A Smokin' Good Time at Galiano

You have to hand it to us: Jan and I are masters of good timing. Two or three weeks ago, as one sunny day relentlessly followed another, and lawns grew ever drier and browner, we planned a departure from Vancouver Island for the first time in many months. No, not to Europe or even some distant reach of our home and native land. No, we limited ambition to something in the order of 26 kilometres, the distance between the BC Ferries terminal at Swartz Bay on Vancouver Island  and its lesser sibling at Sturdies Bay on Galiano Island.

Galiano is among our favourite of British Columbia's highly attractive southern Gulf Islands, rivaled in our affections only by Saturna and Hornby. We looked forward to vigourous hikes to Bodega Ridge and Mount Galiano, both of them destinations we know well but never weary of.  The little trip was meant in part to celebrate Jan's latest birthday which I shall be sufficiently discrete not to name.

Then the fates threw a spanner into our best-laid plan: much of the American west coast, and a little bit of Canada's too, caught fire.  In the leadup to our October 14 departure for Galiano, a pall of thick wildfire smoke fell upon our town. In September fine weather normally enables Islanders to see clear across Juan de Fuca Strait, to the Olympic Mountains of Washington state, the highest peaks snow-capped even in late summer. Now, with wildfires raging in California, Oregon and Washington, the sun turned into a dim orange ball, visibility fell to perhaps a quarter mile, and air quality in Vancouver and Victoria reached a nadir: as bad or worse than any city in the world. Health authorities recommended that we all refrain from strenuous activity, perhaps even stay inside after sealing up windows and doors. We went to Galiano anyway.

Though a change in perspective and expectation proved necessary we managed to find plenty to see as long as we remembered to keep the focus close. Near the Sturdies Bay ferry terminal, at Bellhouse Park, remarkable sandstone geology provides plenty to contemplate. A gang of purple sea stars also caught our eye at Bellhouse. The big 'starfish' plays a neat trick: after forcing a clam or mussel to give up a tiny opening, the star is able to displace its stomach inside the bivalve shell and digest the body of its prey at one remove.

Bluffs Park denied its usual generous vistas across Active Pass to Mayne, Pender and Salt Spring islands but permitted close inspection of conglomerate rock, flowers and spiders. At Montague Harbour we introduced ourselves to tiny purple shore crabs and conducted an inventory of all the bivalves and crustaceans we could distinguish in a single square metre of the intertidal zone—oysters, clams, limpets, barnacles et al.

With ambitious hikes ruled out, we even managed to score a couple of 'lifers': visits to places we'd never seen before. At Matthews Point we watched the big BC ferries traverse Active Pass —and managed to move fast enough to stay out of harm's way when a ferry's surprisingly big 'wash' rolled into shore. Birds are a reliable attraction as long as visibility is a little better than a hundred feet: a heron fishing from a drifting log, a kingfisher rattling its objections to our intrusion into its neighbourhood.

Morning Beach provided another lifer. There we had more unusual geology to admire, and birds too. As we sat ogling the seals and sea lions lolling on Lion Islets, a pair of red crossbills dropped into the scrubby yew right beside us and allowed me to take a portfolio of pictures. A young crow noisily pestered its mother for yet another feed. A gull turned the tables on a purple star, trying its damndest to ingest one that must have been six inches across.

If the land of the living grows a little tedious, there is always the domain of the dead. Not everyone shares my view that there is no such thing as a boring cemetery. Galiano's is especially fascinating. An excellent array of unusual grave decorations rewards the visitor who takes the time and trouble to follow Active Pass Drive as far as one can. The earliest Galiano pioneers—the Georgesons and Bellhouses among them—are gathered here. There are a few conventional-looking grave markers at the Galiano final resting place but the majority are out of the ordinary: a charming sculpture of Uncle Tom Head and his cherished dog, a rusting toy truck marking the grave of an islander who loved to drive his full-sized pickup along Galiano roads, a lovely porcelain rendering of a small child riding an elephant.

