MYRIAM CASPER
BRITISH COLUMBIA
NATURE & WILDLIFE
Stanley Park, the perfect city escape. This tranquil oasis is blooming with urban wildlife, beautiful gardens, and a forest with roughly 500,000 cedar, fir and hemlock trees.
The Beauty of Transitions. I love the point when fall is on the verge of becoming winter, when the skeleton of the landscape is becoming perfectly visible, presenting its incredible artistic shapes but still holding onto a few colorful leaves, which in turn awaits for the wind to finally carry them over.
I was fascinated to learn that cougars used to run wild in the area, along with other larger mammals such as elk, wolves and bears. In 1911, Stanley Park’s last cougar met a bloody and dramatic end.
While most animals use either sight, sound, or smell to hunt, I noticed that this little creature that looks like a masked bandit "sees" with its hands.Touch is the raccoon's most conspicuous sense.
Although no bears or cougars in the park these days, still is quite wild. Coyotes, eagles, beavers, great blue herons, squirrels, racoons, ducks, Canada geese to name a few.
I watched the Great Blue Heron stalking its prey slowly and methodically. When the right time arrived, its neck and strong beak shot forward like a loosed arrow and literally speared a fish out of the water. The power of precision!
Brackendale, a small community in the First Nation Squamish Territory in British Columbia. This area has long been recognized as one of the most significant areas of wintering bald eagles in North America. The salmon come back to its native place to reproduce and that's a great food opportunity for the eagles.
British Columbia's must also be explored by kayak. The Deer Group Islands are in the south east corner of Barkley Sound off Bamfield. They are less known and harder to get to than the neighbouring Broken Group of Islands and that's great because you can have a whole beach just for yourself with lots of space for your tent overnight.
"In a cold morning the wind is whispering on the surface of the water exactly at the time when the temperature drops below zero. The water gets frozen revealing the imprisoned wind's last words."
We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of Nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.
- Henry David Thoreau, from Walden: Or, Life in the Woods.
Summer at a cozy little island that offers you an infinite feeling of connection with Mother Nature.
Leaving behind all the traffic I hear no noise. As I get in tune with the new surroundings, all I hear and feel is the silence. A pristine experience. I notice a distant sound of wings flapping through the air. It gets louder and louder. I open my eyes to a welcoming visit of a beautiful black majestic raven. The discovery of new sounds keeps growing, just as the deep growls and grunts of the sea lions resting on the top of the rocks. Waves break onto the shore. Pebbles roll down the beach. The sun is low, rich red colour scatters on the sky. I watch a great blue heron elegantly landing on a rock. Surrendered, we stare at the constant change in light and colours, till the darkness of the night ends another inspiring day watching Mother Earth.