ahta III

Ahta is the queen of streams. The water here is clean and cold, the river basin wide and covered in smooth cobble-stones. As streamwalkers, Lauren and I swing our legs and trip over moss and fallen old-growth to climb along the banks, balancing on huge fallen trees-as-bridges to criss-cross our way upstream. We gaze down into pools of hundreds of fish, sometimes eight or nine deep, multiplying and calculating the population, seeing numbers in the thousands.

Located at the mouth of Bond Sound on the mainland coast, Ahta is thought of as the southernmost extent of the Great Bear Rainforest. Indeed, Great Bears are found here; each time we visit to salmoncount, we share this river space with grizzlies. They walk by us on the streamside, ears attuned to the splashing fish, lifting onto back legs and rubbing against trees. We've seen them in the river eating salmon, peeling the skin off the bones, or swimming through pools, arcs of fish avoiding their huge claws. Their footprints are everywhere, deep, earthy holes in the forest floor. As we move upstream, through thick matted moss and decaying Douglas fir, we follow the bear highways created by these creatures putting their feet into exact footprints of the bear before it, pressing scent into the pathway, reinforcing their belonging to this place, and Ahta's belonging to them. 

The salmon here have been pairing up, digging redds in the cobble, pushing stones aside and hoping their eggs will stay safe while they incubate for the winter months. The spring will see tiny pink and chum fry emerge and sweep and tumble out into the sedgy estuary. Water ouzels, small songbirds who run on the river bottoms, hide away salmon eggs, and feast on the pink-jewels after shaking the fresh cool water out of their grey-black feathers. Juvenile eagles beat their ruffled wings over our heads, and we follow wolf prints along portions of the sandy banks.

This is where the salmon-forest came alive for me. I have read that the rich ocean-derived nutrients brought back by these fish to their natal streams would carry into the surrounding forest and feed the entire community. Here, at Ahta's banks, this picture is carnally painted; the sharp smell of decaying chum, pink, and coho carries far into the surrounding forest and grizzly, blackbear, ouzel, wolf, heron, eagle, gull, merganser, harbourseal, and kingfisher, to name a few, are making their seasonal homes here to feast. This place is thick with salmon carcass, flung everywhere, disintegrating bodies in the loam. The trees, the cedar and hemlock and Douglas fir, the salmonberry shrubs, huckleberry, azelea, salal, are drinking up these nutrients. Linnea borealis, Polypodium glycyrrhiza, Cornus canadensis. The thick moss is dotted by hedgehog mushrooms, yellowfeet, chanterelles, Zeller's Bolete, and angelwings clinging like shingles to rotting logs.
As we turn to go downstream again from the misting waterfalls, the air hangs with whispers of fish ghosts Their gill filaments gasping, their tails ragged, bellies hollow, eggs expelled, and scales rubbed off, protein foam tumbling back down the creek.

ahta II

ahta I

a walk, a sniff, a backrub on a few trees

eavesdropping on whales

Some mornings I wake up to the erratic splashes of Pacific white-sided dolphins -- groups of ten, twenty, fifty, perhaps more, moving through the fog below the rocky cliff-side outside of my mesh tent door. Or a single calm breath of a sea lion as he lifts his head above the kelp. Kingfishers or ravens, hunting at the edge of the bay. The low, loud hum of a tug towing a log boom, a fishing boat pushing the waves aside, or the sound of a coho salmon throwing her slippery body out of the water into the surprising air. Or it's the A25s and A23s, two families of orca I have learned the names, calls, fin shapes, and swimming patterns of in the past few months. They breathe almost in unison, catching up with eachother while they move west, their giant lungs making it sound like they are much closer than they actually are -- the sound travelling over the top of the still water while they meet our world and swim below the surface to call to their sisters, to watch a fish slip by, and to listen to the tides move little stones up and down their beaches.

I have been working as a warden at Robson Bight Michael Bigg Ecologial Reserve in Johnstone Strait. I volunteered here a few years ago and was fourtunate to join their seasonal team this year. I run a small rigid-hull zodiac, patrolling the boundary of the reserve. Here, I contact boaters to show them out of the reserve, educate them on appropriate whale-viewing etiquette, or show them black-and-white pictures of the dorsal fins of killer whales which tell stories about familial histories, scars, recent sightings, and new babies.

