Sure, the picture is not precisely in focus, but what the heck. The bee is the star here. Look at her answer the call of the balsam root. Look at the balsam […]
Dancing in a Fur Coat
Life and Death and Cottonwoods on the Similkameen River
Rivers flood. It’s one of the things they do. They’re pretty good at it. The Similkameen River, with a minimum flow of 65 cubic feet per second at Nighthawk, an average flow […]
The Sacred Mountain of the North Okanagan
I went down to the lake to read the news. Terrace Mountain was pretty free with it. This old stratovolcano showed me a bird feeding something, or about to devour something. Note […]
Climate Resilience 3: Self-Fertilizing and Self-Watering Islands
That’s right, islands in the grass. They’re not just sitting there. They are creating nitrogen and releasing minerals from the rock into a form that plants can use. In fact, instead of […]
Magpie Makes a Mistake
It is a rule of magpie society that no-one gets a picture. Absolutely not allowed. I got lucky!
Murdering Geese for Tourists. It’s What We Do.
These geese. Come June, they will be herded with kayaks, put on a truck, killed, and dumped in the landfill. These geese: On a beach that has silted in with road sand […]
The Origins of Music?
So, what do you think? Is it possible that wolves (or in this case coyotes) taught people to make music, first by howling into the wind, and then by making flute holes […]
The Gift Culture of the Grasslands
Flax is beautiful. The seeds grow heavy and lower the seed to the ground. Mice eat the seed there. And then it lifts up again, through the snow! These aren’t seeds that […]
A Bold Young One
A young buck strolls along the canal trail in the fog. Then down to some human fruit trees and tasty shrubberies. There’s a gathering of does a kilometre away and the older […]
Grassland Bycatch
Bycatch is all that stuff in the sea that deserves its own life, is caught when fishers are trying to snag something or other, and is thrown back overboard dead. It’s a […]
