British Columbia Magazine

The average person spends 90 percent (I repeat 90 percent!) of our time on Earth indoors. An extra five percent is eaten up sitting in our cars.If my math’s correct, that leaves us hiking, kayaking, skiing, swimming, strolling, diving, sand-castle building, wildlife watching, or doing any of the other great activities available beyond four walls only five percent of our time.

“Health futurist” Trevor Hancock of the University of Victoria (from which this surprising factoid comes) believes spending time in nature is critical to our health. “There is growing evidence of the physical, mental, social, and spiritual benefits of being in nature, and of nature’s ability to help healing,” he says.

Hancock will discuss nature’s significance to human health at a conference this weekend, September 20 to 23, at the Creekside Community Centre in Vancouver.In the meantime, let us all slowly back away from our computers and run for the door. Our well-being depends on it.

For inspiration on what to do out there, check our Stories section for articles about outdoor adventures, such as cycling on Haida Gwaii, hiking on Flores Island, visiting Skookumchuk Narrows, and more.

Did you know that the first two lighthouses on British Columbia’s coast turn 150 years old this year?

The Spring 2010 issue of British Columbia Magazine includes “150 years of light,” a short article about Victoria’s Fisgard Lighthouse and Race Rocks Lighthouse.

Dale Mumford of Fort Rodd Hill and Fisgard Lighthouse National Historic Sites of Canada has done extensive research on the history of these two beacons, and shares his profiles of the first and last keepers at Fisgard Lighthouse in this week’s web exclusive. Read the full article on our website.

Wolverines don’t share well.

In my family of six, I learned to claim my share of treats—cinnamon buns, cookies, or other tasty food—as soon as Mom pulled them from the grocery bag. If I didn’t, the goodies could be gone long before my stomach rumbled.

My siblings and I developed tactics for protecting our fair share. We hid food in dark recesses of the fridge and cupboards, where we thought no one would look. We stockpiled granola bars and nectarines in our school backpacks and lockers. And, when squaring off over the last morsels of a particular delicacy, would look one another square in the eye and lick our portion. No one would steal it then!

If you think that’s gross, be glad you didn’t grow up among wolverines. This carnivore is known to spray its leftovers with a smelly musk and come back to eat it later. It seems that saliva doesn’t suffice in the wolverine world.

Moral of this story? As associate editor Jenny Manzer quips, “Never follow a wolverine in a buffet line-up.”

British Columbia is full of volcanoes.

Mount Garibaldi. Mount Meager. Mount Edziza. All were active volcanoes once.

The Geological Survey of Canada groups the volcanoes of the Pacific Northwest—those younger than about five million years—into seven volcanic belts. Of these, five include large portions of B.C.—the Anahim, Garibaldi, and Stikine volcanic belts, the Chilcotin Plateau Basalts, and Wells Gray-Clearwater Volcanic Field. A sixth, the Wrangell Volcanic Belt, just touches B.C.’s northwest corner.

Somewhat ironically, it is a volcano outside of B.C. that most threatens British Columbians. For those living in Vancouver and the Fraser Valley, Emergency Management BC  identifies Mount Baker, in the Cascades belt of northern Washington State, as posing the greatest potential volcanic hazard. Not that scientists suggest it will erupt soon: just someday.

For our Spring 2009 issue, Contributing Editor Larry Pynn and landscape photographer Chris Harris travelled on horseback into the eerily beautiful volcanic landscape of Itcha Ilgachuz Provincial Park. This Chilcotin park’s landforms were created in two volcanic phases: an early shield-building stage, characterized by lava flows some three million years ago;  and a more recent capping stage 800,000 to 2.2 million years ago, when molten magma founds its way to the Earth’s surface through fissures to become cinder cones.

To read the full article and see Harris’s spectacular photographs from the trip, pick up the current issue of British Columbia Magazine.

Of all the creatures in British Columbia, the giant Pacific octopus tops my list as the most fascinating. For one thing, this boneless, eight-armed, mucous-covered critter is incredibly intelligent. “Houdini,” former resident of the Vancouver Aquarium, actually learned to slither up a pipe and through the lid of an adjacent fish tank for midnight snacks.

I divulge some of the octopus’s secrets in “Beauties and beasts” in our Winter 2008 issue, but there’s plenty more to say about this peculiar invertebrate. Here are a few more facts:

* To escape danger, an octopus may squirt ink in the eyes of a would-be-predator, then drop to the seafloor and instantly camouflage itself.

* When an octopus hides, it stops breathing temporarily and cleverly turn its arms to conceal its suckers and gill slits, the only two body parts that don’t change colour.

* A female glues her 300 or so egg clusters to the roof of her den with a solution she produces in her mouth, then ceases eating for six months to tend the brood. By the time she pushes open her den to release the newly hatched offspring, she is too weak to survive.

* Each hatchling, only six millimetres long, is an exact replica of a full-grown octopus.

* An adult octopus has some 1,600 suckers, used to “taste” everything it encounters.

