Dungeness crab.

Some folks I am acquainted with like the Sooke Hills every bit as much as I do—but for very different reasons. Their preferred approach is a hell-bent chase over as much ground as they can cover at the fastest possible speed. By contrast my role model is Ferdinand the Bull: for me the glories of the Sooke Hills—its golden eagles, pygmy owls, wildflowers and sharp-tailed snakes—are best savoured at just about the slowest possible speed. Vive la difference.