Vancouver Christmas Bird Count

 For the first time in Vancouver, Kathryn and I decided to participate in the Christmas Bird Count in Vancouver. We ended up scouring our little patch of the city from pretty much dawn to dusk and ended up with 46 species varying from eagles to sparrows and with more than a few glaucous-winged gulls and crows in the middle.

Despite not having the immediate network for such events that we had in Manitoba, it was very easy to find the phone number of a co-ordinator on the internet and get involved. We joined a little group, bringing the total to six and had a very nice sociable day spotting everything we could.

We had great weather and some very good birds that I wasn't expecting to see like an oystercatcher, harlequin duck, and some horned grebes (shown below). Since our search area was also our neighborhood and regular stomping grounds we were able to offer up good areas, with Kathryn shining in particular by knowing to the square meter where we would find a heron and some hummingbirds.

A very enjoyable time all around which we are likely to repeat in the future. We actually ran into a woman who wanted to be out birding that day, so if you live in Vancouver and want to get involved, check out the Nature Vancouver website and get on the list for next year :)

Grey Cup Parade

 The Grey Cup was in Vancouver last week and we took a few hours early on the Saturday morning to go down and watch the parade. To help people who get confused into thinking its the "Marching Bands, Cheerleaders and Animal Mascots Parade" they periodically carry through a giant inflated football just to help keep everyone focused.

 The cup itself was part of the parade along with the football commissioner and a group of Mountie guards. Even though I don't really get the big deal with sports, its fun to see some of the regalia that goes along with it all.

 Kathryn is a Roughriders fan, but this guy is a HARDCORE Roughriders fan. Given that his team didn't even make the cup, but he still flew to Vancouver to wear bodypaint and SHOOT FIRE OUT OF HIS HEAD, I don't think anyone can question his dedication to the game.

Marine Mammal Symposium

 The University of British Columbia has been conducting an annual Marine Mammals Symposium for the past 22 years and this was the 2nd year that we attended. Its a pretty excellent gathering of the west coast minds for all things cetacean and pinniped, with presentations by grad students, professors, artists, and photographers along with representation from the whale watching industry.

 Each presenter is limited to a 5 minute slot which most people stick to out of 'fear' of the Call of the Rooster, which is a rubber chicken squawk signaling that your time is up. This creates a very intense but rapid volley of presentations with 44 different topics this year. There are several breaks throughout the day for lunch and stretches, and the lobby of the building has some pretty awesome articulated skeletons like the minke whale below.

 This trio of dolphin skeletons graces a nearby stairway, and one of the highlights for me this year was a brief presentation by the fellow who not only articulated all the skeletons in the building, but also the blue whale skeleton at the Beatty Biodiversity Museum, as well as some of the larger specimens at the Whale Interpretive Centre.

 

All in all an amazing but mentally draining day learning about some amazing animals from some pretty incredible people. If this sounds like your sort of thing, I would strongly recommend it, even as an outsider to the industry and a bit of a layman myself I find the whole day stimulating and eventful.

Scholarships

 I got a few emails last month stating that I had won two scholarships for the previous school year and there would be an awards ceremony on November 5th. When we got there I felt very underdressed and outclassed by a room full of academic and business top brass in fancy suits, but I managed to bumble my way through the experience all the same. Below is a picture from one corner of the room to show the layout of the room and density of formal people.

 Being a giant nerd last year, I apparently had the top mark in my program which earned me the "BCIT Foundations Scholarship" from the faculty of BCIT. Below is a picture of me receiving my cheque from a representative of the school.

 I was also one of two recipients of the "KPMG Award" (for those outside the industry, KPMG is one of the four large accounting firms in the world, so catching their attention is pretty humbling and exciting). The gentleman on the left was the presenter on behalf of KPMG and the young lady in the middle was the other winner of the award.

 

I feel very honored to be recognized for my efforts and it certainly reinforced that doing something else with my time was a good idea overall. Congratulations to the other award recipients and thanks to all the donors and attendees.

Seasonal Mushrooms

 Amidse the panic and frenzy that was my midterms week came a moment of calm when Kathryn insisted I come out (and bring my macro lens) to see a secret she had to share. After a short walk we came to a frequently trod corner of Stanley Park which had become home to an astonishing variety of mushrooms in a very small area. The brown woody one below is the outlier which we are unable to identify, but any amateur mycologists are welcome to chime in via the comments.

