Powell Street Festival

This Saturday, Davis and I went to the Powell Street Festival, a celebration of the Japanese community in Vancouver.

On our way, we passed this beautiful mural in Chinatown:


with a very thought-provoking quote


The festival is held in Oppenheimer Park in the somewhat infamous downtown east-side. But families and locals were mingling and enjoying the sunshine, music, and food.


I just noticed the colourful and interesting houses behind the tents in this photo - I wish I'd had a closer look!


Davis of course was mainly interested in the martial arts demos, but a fairly large crowd had already assembled by the time we got there, and it was hard to get a good look.


So, we headed over to the food area! These are called manju, and they're a variation of a Chinese pastry that contains red bean paste.


A similar item is the fresh imagawayaki, which is also filled with red bean paste.


YUM!


As, uh, fascinating as it seemed, we did not visit this tent.


But we did try some tofu yaki with Asian slaw, and matcha smoothies.


As we left, we were serenaded by Nish Rawks, a Toronto-based rapper of Japanese descent.


I was pretty impressed.

Salt marsh

This week, we've been working out on the salt marshes off Westham Island. A salt marsh, in case it isn't obvious, is the upper part of the intertidal zone where salt-tolerant plants such as worts, sedges, and rushes can be periodically covered at high tide. In the delta of the Fraser River, the marshes and mudflats extend out for probably a couple of kilometers at least. We've been working with a government biologist, counting different types of native vegetation out there in order to assess how much the marsh has eroded over the past thirty years - and the answer seems to be a lot, in some places. From what I understand, the erosion of the marsh is mainly due to rising sea levels and over-grubbing by snow geese.

It's muddy, dirty, exhausting work - it's a 45 minute slog through the mud and a short canoe ride across a channel just to get to the site, and then we're on our knees in the muck all day getting poked in the eye (or nostril) by bulrush stems. But the sun is (usually) shining, we can see all sorts of birds (harriers, yellowlegs, sandpipers, bald eagles, swallows, wrens, herons, etc), and there's something about working outdoors, especially by the ocean, that really connects you to the planet. Measuring the workday by high tides and low tides and sun and rain makes me feel like I'm remembering something more elemental that I'd forgotten along the way. And the landscape is beautiful - I find it really interesting to see the different vegetation zones change as you move away from land, as different species adapt to different water and salinity levels.











This is prime real estate as far as eagles are concerned... this pair built their nest on an old navigation tower, and are raising two young that are about to fledge. This particular site comes complete with adjacent tower (excellent for stretching your wings and letting the wind take you off), multiple perch sites, breathtaking views, and even a small live tree growing out of the corner for shade.


Coyote?


Mallard nest.


A hanging marsh wren nest, woven around and suspended by cattail stalks.






Our accompanying government biologist suspected this was a harbour seal placenta/birth sac... and NOT the plastic bag we all initially thought it was!


Tomorrow is our last day working on this project, and I'm looking forward to (hopefully) a more relaxed week of bird counts next week!

The British invasion

I started a new job this week - it's going to be a hodgepodge of things, I think, but all conservation-oriented, and with hopefully not a few bird surveys. For the past two days, however, we've been mapping Spartina grass on the Roberts Bank mudflats near Tsawwassen, BC. Spartina is an invasive grass from England that's been found up and down the western coast. Like all invasive species, it seems, Spartina spreads rapidly and is a pain in the butt to get rid of, outcompeting local plants and decreasing habitat for marine invertebrates, fish, and birds.

Roberts Bank is a very alien, very magical landscape. Walking toward the water from the dikes, you wade through a few metres of vegetation before coming out onto a muddy soup, which lasts another few metres. Then finally the ground hardens, and what looks like a prehistoric or lunar terrain emerges with cracked mud and channels and pools everywhere that the tide has formed. The oozy mud under the pools and rivers is also strange... there's a thin brown surface layer, but the sludge below is a soft black colour and actually feels really lovely on the skin.