Sure, it might have been nice to have the usual sunshine grace our visit to Galiano, but if one takes the time to find the iconic little human riding an elephant, Galiano offers ample reward even when smoky haze reduces visibility to near zero.

Ah the Joys of a Big Sit

Now that September is upon us, peregrinations are front of mind, the sort that occur annually at this time of year as birds that have raised broods in Canada—from our region of the country all the way to the faraway Arctic—decide it is time to head to wherever it is they like to make their winter home.

Once upon a time—oh, as long as four decades ago—I was a crazed practitioner of the birding Big Day wherein two or three keeners get together to see how many species they are able to find in  a given window of up to 24 hours. Hereabouts early May is a good time for a Big Day; so is early-mid September. The thing about a Big Day is that it is a very intensive, rushed affair not conducive to relaxation, peace, quiet and tranquility. 

Even as a young buck I was aware of an alternative to the Big Day, namely, the Big Sit, an option that involves no running-around at all, but a nice leisurely settling-in at some well-selected site, preferably in comfortable folding chairs, a lovely picnic lunch at hand, chilled beverages waiting in the cooler, all gathered at a site commanding excellent views over an area likely to be traversed by a variety of birds. Despite its manifest attractions I was never much drawn to the Big Sit when I was a young fellow. That has now changed.

Jan and I decided that a Big Sit was just the thing for a blithesome early September morning. We went to Tower Point which commands an expansive view over Juan de Fuca Strait all the way to the Olympic Mountains of Washington State. Jan decided it was a capital idea, one she bought into with extra fervor when I promised to make my world-renowned pesto sandwiches part of the deal.

We arrived at our destination a little past 8, pleased as usual to be greeted by a soundscape dominated by waves lapping at the rocky shoreline, Garry oaks soughing in a gentle breeze, harbour seals contentedly grunting from the islet just off the point. Human-made noise was happily absent. There were birds to see right off the bat—surfbirds and turnstones foraging for breakfast among the offshore rocks. Legions of gulls gathered too: old-reliable glaucous-winged gulls, even bigger numbers of a lovely gull whose numbers peak at this time of year, a species that for some reason always brings Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys to my mind—California gulls.

My better half and I were well equipped for observing birds and recording anything special that might fly into our view plane: two binoculars, spotting scope, two cameras. Off to the west we saw a crowd of gulls—two hundred or more—gathered on a sand bar at the entrance to winsome Witty's Lagoon. I turned the spotting scope to the sandbar, soon gathered that the majority of the gulls were Californias, the sort evoking Brian Wilson. 

Then I spotted something else, on the beach beyond the sandbar: naked women. Once upon a time, back when I was as hardcore a Big Day practitioner as ever was, I might easily have been distracted by women naturists assembled on a beach. It is perhaps a sad marker of how much has changed over the years that I was hardly distracted at all. No, there were birds to identify; I was bound and determined to identify them.

Our principal birding targets were phalaropes and jaegers—seagoing birds that provide the best, albeit rare, viewing possibilities at this time of year. Well, to kill the suspense, no, we saw no phalaropes. We saw no jaegers. We saw container ships pass slowly by, too distant to hear the thrum of the ships' engines. In the distance zodiacs packed with whale-watchers also raced past, everyone on board keen for close encounters with orcas, perhaps even a humpback. We saw no whales.

Onshore just behind us, there were landbirds to hear and see: a towhee here, nuthatch there, a warbler or two, a little gang of bushtits, a flicker. In the result we fell short of the hundred-plus count that might have once been assured in a September Big Day. We listed barely a couple dozen species. Feel no pity. The pesto sandwiches, washed down with herbal tea, were every bit as brilliant as promised. On the way back to the car we filled two containers with blackberries. The berries will provide the filling for the pie we'll share tomorrow evening with Jan's Dad. What could be finer? 

Despite the paucity of phalaropes and jaegers it was a Big Sit to remember. I can hardly wait for the next one.