To learn even more about the giant Pacific octopus, pick up our Fall 2001 back issue, which includes “One big sucker,” an excellent, in-depth feature on the species by contributing editor Bruce Obee.

Sea lions and seals: what’s the difference?

While researching the Steller sea lion for my “Beauties and beasts” feature in the Winter 2008 issue—a profile of some of the prettiest and ugliest critters in the sea—it occurred to me that readers might be interested to learn how to tell these two local pinnipeds apart. Here are four clues:

ONE: Steller sea lions, the “king” of sea lions, are larger. Males may weigh up to 800 kilograms; females up to 300 kilograms. Pacific harbour seals generally weigh between 60 and 120 kilograms.

TWO: Steller sea lions have longer flippers, and use them to support their body weight when they walk on land. Seals bounce around on their bellies when they’re out of the water.

THREE: Steller sea lions have outer ear flaps. Seals have no external ear structures, just holes.

FOUR: Steller sea lions roar and bark. Seals generally are quiet.

Click here for a photo and more information on the Pacific harbour seal, and here for more on the Steller sea lion.

Your favourite hiking trail is a great place to look for wildlife tracks in winter. Ecological meeting places and wetlands are also rich territory, writes Larry Pynn in our Winter 2008 cover story, “especially the transition area between meadow and forest, which provides animals with both food and cover into which they may escape.” 

Here are a few other tracker tips to bear in mind when trying to decode animal tracks:

* River otters are agile in water but rather clumsy on land. Look for long slide marks between prints, and note that the otter’s webbed back toes may only be visible in mud tracks. 

* Marks left in the snow by a cougar’s tail can help you distinguish between this cat and the equally elusive lynx. 

* The hind toes of the snowshoe hare spread to form a broad “snowshoe” four to 12 centimetres wide. Watch for intercepting tracks of the hare’s many avian and mammal predators.

The Steller’s jay, British Columbia’s provincial bird, is closely related to the crow and the raven. All three birds are members of the Corvidae family, and are widely known for their intelligence. As Bruce Obee writes in the Wild File department of our Summer 2008 issue, the proud bird with its distinctive upright crest and striking blue colouring can also be quite the ventriloquist.

“The Steller’s jay will sometimes mimic the mellow song of the robin or the harsh trailing of a red-tailed hawk. It’s not known precisely why.” To hear this saucy bird’s common call  online, click here and select “Steller’s jay.”

Named by Georg Steller, a surgeon and naturalist who sailed from Russian to the North Pacific in 1741, the Steller’s jay has been B.C.’s avian emblem since 1987.

To mark British Columbia’s 150th anniversary, Victoria-based AbeBooks, an online marketplace for reading material (just purchased by Amazon), recently released a list of the 10 most expensive books about B.C. ever sold through the company’s website.

While I can’t fathom spending $1,500 on a book, I would love a peek at that leather-bound collection of Emily Carr’s artwork!

Here are their top five pricey picks; click here to check out the complete list.

1. David Thompson’s Narrative of his Explorations in Western America 1784-1812, ed. J.B. Tyrrell - $4,250This account of Thompson’s explorations in western Canada was published in 1916 and is one of only 550 copies.

2. The Journals of Captain James Cook on His Voyages, ed. J.C. Beaglehole - $1,750A collection of journal entries, written by Cook and his officers during three voyages (including his 1778 exploration of B.C.’s coast) and published in 1955.

3. The Art of Emily Carr, Doris Shadbolt - $1,500This signed, numbered, and leather-bound book contains reproductions of works by the celebrated Victoria-based painter and writer Emily Carr (1871-1945) and is one of only 250 copies.

4. British Columbia Historical Quarterly, various authors - $1,351An important historical resource, this book contains a complete collection of quarterly reports from 1937 to 1956 as well as photographs of prominent British Columbians.

5. Voyages From Montreal, on the River St. Laurence, through the Continent of North America, to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans; in the years 1789 and 1793, Sir Alexander MacKenzie - $1,250Explorer Alexander MacKenzie’s account of the first transcontinental exploration from the St. Lawrence River to the Pacific Ocean.

Did you know there are GIGANTIC cedar trees growing in a British Columbia rainforest more than 600 kilometres inland from the West Coast? B.C. is the only place in the world where inland temperate rainforest occurs in abundance. The zone is concentrated in the wettest valleys along the windward slopes of the Rockies and Columbia Mountains (including the Monashees, Selkirks, and Purcells).

Here are a few other surprising facts and figures from our Summer 2008 feature article on “The enchanted Incomappleux forest.”

1,500
Age, in years, of some of the oldest western redcedar trees growing in the Incomappleux River valley, in the Selkirk Mountains southwest of Glacier National Park.

9
Girth, in metres, of some of the largest Incomappleux redcedars—that’s more than three metres in diameter.

13,460
Total area, in square kilometres, of rare inland temperate rainforest in B.C., including the wet and very wet subzones.

100
Approximate distance, in kilometres, from the town of Revelstoke, along highways and logging back roads, to the quaint Mountain Hostel in the Incomappleux Valley.