British Columbia Magazine

Loyal readers of this blog: please forgive my recent fixation with aquatic critters. I can’t resist posting one more entry about octopuses — slimy, slinky, eight-armed wonders that they are.

Susan Rybar of Victoria was waiting on shore for some friends to complete a dive off the city’s Ogden Point when one of them surfaced with an old medicine bottle and placed it at her feet. Out of the bottle squirmed a tiny octopus! It stuck around long enough for Susan to snap this photograph before it wriggled back into the water.

James Cosgrove, British Columbia’s resident cephalopod expert, says Susan’s photo shows either a juvenile giant Pacific octopus (Enteroctopus dofleini), or a ruby octopus (Octopus rubescens), also known as the Pacific red octopus. It is common to find the young of either species taking shelter in cans and bottles in shallow water.

Watch for Cosgrove’s new book Super Suckers: The Giant Pacific Octopus and Other Cephalopods of the Pacific Northwest (Harbour Publishing) this March. The text will include fascinating factoids, new research on octopus behaviour, anecdotes and legends, as well as underwater photographs taken by regular British Columbia Magazine contributor Neil McDaniel.

I laughed when I first cracked the cover of Exploring Tumbler Ridge. Charles Helm, family practitioner and unofficial cheerleader for his Northern British Columbia community, had inserted a personal greeting for me written on a sheet from his medical prescription pad.

The book, written by Helm, is a fitting prescription for anyone itching to experience Tumbler Ridge. He provides a thorough overview of the area’s geological and human history, and explains how the community survived when the coal industry it depended on temporarily collapsed. He discusses the dinosaur fossil discoveries that have brought a level of fame to Tumbler Ridge in recent years, and other topics of local interest—the eagle migration and the impact of the mountain pine beetle, among others.

“The Tumbler Ridge area has yet to give up all of its secrets,” Helm writes, “and the purpose of this book is not to provide directions to every interesting feature.”

Yet the section I find most valuable provides an excellent, detailed overview of nearly 50 hiking trails in the area. It includes maps and difficulty ratings, as well as estimates for distance, time, and elevation.

I’ve already dog-eared a few pages. Who knows, a summer hiking trip to Tumbler Ridge might be—sorry, I can’t help myself—just what the docter ordered.

Exploring Tumbler Ridge can be purchased from www.exploringtumblerridge.com.

You will almost certainly never see a northern spotted owl in the wilds of southwestern British Columbia. Fewer than 20 of the birds remain, down from a historic high of 300 to 500 pairs. But that doesn’t mean you should stop caring about the species, which continues to sound the alarm for all manner of animals at risk.

Enter Jared Hobbs, Ministry of Environment biologist and professional photographer with his important and compelling new book, Spotted Owls: Shadows in an Old-Growth Forest, with text by noted Okanagan ecologist Richard Cannings (Greystone, $36.95, cloth, 136 pages).

In the summer of 2005, I accompanied Hobbs by helicopter and foot into the Stein Valley near Lillooet to see the owls for myself. The experience left me with mixed emotions:  saddened to witness the downward spiral of these precious birds, but feeling fortunate to have at least seen them before they vanish altogether, the victim mainly of logging of their old-growth habitat and, to a lesser extent, of competition from the more resilient barred owl.

Hobbs’ remarkable collection of photos takes me back to the forest, deep into the owls’ shadowy world, and shows why we are all richer for maintaining ecological diversity–and what we stand to lose if we do not take care of our natural world.

For more about Jared Hobbs and his new book, please visit his website (www.hobbsphotos.com).