 We looked this one up in our mushroom guide and believe it is a Fragile Russula which are apparently inedible, not that we'd really want to be cooking anything that turned up a few meters from the parking lot in the first place.

 Fans of Super Mario Brothers and the Grateful Dead alike can probably recognize this Fly Amanita mushroom, famous for both giving you an extra hitpoint against flying turtles and being a hallucinogen. Although it has a proud history amongst Siberian shamans and is apparently quite popular at rural Lithuanian wedding feasts, we decided to only enjoy it through our camera.

While it is supposed to be good for killing flies (hence Fly Amanita), it is potentially very dangerous as well and was a favorite poison during the Roman era.

Telegraph Cove - Historic Side

 We've visited Telegraph Cove every year for the last 5 summers now, and looking back through our past posts it occurred to me that while we'd talked about people and animals of all sorts, we haven't actually shared that many pictures of the town itself. Compounding that, part of the town is very pretty and historical while part of it is a rather ugly motel, so we actually don't really have photographs of ALL of it, even after all these years. Below is a look down into the marina from the RV park where we usually camp out.

 A boardwalk runs around the edge of the cove along which the entire historical part of town is built up, with dock access in a few spots depending on which side your boat is moored on. The red building in the middle is the Old Saltery Pub which has very frequent salmon barbeques and does a pretty great seafood linguini as well.

 This is a view coming back into town from on one of the whale watching boats, and has a nice look at the Stubb's Island office and the Whale Interpretive Centre. The little houses nestled on the hillside are pretty charming and the great people and good times to be hand keep bringing us back year after year.

Northern Residents of Telegraph Cove

There are several distinct populations of orca in the waters of British Columbia, and the pods most common to the Telegraph Cove area belong to the Northern Residents. These orcas are specialized in eating chinook salmon, nearly to the exclusion of all other potential foods and are an iconic part of the landscape of northern Vancouver Island.

 They travel in pods between a pair to several dozen and like all orca, have a matriarchal society in which the sons stay with their mothers most of their life (according to a book we read last year, sons may spend up to 65% of their life within a body length of their mother). Since they must constantly come up for air, they can only let half of their brain sleep at atime, so they are commonly found in a resting formation where they travel along slowly and breathe frequently.

 When fully awake and active, their behaviour can be quite varied and exciting with all manner of spy hops (below), tail slaps, pectoral fin waves, breaches and vocalization. People only began seriously studying these animals in the 50s and the volume of information yet to be learned is huge, but with such striking and charismatic behaviour there should be no shortage of excited researchers and observers.

Family and Friends to be Thankful For

 With our health, happiness and loving marraige, we both have a lot to be thankful for. Most of that is difficult to express in a quick trio of photos, but we also had visits with dear family and friends this year which are much easier to summarize in a blogpost as people who most certainly help us through the years. Kathryn's parents shared a nice week with us earlier in the summer, allowing for some nice excursions from the city along with an overdue visit. They are an excellent example of how to be married for decades and still be very much in love.

 My cousin Simone and her husband Robbie were in town for a visit this summer as well, and we had a surreal crossover with them and my old friend Riley from Manitoba and the long long ago. It was really great to catch up with people I hadn't seen for years and pretty much pick up where we last left things off.

 Rounding out the summer, my dad came along with us to Telegraph Cove for some wildlife viewing and good company. As always, our friends at Stubbs Island Whale Watching were incredibly generous with their time and we had a dinner party/barbeque pretty much every night we were up there.

 

 There are many more dear people in our lives than we have quick reference photos of, but to everyone that is a part of our routine in Vancouver or elsewhere, thank you for being in our lives and we are no doubt past due for a proper visit.

Telegraph Cove Birds

 While the mammals are overwhelming in Telegraph Cove, there is a plethora of stunning birds to be seen if you can stop your head from spinning after all the cetaceans. There were a pair of peregrine falcons living along a nearby roadside which obliged us with a number of fly-bys. My dad was very quick on the draw and got this stunning photo with all the detail in the feathers and tack-sharp focus.

 Of course, some of the locals are more leisurely about having their photos taken like this great blue heron which was foraging along the entrance to the cove as our tour set out. While they are a common sight all along the coast of BC, we never tire of them or their primeval stature. Watch one of these for a few minutes and you'll have no problem believing that some dinosaurs eventually took to the air.