This place is ecologically charged -- the northern resident killer whales, several families of fish-eating odontocetes, travel here to feed on the increasingly scarce Chinook salmon. Johnstone Strait and the Tsitika River estuary are key foraging areas for this culture of whales. Their traditions find them returning to this area year after year in the summer and fall -- this is a feasting time.

This region is also home to a number of their 'rubbing beaches,' sloped shores covered in small smooth stones that the northern residents seek out to rub their bodies on. This behavior is unique among killer whales; no where else around the globe has this species been observed to annually and continually seek out these types of beaches for this activity. We are so incredibly fourtunate to share a space with these creatures who have decided that this unique place is special to them.

Around a campfire in the evenings, we listen to a radio tuned to hydrophones at several key locations in the area. These underwater microphones allow us to listen to the whales' space. Roaring outboard engines, cruise ships, tugs, transport vessels, seaplanes, little skiffs, aluminum water taxis are common -- beneath their sounds and during the lucky quiet times, we hear vocalizations in a foreign language. Eerie echoes, clicks and whistles, elastic bands snapping, tapping, bubbles, laugher, squeaks.

This is a family sharing their experience of swimming through Johnstone Strait, up Blackney Pass and into Blackfish Sound. They hunt and plan and announce new arrivals. They make declarations about changes in movement, reprimand their children, congratulate each other on leaping, on fishing, on holding their breath. We get to eavesdrop on their private world and imagine the possibilities of their experience, so vastly different from our own.

counting salamanders

sifting through the forest debris, we work to quantify the amphibian distribution in a forest site in maple ridge. our class, divided into teams of three to four individuals, are each given a starting point, measured out forty meters apart down the gravel logging road running approximately north//south. we find our commencement points, grab out tie rope, and dive into the bush, measuring out a line of one hundred meters. then, on each side of the line and under it, we scour.

acting like bears, feeling our way through the forest on all-fours, we scratch away at the underbrush, we overturn rotting logs, peer into small crevices, strip at moulding bark, we peel back the forest.

the forest, close to our faces, smells fresh and clean, recent rainfall has given little fungi the opportunity to push their way to the surface and we compare tastes of licorice fern to the scent of licorice centipedes. our fingernails are ringed in blackened humus, knees steeped in the earth.

western redbacked salamanders, ensatinas, gooey egg masses clinging to debris in ponds, flowering trillium, all observed with face at earth-level, field work is dirty and sweaty and possibility of discovery is under every needle on the forest floor.

to bamfield; the edge of the sea

bamfield is located on the edge of barkley sound on the west coast on vancouver island at the end of an eighty-kilometer winding logging road through old growth, active cutblocks, jungle-sized salal, and moss-choked standing wildlife trees; at the beginning of the great pacific. the weather systems of the coast greet us with sheets of intermittent rain and hail and blueblue skies as we roll westward, sarah's vintage jetta lolling over stones, skidding over gravel, bouncing beneath the boughs of western hemlock, curved cedar, white-barked trembling aspen.

we are going to visit stacey, who lives at the edge of this world and works in the public education department of the bamfield marine sciences centre. she designs and directs outdoor creative experiential education programs for highschool and university students and has an amazing attention to the details and intricacies of the natural world and is a storyteller rich with inspiration and wonder.

we toured the touch-tanks in the public education building; running water filtering through little tanks of anemones, feather-dusters worms, sea cucumbers, brittle stars, sponges, and chitons. students here have the opportunity to peer closely, hold, and compare these living organisms, look carefully at their specific adaptions, and marvel at the incredible diversity found on the beaches, rocks, and below the dark waves around this treasure cove. stacey tells us about anemones that can live over two hundred years and abalone reintroduction projects and porcelain crabs losing their limbs and bat star colouration diversity.

for a moment, between hail and rain and wind and something else, the sun broke thorugh the clouds long enough to walk through the damp forest to the beach. we pick out way between outcroppings of rocks, softsoft sand dotted with smooth, wave-carved shells and bundles of fragrant kelp rafts, everything salty and fresh.

surfbirds and black turnstones chatting and feeding and hopping and flapping all over the rocks, dodging the pacific swells crashing below them, dancing up and down, moving in time with the surge.

