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.

Out and About on the MV Frances Barkley

NASA tells us this week that utter collapse of human civilization is almost inevitable—and just around the geological corner. Even as I type, responsible folks are no doubt mobilizing to do something about it but no, we attend to our bucket list like there’s no tomorrow.

I’ve inhaled Vancouver Island oxygen for nearly four decades but until yesterday had failed to capitalize on one of the jewels of the Island’s marine transportation system. With pals Carole and Garth, Jan and I boarded the MV Frances Barkley at Port Alberni and spent nine hours watching the world go by from the vantage point of the Barkley’s upper deck.

The vessel is a little 58-year-old Norwegian-built ferry that delivers people, mail and freight to the outports along the Alberni Inlet and its tributary waterways. We counted birds, looked for cetaceans and sea lions and soaked up as much local lore as we could fit behind eyes and between ears in the allocated time.

The first port-of-call was tiny Kildonan, which has no supermarkets, no casinos and no roads. A few houses and houseboats cling to a foothold at water’s edge below hills draped with towering conifers looking as though they’ve stood there forever. John, the Barkley skipper eased his 300-ton vessel to shore three times: once to deposit a happy-to-be-home Kildonian who’d been far away for half a year, once to deliver and collect mail, and once to winch a woodstove out of the Barkley’s hold onto a houseboat deck. What a show that was.

It was clear from the captain’s observations that life here at the edge of the deep dark forest is quite unlike the routines those of us who live in the ‘burbs have come to expect. There is nowhere to take a walk—unless you’re game to go bushwhacking up a 20 to 30-degree forest slope—no coffee shops or library reading-rooms to hang out in. No powerlines. No auto traffic. No movie-houses. On the bright side, there is wildlife to appreciate: like the cougar a Kildonan resident recently intercepted on his sundeck as it was about to ingest the family dog.

Once upon a time there was a big salmon cannery at Kildonan that provided a livelihood for quite a number of folks. Alas, the cannery closed down decades ago; all that remains are the pilings that once supported it, all of them now serving as planters for the various living things that have managed to take root.

Just over the hill from Kildonan lies Henderson Lake, which has the distinction of being the wettest place in Canada. In a normal year 272 inches of rain cascades into Henderson Lake and upon the heads of whoever happens to be lurking in the lakeside forest. In 1997 Mother Nature humbled that astounding number with an even more jaw-dropping one: in that banner year 366 inches fell upon the folks lolling at lakeside. If you’re a modern person who appreciates metric measures, perhaps this will suit you—366 inches translates into more than nine metres of rain. That’s right, nine metres.

As we made our way from Alberni to Kildonan, eventually on to Bamfield, there were regular signs that industry has not forgotten this part of the Island: a sawmill here, log booms there, an oyster farm further along. We pulled into Bamfield across the harbour from the 1902 cable station that served as western terminus of the trans-Pacific telegraph cable. Cap’n John gave us an hour to enjoy Bamfield by shank’s mare. Some of us opted to walk to Brady Beach, stroll the sandy strand and contemplate the vast distance to Japan.

I spent most of the on-board time clutching my binocular in hopes of building a respectable day list of birds seen. In the result only 27 species availed themselves including good numbers of bald eagles and ducks. A red-throated loon elicited approval, as did a couple of seagoing alcids—the bird family that includes puffins among its ranks—the rhinocerous auklet, named for the base-of-the-bill spur males cultivate at this time of year to charm a female into submission, and the little marbled murrelet whose breeding habitat was unknown until, fairly recently, it was discovered that these robin-sized seabirds nest in the high tops of the tallest trees in old-growth forests. Imagine that.

Unfeathered finds offered views too. A gang of sea lions lolled on the rocks at Chup Point but doubtless the best wildlife sighting of the day reserved itself for the final hour or so. A pod of orcas—which used to go by the moniker killer whale—came up for air right beside the Barkley and splashed about in a brief sunny interlude. Garth has consumed more than seven decades of his allotted time on Planet Earth without—until this moment—ever laying eyes on any sort of whale, let alone the storied Orcinus orca. You may well imagine the exultation that erupted as a result of that sighting.

The weatherman had promised rain this day—what else would you expect of a place that gets nine metres a year?—but he proved to be serendipitously wrong. Sure, we had to put up with occasional mist and drizzle but outright rain stayed mostly away; we felt like lottery winners.

If human civilization is about to collapse under its own enormous weight I suppose I ought to be contemplating what to do about it. Truth be told, I haven’t a clue what I might accomplish in the absence of cooperation from others. Feel free to slag me for saying so but I think what I’ll do is carry on trying to see as much relic wilderness as I can before night descends over the whole shebang.