 While neither of us are big gull enthusiasts, my dad is quite the fan and his interest certainly makes them more of a draw. This California gull was perched helpfully on one of the pier pilings in the cove and there were dozens of others scattered around the area, just waiting to be scanned for rarities.

Black Bears on the Boardwalk and Grizzlies of the Deep

With the draw of whales near Telegraph Cove, its easy to forget the other major mammals in the area, both on land and in the water. Telegraph Cove is built up on boardwalks along the coast, and one morning this young black bear followed a stream down to the sea and was wandering around at low tide looking for tasty invertebrates under the rocks. He seemed quite unphased by the gaggle of tourists following along above and taking his picture.

 Out in the water, the Steller Sea Lions are equally impressive mammals. Since we typically see them from boats where we are both far away and much higher up they can seem comical, but they are pretty big and impressive creatures in their own rights. They are infact the largest of the eared seals and combine the size of bears with the sociability of dogs.

 Carrying the bear analogy one step further, the Whale Interpretive Centre has skeleton samples of most of the resident mammals, and a quick comparison between a grizzly bear and a steller sea lion shows more than a passing resemblance. This should not come as a huge surprise since both groups share common Arctoidea ancestors and are really just different twigs on the same branch of the mammalian family tree.

Hungry hungry humpbacks

 We had our annual visit to Telegraph Cove over the Labour Day long weekend and its been a few years since we actually had a blog post dedicated to one of our favorite animal sightings: the humpback whale. There have been an increasing number of humpback whales in the area this year, and Captain Wayne told us that it was a poor year for baitfish such as herring, so the humpbacks were being very competive for their meals. The whale below slapped its tail on the water for several minutes straight, maybe saying hello and maybe telling the other whales to give him some room.

 This was the first year we had seen humpbacks performing a newly discovered feeding technique called 'Trap feeding.' This behaviour seems particular to this area of the world, making it all the more rare and amazing to see. The whale essentially pops its mouth above the water and slowly moves around while using its pectoral fins to push fish into its mouth. An incredible bit of hunting AND a good chance to see the whale for more than a few seconds as they held this position for half a minute or more scooping up fish.

 Of course, with so many whales in the area, some were more competitive than others, as the whale below is lunging sideways through a bait ball. There were 5 or more humpbacks in the immediate area all feeding on this school of fish and the meal lasted several minutes.

Interestingly enough, the whales are just being opportunistic mooches, the actual work is done by the birds, some of which dive under water while others scoop up fish from above, forcing them into a ball for defense... the the humpback "sneaks" in and eats the lot. The birds do the work, but we have yet to see any get accidentally eaten, so they don't have the worst part of the deal, that place is reserved for the fish that EVERYONE seems to find so delicious.

Back to School and Summer Job Roundup

 We had a wonderful getaway to Telegraph Cove over the Labour Day long weekend, but before we get to that I'd like to do a quick post about my summer job and heading back to school for year 2 (of 2). I had a great summer gig at Bardel Entertainment doing Excel spreadsheet data and will continue to do some part-time freelance for them in the coming year, which is nice. It was very fun to transition from the art side to the business side and see film production from an entirely different perspective.

 For my friends still in vfx: if the image below doesn't look like a fun summer then don't get into accounting :) I spent 3 months working in Excel 8 hours a day creating templates for Bardel to track the finances of their various productions and help consolidate that for quarterly reports. I also did some basic entry level accounting tasks and learned an absolute ton.

 And here's the lineup for the coming term. The first week is always a pain getting caught up on reading as every course has a few chapters right off the hop that are full of technical terms but not complex enough to warrant longer coverage so there's a sudden surge to read 100+ pages of dense material in each book. For those of you not familiar with it, and to give scale to the widths of that stack, the Income Tax Act (at the bottom) is 2000+ pages of 8 point legalese text and a guaranteed cure for insomnia.

 

In Summary: It was a good summer, its going to be an intense and demanding 9 months, but after this push I will be totally employable in my new field and already have some contacts and experience for when I come out the other end.

Chariot Fest of India

 Yes, you read that right: Indian Chariot Festival. I wasn't quite sure what to expect myself, and anyone that goes expecting Ben-Hur or Queen Boudica will be disappointed, but if you are looking for a splash of colour and culture, its a pretty neat event that has been a part of our neighbourhood for 41 years and this was the first I had heard of it.