 

 

Swimsuits Not Required

In 1722 Daniel Dafoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, published A Journal of the Plague Year, one man's account of the Great Plague of London which killed about a hundred thousand Londoners and others in 1665-66. Wikipedia tells us that Dafoe takes pains to achieve verisimilitude in his plague book, describing specific neighborhoods, streets, and even particular houses in which events took place. I admit to having never read Journal of the Plague Year. Perhaps this would be a good year to remedy that defect.

Our own pandemic of 2020 has turned the planet into a strange, unfamiliar world. But for CV-19 I would be in Cape Breton now, enjoying the woods of Boularderie Island, cataloguing the birds and wildflowers, trying in vain to persuade twin cousins Lynn and Louise to go for a skinny dip in my own private, perfect swimming hole.  But no, I am in BC rather than CB, striving to make the best of altered circumstances.

I find that in at least one way I have become a facsimile of my late, lamented mother. When I was young I never quite understood why dear old Mum put such a high premium on peace and quiet. I no longer wonder why. From the sleeping porch at Big Bras d'Or it is commonplace in the dead of night to hear barred owls and coyotes in conversation from somewhere in the upper reaches of Kelly's Mountain, five kilometres away. We get up in the morning to revel in the chorus of warblers singing from the woods just behind the cabin. At 'Bigador' there is plenty of  peace and quiet. Here in our no-longer-little city it often seems to me that there is none at all, so when Mary and Mike proposed that we join them in a longish hike to Sheilds Lake in the Sooke Hills, Jan and I said yes, please and thank you.

Monday was a glorious day for hiking a less-traveled wilderness route: sunny but not too warm, a gentle breeze producing what might be my favourite sound in nature: the soughing of wind in pines. Not spruces, not firs, not hemlocks produce the same sound. Only pines. On the way to Sheilds—no, that is not a misspelling, the lake is Sheilds, not Shields—there was plenty of p & q to value. In mid-August songbirds have mostly done their procreative duty and fallen silent: the woods are no longer alive with their urgent song, but we did hear a vocalizing pygmy owl and counted ourselves lucky.

August is not prime time for wildflowers either but a rattlesnake plantain here, king gentian or rein-orchid there provided sufficient opportunity to pause to take a picture and a legitimate excuse to catch my breath.

Our friends treated us to a 'lifer': a new-to-us, rough, untraveled route across a height of land to our target lake. Sheilds is sufficiently removed from any madding crowd that we had a reasonable prospect of having it to ourselves. And indeed we did. Sheilds was another 'lifer: a lovely good-sized lake festooned here and there with pink water lilies. Apart from a calling raven here, a sapsucker there, we were alone.

I am someone who tends to feel that getting dressed to go for a swim is just about as logical as doing so to take a bath or have a shower. If I have to swim with a cast of strangers, in a bathing suit, I typically conclude it is not worth the trouble. At Sheilds there were no strangers, no need for bathing suits. Like-minded friends are one of life's true treasures: all together we went for a lovely swim in the altogether. It was sublime.

Now I freely admit that deeply into my eighth decade I am no longer anything but an eyesore to anyone who might have been peeking from the woods but if friends are both like-minded and forgiving of deeply wrinkled, saggy skin, an old fellow is doubly blessed.

After relaxing swim and restorative lunch it might have been a downer to tear ourselves away from Sheilds but there was consolation: another lake on the way back, another swim for those needing a second cooldown.

None of us were in any hurry to get the day over with so by the time we'd tramped 14 km, climbed 430 metres or thereabouts, subjected our feet to 31,107 steps, nine hours had somehow slipped past. By then I was ready to call it a day. Wrinkles and sags notwithstanding I'm grateful I can still do such a thing.