 

we peer into tidal pools, their biological communities arranged in arcs, imprinting the story of wave breaks and water resistance patterns moving over the pool. anemones, soft bodied and green and pink and sticky, taking the inner arc, with the mussels, the giant calcified shells, feeding on the direct wave action on the outerarc of the pool. barnacles, all over, their featherfeet feeding and feeding in the rick plankton currents, the soup of saltysea.

 

there are a hundred little mouths in here, feet and tails churning the water, the crunch of a stolen shell-home and glistening seaweed. there's true magnetism in this place, a power of fresh sea air and everything so alive you can't blink for a moment.

for whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea

-- e.e.cummings, "maggie and milly and molly and may"

snowy owls in boundry bay

 we went out to boundry bay on sunday to look for the snowy owls who have found themselves on a southward migration this season. it's a relatively rare sighting, large white, mottled, or grey strigiformes lazing on the driftwood washed up against the dike around the bay. typically found in the circumpolar regions, these individuals have been faced with a food shortage this season; lemmings, voles, and deer mice in short supply, they've made their way south to warmer climes.

while watching for owls, we wandered the bay; miniature islands and kelp tangles, eagles on old logs, northern harriers, a short-eared owl, and the sculptural promise of debris:

Robson Bight

Two summers ago I volunteered with a warden program in Johnstone Strait run by CETUS Research and Conservation Society. Camped in Boat Bay on West Cracroft Island, every morning started with a muddy hike through salal, cedar, and skunk cabbage to a lookout named Eagle Eye for the giant telescopes and box full of binoculars set on the edge of a high ocean-facing cliff.

foggy morning on the cliff

high-tech monitors

The morning would begin by turning on the radios and hydrophone receivers, making contact with marine park wardens and then firing up a small camp stove to brew hot coffee to warm our hands from the northern Vancouver Island late August fog. Here to monitor the boat traffic and whale behavior outside of  Robson Bight Michael Bigg Ecological Reserve, we worked to collect data used in studies looking at the correlation between human presence on the water and the behavioral changes seen in whales.
The resulting studies have shown that these whales respond to boat traffic by adopting more erratic swimming patterns when they would usually be foraging, suggesting that high levels of anthropogenic interference will cause reduced hunting success for these already threatened populations of killer whales.

An ocean environment is saturated in sound – noise travels further through water than  through air, and in an environment where light may not be a illuminating sense, creatures living in this environment use sound to guide their paths, to find food, to communicate, and to identify and avoid danger.

Highly acoustic creatures, killer whales use echolocation to hunt, navigate, and sonically light up their environment. Their vocalizations – clicks, whistles, moans, and squeaks – help us to recognize them as distinct groups of whales where families can be told apart by their different accents.
Being cognisant of our often invasive presence on the water near these animals, a series of hydrophones, set up by Orcalab, broadcast underwater noise to our lookout station while we watched from afar; in this way we were able to gain insight into the complexities of sound in which these animals participate and produce while gaining an appreciation and sensitivity for the loud levels of boat traffic also moving through the area.

In the early morning, the sounds of the pod's chatter would crackle over the speakers; for the moment completely uninterrupted by the loud roar of tugboats and fishing vessels moving down Johnstone Strait. Sitting atop the cliff, peering through binoculars, we could silently eavesdrop without the whales knowing or being affected by our closeness to them.

architects

i will pass around a robin's nest. the nine-year-olds are told that they have to look very close, to try to figure out what the bird makes the nest out of. they shout "sticks! grass! mud!" and i ask them how the robin puts the mud into the bottom of the nest. they throw out guesses: tail, feet, beak, wings. then  i will shake my head and tell them to stick their red robin tummies out and we giggle while we smear that mud into the nest.
we'll touch a yellow warbler's nest. it is soft inside, a tiny cocoon, i'll whisper the warbler's secret recipe for the cushioned and delicate lodge: cottonwood seeds and spider's webs.
then we'll run our fingers along the inside of a hollow tree, an abandoned honeybee's nest, brown and waxy. under the hot sun the wax gives off the smell of honey, it is sweet and wild and we all make little mmm sounds while we smell our hands.

robin's nest

paper wasp's nest

cliff swallow's nests