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Seen on a walk around the seawall with my mother in July. Herons are relatively common in Vancouver, which hasn’t made me love them any less. More photos are in the galleries or on Flickr.
Posted by skooter at 11:19 PM
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Tags: Heron, Nature, Stanley Park, Vancouver Outdoors, Wildlife
A friend from Germany was in town, so I took him on a mini-tour of my favourite North Shore parks. After dinner we visited Whytecliffe Park. Luck was on our side and it was low tide, so we trekked out to the island.
Posted by skooter at 3:50 AM
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Tags: Bowen Island, North Vancouver, Whytecliffe Park
I attended the first of five summer previews of the Beaty Biodiversity Museum at UBC today. The feature exhibit is an 85 foot long skeleton of a Blue Whale largest mammal ever to have inhabited our biosphere, hunted to near extinction by man.
The skeleton is stunning, and well worth seeing. There are more photos than the ones below in the galleries section.
The hollow tree’s been strapped together and held up by human means for some time now, and I think it’s time to let nature take its course here. That doesn’t make it any sadder. I’ll miss it.
Stanley Park’s hollow tree gets the axe
Last Updated: Tuesday, April 1, 2008 | 2:19 PM ETOne of Vancouver’s oldest treasures will soon be cut down but its legacy as a tourist attraction will live on.
On Monday evening, the Vancouver Park Board voted to cut down the hollow tree on Park Drive in Stanley Park.
The 13-metre-tall stump is at least 700 years old, but storm damage in recent years has caused its decomposing hollow trunk to tilt dangerously.
Whistler Olympic Park is open, with a huge network of new (and spectacular) cross country ski trails.
The Norwegian ski team was testing skis on the Olympic trails when we were there. A brief chat with the coach was fun, and I offered him a business card “in case you need an extra for 2010.” His smile and laugh were characteristic of what turned out to be a most amazing day.
Posted by skooter at 2:02 PM
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Tags: 2010, Skiing, Vancouver Olympics, Whistler
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: The hotter it gets, the larger the water crisis is going to become. When you ask people who are promoting development how we can go on, they think we’ll end up getting water from Canada, that these huge engineering projects are going to rescue us. That just isn’t realistic. If you had to go to Las Vegas and place a bet that we can rely on the Canadians to save us—well, it’s not a good bet.
—“Outside Magazine”:http://www.outsidemag.com/, March 2008, pp. 107
Kennedy’s right that there’s not going to be an engineered solution to the water problems of the American south (at least not one that involves transferring water, as opposed to preserving it) but at some point, sometime in the near future some senior American elected official will blame Canada for this, and push for a NAFTA related water transfer requirement.
Count on it.
Posted by skooter at 8:31 PM
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Tags: Articles, Conservation, Environmentalism, Water
This is good. This is why they call it nature. Let’s hope that the local Vancouver hippies don’t star a protest to get this thing propped up again.
Ancient cedar falls in Vancouver’s Stanley Park
Last Updated: Friday, October 12, 2007 | 1:35 AM ET
A red cedar tree believed to be almost 1,000 years old and reputedly the largest of its kind in the world uprooted and toppled from natural causes in Vancouver’s Stanley Park.
On Thursday, a part of the tree’s root was exposed and clearly saturated with water and rotten. The top of the tree lies so deep in the forest it can’t be seen.