A Little Cometary Perspective

In these Covid-deprived times our ability to embark on ambitious peregrinations is greatly stifled. We are encouraged to stay close to home, abjure crowded airplanes, keep our distance, and thereby hope to avoid emulating the unhappy fate of the six hundred thousand of our fellow humans who have already succumbed to the virus. At this time of year I would ordinarily be enveloped in the quiet, restorative delights of the woods of Big Bras d'Or, the wildflower-festooned trail to Dalem Lake, the vocal stylings of the Swainson's thrushes, black-throated green warblers and white-throated sparrows of Boularderie Island. Perhaps the pandemic will have abated enough to permit a return to Cape Breton in 2021. Perhaps not.

I am obliged to content myself with horizons reachable on foot from my James Bay door, by bicycle, or by a short drive in gasoline-powered conveyance. But these days—perhaps I should say nights—another sort of peregrination provides happy, contemplative distraction. I admit to being one among  my kind fascinated by comets. Yes, comets. I get excited whenever a new comet is discovered and I have the prospect of seeing it with my own septuagenarian eyes. In late March, on its journey to our corner of the solar system, a new comet was detected by a space telescope, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer absorbed in its Near-Earth Objects mission—NEOWISE for short. Comet Neowise has an alternate, even more prosaic moniker, C/2020 F3. I find neither name as evocative as the names Halley, Hale-Bopp or Hyakutake but that is a mere quibble. Any visible comet is a joy to behold, an inducement to contemplate our significance in the greater scheme of things.

Often dubbed "dirty snowballs", comets are typically made of dust, gas and the ionized gas the scientists call plasma. When invisibly minding their own business in the outer reaches of the solar system comets are very cold, something in the order of minus-220 Celsius, but as they approach the innermost zones of the solar system the surface temperature can shoot to an opposite extreme: heat measured in the millions of degrees. And that is when we humans get to see them: it is the heat of the sun and the solar wind that produce the comet's corona and the tail that extends as much as ten million kilometres.

A few nights ago Jan and I made our way in evening twilight to Highrock Park in Esquimalt to see the new comet. We were not alone: twenty or thirty others were also gathered at Highrock for the show. Neowise is a wee thing, a mere five kilometres in diameter, but even at a distance of a hundred million kilometres the corona and tail make it is easy enough to spot, especially if the observer is armed with a decent binocular. It was of course Jan, aka 'Hawkeye', who spotted it first. I managed to get a decent image of Neowise with my long-lens Sony.

One viewing was not enough. Last night we went out again. By 11 pm the summit of Victoria's Mount Tolmie was crowded with people and their vehicles, all gathered for the same purpose. Neowise once traveled at a sedate 3,200 kilometres/hour but the slingshot effect of the sun's gravity has increased the iceball's pace to 28,000 kph. That works out to about 7.78 kilometres a second, quite a bit faster than Usain Bolt in his prime. The comet will make its closest approach to Planet Earth July 22 by which time it will be a mere 103 million kilometres distant. You still have plenty of time to see it: take a bino to some location—the darker the better—with an open view to the northwest. I promise it will be easy enough to see.

Where is Neowise headed? Well, back to the Oort Cloud is the short answer: the far reaches of the solar system. Solar system distances are measured by the Astronomical Unit, the distance from the sun to our little planet, 152 million kilometres. At aphelion, the comet's greatest distance from the sun, Neowise will be in the order of 630 AU away from us. The comet will need a few thousand years to reach aphelion and commence its next circuit to the sun. For a sense of what 630 AU means consider this: Voyager 1, launched 43 years ago in 1977 and speeding along at 17 kilometres/second is now about 150 AU from its launch pad. When will we see this comet again? The experts tell us it will be 6,800 years before Neowise delivers a return engagement.

Neowise delivers a tonic over and above its fascinating bare facts: when a fellow is inclined to fret about the state of human affairs and the danger that Donald Trump might be reelected leader of the free world, the comet offers a little perspective.

