Two Biologists and a Boy: The Long Way Home
Original Post at Highline Online, September 24, 2012. A couple of weeks ago, a young male elk ran us off the trail. It was the first time I’ve been threatened by an animal while hiking with my son Dylan, and the only time I’ve ever popped the safety off of my bear spray. It happened when Dylan and I were hiking with a friend, Tracy, and her daughter, Linnaea. It had been a long hike, having tried twice already to descend the Pyramid Benchland back into town. A mother black bear and her cub turned us around the first time. We were alerted to their presence by a sound like a log exploding in a…
Two Biologists and a Boy: Road Swimming
July 23, 2012 Highline Online “My nuts are freezing!” says Dylan as he strips down beside me. I know I am supposed to say something like “the correct term is testicles, and please don’t yell stuff like that at the top of your lungs.” Unfortunately, I am laughing too hard, and the damage is done. This is the schoolyard vocabulary Dylan has picked up in grade one, and coming from his seven-year-old mouth, it’s damn funny. We’re standing on the edge of the floodwater that has engulfed Snaring Road. Our gaze follows the watery, yellow centerline for 30 meters or so before it disappears into the deeper water at a dip in the road. Dylan…
New Experimental Podcast! How a Pitcher Plant Uses Its Lid to Capture Prey
Hovering over the rim of the pitcher plant Nepenthes gracilis is a lid that protects the pitcher from being flooded by rain. But a recent study has discovered that the lid is much, much more. In this species, the lid acts as another trapping mechanism, allowing insects to be “flicked” off the lid by rain drops and into the digestive fluid in the pitcher below. Listen to podcast here.
Two Biologists and a Boy: When an Animal Loses Her Young
For Highline Online, June 18, 2012. I haven’t really seen my husband Geoff for about three days. With the snow low on the mountains animals are forced into the valley bottoms, where they’re running into people all over the place. These “interactions” are keeping Geoff – wildlife conflict specialist with Parks Canada - pretty busy. During a ten minute cross-over at breakfast this morning he told me that he was in fact with “another woman” into the wee hours of last night. She was a female elk who had birthed her calf on Jasper Park Lodge property, only to have it snatched up by what was likely a grizzly bear, wolf or cougar. The distraught…
Path of the Glacier Exhibit to be Installed this Summer
Kudos to Parks Canada Designer Marni Wilson and Project Lead Gloria Keyes-Brady on putting together a beautiful exhibit to be enjoyed for the next ten years at the base of the internationally renowned Mountain: Mount Edith Cavell. Thanks once more for the opportunity to do the writing. What a fun project!
