The spring is advancing three or four days for every day, after its slow start. Now the butterflies! I first wrote that I couldn’t identify this pretty one. “It looks like a […]
Butterfly Season is Here
Helping the Bees
Here is the local crowd in the pussy willow down the road at 2 pm yesterday. Bees, wild and domestic. Big honey bees, small solitary bees, and even a fly or two. […]
Climate, Wild Harvest and Human Life as Environments
More important as a food crop than the pretty yellow bell lily … …is desert parsley. She’s cream-coloured… … with short flower stalks, or tall ones… … or purple, when still half-closed… […]
Yellow Bells Arrive
Once an important food crop, yellow bells are now rare, yet continue to mark the exchange of water and heat in the soil and to mark what is still possible for renewal […]
The First Petal of the First Blossom of the Sun
It’s a good day for arrow-leafed balsam roots. They have come fast (in two days). If you hurry, there’s still time for some fine steamed sprouts. Their menthol flavour is not yet […]
The Tides Wash Over Turtle Mountain
When plants left the sea for the air… … they didn’t. We live in an intertidal zone. Ah, here comes the first breaker of the tide now… Here’s the surf rolling East […]
The Magical Language of Opals
The ground is rich with opal here. Mostly, it is in thin sheets repairing the splintered rock from the violent collision that made this land. You can read it, though. On the […]
Marmot Calls for the Sun
Snow in the morning, snow all last week. Brr. But Marmot has climbed on top of Marmot Rock today, and called the sun. This is a good sign!
March is a Time of Passage, Not a Season
March is neither winter nor spring. Its weather is not its own. Anything can happen this month, and usually does. It’s best to call it an empty space that other seasons pass […]
How Shyness Changes the World
Some hawks tolerate being watched. Some don’t. It’s an example of how observation changes the observed world. I mean, how much of hunting behaviour is dependent upon being undisturbed at rest, or […]
Okanagan Okanogan 