  

In Pursuit of Pipsissewa

Deprived by Covid-19 of a 2020 sojourn at beloved 'Bigadore' in Cape Breton, I seek distractions that might ease the sting of the loss. Bonnie Henry, British Columbia's cherished chief medical officer, tells us to stay close to home, abjure unnecessary travel, and adjust ourselves to near horizons. I try to do my bit but after a hundred days and more of the new regime I admit to chafing at being confined within a walkable radius of our Ontario Street shack, especially since the crown jewel of Victoria's city parks—Beacon Hill Park—is ever more being taken over by people in tents—the homeless and perhaps others who like the prospect of no-cost camping in blithe surroundings.

I leapt at the prospect of teaming up with Jan and best-buddies Mary and Mike for a grail quest requiring the use of motor vehicle and the burning of fossil fuel. Yes, a departure from strict adherence to Dr Bonnie's prescription but a fellow can take only so much confinement.

The subject of our grail quest was flowers, yes, flowers. Wildflowers to be specific, ones that were pretty much strangers to all of us.

Starting at 0630 hours we made an early stop at Goldstream Park. None of the tenters domiciled at the park campground were yet out of their sleeping bags but the musical accompaniment provided by the dawn chorus of birds was well underway—varied thrush, olive-sided flycatcher and that most sublime of our woodland songsters, Swainson's thrush. Just a few days before, Mary and Mike had spotted two flower species new to them and to us—the lovely pink wintergreen and gnome-plant, the latter a pale oddball that makes its way in life by attaching its roots to self-sufficient plants and stealing some of their nutrients. Now they were in full bloom.

The main thoroughfare running north-south in our James Bay neighbourhood is Menzies Street. The name honours a Scots scientist of the 18th Century, Archibald Menzies, who made a name for himself as ship's taxonomist on George Vancouver's expedition to our part of the world in 1792. I have become something of a Menzies fan: I decided that before shuffling off this mortal coil I had to see the last of the west-coast plants named for the eminent Dr. Menzies. The very last happened to be beguilingly-named Pipsissewa—a word adapted from the Cree original—whose taxonomic handle is Chimaphila umbellata. 

Mary, our intrepid floral researcher, had found evidence that pipsissewa had lately been spotted close to the Koksilah River. That is where we headed next and it was there, by the rushing Koksilah, that Mary spotted the first of a gang of C. umbellata. Now I have to admit that the little flower is just that, a mere flower, and not a big showy one at that, but I couldn't have been happier had I been given ironclad cosmic assurances that Donald Trump will be tossed from the Oval Office come November.

Further downstream the river is crossed by the Koksilah Trestle, one of the world's tallest, most spectacular timber rail trestles. The chugging steam locomotives are of course long gone, but the trestle was well restored a decade ago and now attracts tourists keen to imagine a bygone era and to marvel at what could be achieved a century ago by the hand of man.

Our happy quartet made its way to Bright Angel Park where a picnic table in the shade provided the venue for a fine lunch of sandwiches, fresh fruit and—best of all—an array of licorice allsorts. A narrow pedestrian suspension bridge crosses the Koksilah a short distance from the picnic table. The little bridge does not impersonate terra firma. We staggered and slewed like drunks to the other side, cast eyes upward to the tops of towering red-cedars and sought to keep safely distanced from the families drawn on a hot day to the river's cooling pools.

Close enough to hear the roar of traffic on the bypass highway at Nanaimo,  Harewood Plains—a 'lifer' for all of—is one of a handful of sites in BC where one can hope to see Lotus pinnatus—meadow birdsfoot trefoil. We found all the trefoil we could possibly want to admire, and a host of other flowering lovelies: nodding onion, yellow monkey-flower, crown brodiaea,

I find I have something in common with birds: we tend to like the same places. Though it was now late afternoon the meadows at Harewood were alive with bird song—black-headed grosbeak, white-crowned sparrow, house wren. A garter snake soaking up sunshine tolerated my close approach to take its portrait. Turkey vultures drifted overhead, perhaps waiting for one of us to expire. Lovely.

The only flaw in a splendid day with good friends was that it came to an end. Ah well, enough of these and I might just survive a summer without the restorative charms of Boularderie Island.

