On a late winter day heavy with cloud cover, you can still have a glorious day at Kitsilano beach. The definition of “glorious” simply changes with the season.
Moments before I took this photo, a man in a wet suit had been swimming a few yards from the man on the rock. The moment after, the little girl fell splat on the muddy sand and began to cry sharply and urgently. Their outing was over, but mine had just begun.
It’s here! The annually hoped-for spring teaser! Over the past week we’ve had several days of it, and, with a few days to go in the month, perhaps there will be a few more.
Ah, a lovely winter day. That means “game on” on the neighborhood sports field.
It means the dog gets an extra long walk. Thoughts turn to a scenic turn along the water. We walk with heads up to the sun and notice the treetops.
After Vancouver’s mountains and bays, I love its old trees best. I am charmed that many streets in my neighborhood of Kitsilano are named after tree species. (I live between Arbutus and Yew.) I can easily identify the old cedars, oversized holly bush, and cherry blossoms, but some of the gnarled, tall and ancient specimens are subspecies and just different enough from what I’ve been used to that I am not confident of my ability to identify them. Or, they’ve been trimmed or pollarded beyond common recognition.
So it was to my delight that I discovered, through a local friend, that the city cares enough about the contribution trees make to the character and liveability of its neighborhoods — and in its investment in planting them decades ago — that it tracks their health and identifies them per street. This discovery will put an end to my curiosity and guesswork.
In Kitsilano, we walk under canopies of leaves or thick branches from the familiar American Elms, English Oaks, Willows and Douglas Firs, but tucked here in there in between are the less obvious Sycamore Maples, Crimean Lindens and Hornbeam.
Yew St. Red Oaks
In Point Grey’s Jericho Beach, the landscaping includes trees that to my eye look best in their autumn color, even as I’ve yet to certify their identities. I think that’s a Paul’s Scarlet Hawthorn in the background here:
Jericho Beach park, autumn
Japanese Flowering Crabapple, Jericho Beach park
This might be a Weeping Cutleaf Birch:
Have a look at the list. Know your neighborhood trees.
At Boundary Bay
It is uncharacteristically cold, with temperatures in the low single digits (Celsius), but that didn’t stop me and a couple of friends from making the drive to Boundary Bay to see the 2nd year of snowy owls wintering in the area. They appear in the south mainland because hunger drives them further south than they typically go.
I love how they are called “snowy” instead of “snow.” First of all, it is grammatically correct to describe them so — after all they are not made of snow — and then it sounds cuter, kind of like the owls themselves.
Farmland adjacent to Boundary Bay
There were a lot fewer people than last year on the dike viewing the birds perched on logs in the large open marsh, I guess because of the freezing weather. Or, because the spectacle was not as grand as before. We only saw five owls, fewer than the dozen or so I’d seen last year. Nevertheless, it was worth the trip and the extra layering of clothing. Besides the owls on logs, we saw two owls close up in flight, one screeching, lots of bald eagles and herons, and winter views of the Cascades, Mt. Baker and the water towards Washington that were mesmerizing.
Boundary Bay
The Boundary Bay park is adjacent to farmland and horse country, with ditches lining both sides of 64th Street leading to the dike walkway. On our way in, we spotted several herons standing up straight in the fields. On our way out, as dusk turned into dark, we caught sight of them in the watery ditches plucking vittles.
Happily there were no assholes present like the one last year who defied signs instructing watchers to stay on the dike and not approach the owls.
Nice, France, December 15
Vancouverites love to travel, and the end of year holidays are as good a time for that as any. In December the province of B.C. offers a lot of options — stormwatching in Tofino, skiing in Whistler or the Kootenays, relaxation at Harrison Hot Springs, or one of the many rugged options in the wild country which makes up most of the territory.
Looking beyond, there are those with time shares in Mexico (although that number might decline in the near future) or second homes in Arizona and Texas. We have friends who pack up every December for Baja in Mexico and don’t return until February.
We opt for summer travel, and love to explore the province when it is warm and dry. But like everyone in the bioregion of Cascadia (Western Canada and coastal Washington and Oregon), we yearn for brighter days than we are offered by our geography this time of year. For the 2012 holidays, we took up a friend’s offer to stay a few weeks in her apartment in Nice, France.
There are no direct flights from Vancouver to Nice. There is a very expensive flight to Paris with a connection to Nice. It was less expensive for us to fly out of the US, as it is for virtually every flight out of Canada. What locals do is take the shuttle bus to the Seattle airport, a four hour trip that still ends up saving hundreds of dollars on air travel.
While in Nice, I thought about its similarities to Vancouver. No, there is NO similarity in weather. But both cities are on the water, surrounded by mountains, environmentally progressive, dog-friendly, and known for good dining. Fantasy: dividing my time between the two.
kmazz 