Harbour Air

Last week I featured a photo of a West Coast Air seaplane coming in for a landing. The other main airline serving the Inner Harbour is Harbour Air. Here is a shot of one of their seaplanes taxiing into the Inner Harbour in the early evening. As well as flights to/from Vancouver and Vancouver Island destinations, Harbour Air also offers sightseeing packages.

Totem Pole on Songhees Point

The artwork of Pacific Northwest Native Peoples is world renowned. Probably its most famous artifact is the totem pole and that pictured above is one of my local favorites. It is located on Songhees Point and has, in part, been featured here before. Visit the Songhees Nation website to find out more about the history and culture of the people who lived here before European settlers arrived. There are also some good photos showing the various stages during the creation of a totem pole. Wikipedia also has a good article on totem poles.

Smart Birds 2

Here's another example of intelligent birds. The seagulls pictured above and below were photographed out at Esquimalt Lagoon. Both photos were taken within about a half hour I spent observing these gulls (and others) flying past with these clams in their beaks. They catch the clams in the shallows of the lagoon and then fly over the road to a nearby bunch of large boulders. As soon as the gulls are above these rocks they drop the clams from high enough so that the force of their fall onto the rocks cracks the shells. The gull then swoops down and enjoys his shellfish.

Arbutus Moon

Smart Birds 1

Western science has been slow to recognize intelligence in animals. I suspect this is because since we began to get our food from agriculture there has been little need to observe animals closely in the way that hunters do. I always enjoy seeing animals think and above is a little example I saw out at Esquimalt Lagoon. Great Blue Herons usually wade around until they catch a small fish. Getting their catch from the end of that long beak into their mouth is usually just a matter of opening the beak briefly while tipping the head back so that the catch slides down towards the throat. I've never seen a heron lose a small fish while doing this so I watched with interest when the heron pictured above caught a furiously wriggling eel (above left). I figured he was going to lose it for sure as soon as he opened his bill in order to slide it down towards his mouth since the eel was whipping itself back and forth vigorously. What the heron did in this situation was to wade in to the beach and up onto the shingle. There he dropped his catch on the pebbles where it couldn't swim away to safety. The heron then stabbed it a few times (above center). Once it had stopped moving he picked it up and swallowed it in the usual way (above right). If you think about it, this is a wonderfully complex series of actions. I wonder whether this bird figured this method out for itself or whether it is behavior learned from other herons. I had been watching this heron for some time and earlier saw it twice catch small fish and swallow them without killing them on shore first.