***

To see an array of images from the day's adventures go here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/bigadore/albums/72157714782795898

Munn Road Melody

In these horizon-foreshortened days of both voluntary and mandatory isolation, peregrinations are necessarily more local than they once were. Our trusty Vibe sits idle most days and when we do start it up, it is only to drive a short distance. This being the first week of May, Munn Road beckoned. We drive there to park at a pullout under the hydro line that separates Francis-King and Thetis Lake parks. The powerline and adjacent parkland are an excellent place to see and hear returning migrant songbirds in these early days of a new breeding season. 

Jan and I get going early, arriving at 0517 hours to take in the dawn chorus. The day starts with a bang: distracted by the imminent excitement, I crush my left thumb in the car door, something I'd have preferred not to do. Oh well, even with a battered thumb, I cannot think of anywhere I'd rather be on the fourth of May than in the woods and open places on either side of Munn Road under that powerline. To be there with my better half.

Long ago, in the early-mid 1980s my excellent birding pals, Ron Satterfield and Bruce Whittington, could be persuaded to join me in a birding 'Big Day', an all-out effort to find as many bird species by sight and sound as we could squeeze into a very long day, twenty hours or thereabouts. Even at the time, in my mid-30s I knew what boon companions I had. I cherished them. With the benefit of hindsight my view of them is burnished that much more. I drove my friends hard. If a coterie of birder pals want to see 130 kinds of birds on south Vancouver Island they have to take the enterprise seriously. They did.

I loved Ron Satterfield. I use the past tense because Ron is departed. Gone four years now. Bruce and I were in our mid-30s back then, Ron past 60. Many years after we'd given up the Big Day game, I told my old pal that I felt a little regret about how hard I'd driven him back when. The Great Satterfield asserted that no regret was necessary. He said those times were some of the best of his long, rich life. I knew he meant it.

So yesterday when Jan and I revisited Munn Road for another session of hardcore birding, I was flooded with memories of days gone by, of Ron and Bruce, and all the adventures the powerline delivered when two of the trio were still young and one, not so young, was as intrepid as ever. Two sorts of peregrination unfolded yesterday: the literal kind and the time-travel variety a trip to Munn Road invariably sets in motion.

In a 1980s-era Big Day, after several hours listening for owls in the dark, the trio would typically welcome dawn at Munn Road. There was no time to squander, we would dash into the powerline, keen of eye and ear, and come out an hour or so later fifty species to the good. 

When Jan and go into the powerline now we do not dash. There are no other stops to worry about. The modern version of a May Big Day happens in one place. We take our time. The goal is still 50 species but if it takes the whole morning to reach that target, so be it.

Busted thumb notwithstanding, we have a fine, memorable time. A sapsucker delivers his irregular drumbeat love-song to the woman of his dreams. Jan is widely known by a well-earned nickname: Hawkeye. But her hearing is every bit as sharp as her spotting ability. She has left me behind. I no longer readily hear the kinglets and high-pitched warblers I detected so easily a third of a century ago. She shakes her head at my hearing loss. I wonder how much longer it will be before I get the heave-ho, before she summons the locksmith to re-key the Ontario Street doors.

I do manage to see or hear seven of the eight warbler species we can expect on our route. Especially in the early hours we have the place to ourselves: there are no other people to practice safe-distancing with. A barred owl accommodates our wish for a close look. At the sub-station ponds we find two wood duck families—the adults and their young broods. A pileated woodpecker—the species oldtimers called northern logcock—bangs out his nuptial melody from a distant snag. A medley of songbirds join the morning chorus—purple finches, black-headed grosbeaks, house wrens, common yellowthroats, McGillivray's warblers, goldfinches, a Hutton's vireo—all of them ardent to produce a new generation of their kind. 

It takes the whole morning, all seven hours of it, but we reach our goal: fifty species. The Great Satterfield would be 99 were he still in the land of the living. I miss him, and offer silent thanks for the great, stalwart friend he was.