 The chariot itself was around 50 feet high and had this fellow riding in the front along with a few others. The people infront of the chariot were symbolically pulling it on ropes, but it contentedly ran along on a little motor to make it easy on everyone. The event honours the god Jagannatha who apparently leaves the temple once a year to ride in a chariot.

 There was a nice festival near Second Beach after the procession and unlike most of the parades I've seen lately, this one had a yoga booth right across the way from a free feast. Each year the organizers prepare enough vegetarian food to feed 20,000 people which is given away free and I can certainly attest is delicious. There were also displays on vegetarianism and reincarnation along with the usual childrens theatres, music stages and gifts.

Squamish Railway Museum - Outdoors

 While we were in Squamish with Kathryn's parents earlier this summer, we also stopped by the Squamish Railway Museum which has had some expansion work in the few years since we'd been there last and was a thoroughly entertaining place to spend a couple of hours. As you can see below, a significant portion of the outdoor displays are several lengths of track with an assortment of diesel locomotives, old passenger cars and cabooses along with an old station and roundhouse.

 I find these old snow shovel locomotives particularly amazing given that the cab sits a good 12 feet in the air, giving you an idea of just how much snow needs to be cleared off of the tracks in some of the mountains and interiors.

 Another fun aspect of the outdoor area is being able to clamber around and inside of most of the exhibits. Valerie in particular was delighted to climb up into a caboose as seen below and was very keen on exploring and sitting behind the wheel of every machine in the yard.

Khatsalano Street Party

 For the 4th year in a row (and somehow the 1st year we actually heard about it), part of Kitsalano shuts down for a massive street party 10 blocks long with a typical turnout of over 118,000 people. Below is a shot up the hill into the crowd from one end of the street party. Note that there is an equally large party happening on the other side of that hill, so quite the shindig.

 Any event like this attracts its fair share of buskers and street performers, but we were particularly delighted by this fellow who was blowing  enormous bubbles for donations in the middle of the crowd. He was quite talented and able to blow smaller bubbles into the larger ones as they formed. There was also an excited gaggle of children hanging around waiting for any bubbles to stray into their reach.

 Another main draw for the street party is the collection of music stages which have a variety of performers which change every hour. We had never heard of them before, but Kathyrn was particularly keen to see 'I, Braineater' shown below. They are a group of artists/aging punk rockers who put on a pretty good show and were certainly all involved in the show. The chap in the creature costume on the left was playing the drums 20 minutes later and singing as we left, so they certainly keep things varied.

Canada Day Highlights

 Kathryn and I both really enjoy Canada Day and while it has long been a staple of our summers together, we have had a rough time getting our schedules to line up and enjoy it together the last few years. That said, we were delighted to both have the day off this year for a nice outing and visit with friends. The shot below is a fraction of the crowd downtown at the main music stage near the convention centre.

 On the other side of the convention centre we caught a Lumberjack Show and, while it was very similar to the Lumberjack Show at Grouse Mountain, it was never the less a good time out watching some woodworking hijinks and log rolling tomfoolery.

 On our way home from the family-friendly portion of the day we make a quick stop off at Vancouvers subculture festival 'Canabis Day' which happens every year at the Art Gallery and seems to be getting bigger and more popular with each passing year. I always enjoy seeing public art dressed up for holidays and it was fun to see this Rastafarian lion watching over the crowd.

We ended our day off watching the sunset on the beach with a good group of friends and thoroughly enjoyed having a chance to visit with people and relax and have a nice day together as well. Happy 147th Canada!

Squamish Peak Gondola

 In early June, Kathryn's parents came for a nice visit and we took a day trip to Squamish to ride the very new gondola up to the peak of a nearby mountain. This is in the same area as 'The Chief', but does not share that peak or impose on the people that are out for a hike rather than a day trip.

 The top has a very nice new building with a restaurant/gift shop and that hallmark of standing in high places in BC, a suspension bridge. Kathryn is noticeably more comfortable with suspension bridges than our first visit to the Pinawa suspension bridge and now gamely trots too and fro hundreds of feet in the air.

 The view is certainly worth the effort with a selection of viewpoints out over the valley and Howe Sound. You can click on the panorama below to enlarge it. There were also some very talkative but hard to photograph Sooty Grouse up in the trees and an assortment of short but pleasant hikes around the peak.