Sadly, I couldn't bring my beloved SLR and 200 mm lens out in the muck with me, which was disappointing because I saw so many amazing birds that I just couldn't capture with my point & shoot. Of course there were gulls and swallows everywhere, and little sandpipers that were too far away for me to identify. There was also a small family of killdeer that would shriek and suddenly lift off if we got too close to them, and tons of herons and eagles doing flyovers. The first morning, we also saw a Northern Harrier swooping over the shore grasses looking for a snack. I also identified my first Caspian terns, and solved a bit of a puzzle - Davis and I had been hearing their strange raspy scream all over Richmond but we were never able to get a good look at them to figure out what was making that noise. Mystery solved!

If you roll over the images there should be some text popping up - the pictures were just so cruddy in the first place that I didn't want to clog them up with too much writing. Okay so the rollover thing doesn't seem to work. In the first picture, there are some Caspian terns mixed with gulls in the foreground - the terns have a black crown and a bright red beak. In the distance, what I initially mistook to be a fleet of small sailboats is actually a bunch of great blue herons, fishing out in the shallows. In the second photo, the flagged plant is that dastardly Spartina, and a killdeer.

UBC botanical gardens

A couple of weekends ago, Davis and I went to the botanical gardens at the University of British Columbia, which are both extensive and diverse. They're not on the scale of anything like the Butchart Gardens in Victoria, of course, but I really enjoyed the walk through the tall conifers, smelling everything in the medicinal herb garden, rambling through the alpine terraces, and inspecting the vegetable garden (the produce of which is donated to local charities). We also did the canopy walkway, a series of suspended bridges through the treetops. I actually really enjoyed this too - we did the one at the Capilano Suspension Bridge a few years ago and it really didn't feel like much of an adventure at all. But this one puts you pretty high up in the treetops, it's much less crowded, and you even have some thrilling moments of mild peril as the bridge lurches beneath your feet and you peer down at the forest floor 50 feet below.

I was hoping to see some birds on this trip - last time we went I saw a creeper - but other than a bald eagle surveying its domain, I was out of luck. I saw lots of beautiful flowers and some neat insects but I am sadly lacking in knowledge of both botany and entomology so, without any descriptions to get in the way:

Eat! Vancouver food + cooking fest

As you probably know by now, I love to eat. So when I heard about the food and cooking festival happening this weekend in downtown Vancouver, I more-or-less commanded Davis to go with me.

And it was awesome.

We started off, naturally, in the wine+beer+spirits tasting area. This was probably not the brightest idea as I'd had two pieces of toast for breakfast and Davis had had nothing. But our light buzz probably made the crowds more tolerable.



There were so many things to taste, from local wines to wines from as far away as Hungary, delicious microbrews, vodka, spiced rum, sake from Japan, locally-made mead, a seminar on how to make the perfect Caesar - and absinthe:


After our liquid indulgences, we decided it would be a good idea to get something to eat - fortunately, we had plenty of options! We wandered up and down the booths, snacking on beef jerky, yogurt, ice cream, honey, Korean rice cakes, coffee, candied salmon, turkey sausages, barbecue sauce, olives stuffed with lemon and orange, chocolate:



and delicious Tête de Moine cheese from Switzerland:


And we weren't just concerned with filling our own tummies - there were also rows of pet food vendors, all happy to talk about their products and give us some samples for the beasts.

Even though we were unhappily regretting our decision to not wear elastic-waisted trousers at this point, we waddled over to the restaurant booths, where local restaurants were serving up sample-sized portions of their most popular dishes.



There were also celebrity chefs giving demonstrations, and different seminars on cheese and how to describe and pair wines and beers with food.

EAT! Vancouver also runs tomorrow - so if any of you reading this are in town, I highly recommend you drop by!

Ships to shore

The weather this weekend was forecasted to be the warmest and sunniest in a while, so Davis and I decided to get out of the house and visit Steveston village, a pretty little fishing community south of Vancouver. As we approached, we noticed traffic getting a little heavy - "I guess everyone wants to get outdoors today," I remarked. "Don't worry though, I've never seen the parking lot full."

Well, it was - and so was every side street in a four-block radius. "Is there something going on today?" Davis asked, somewhat rhetorically.

Yes, as it turned out. We finally found a parking spot and started walking toward the village along the dikes when we spotted signs for the Ships to Shore festival - a tall ships celebration featuring four schooners, a Viking longboat, music and food and dancing. This used to be an annual event in the city, until it was suspended to make way for preparations leading up to the 2010 Winter Olympics. This is the first year it's run since 2002.

Passes were on sale to tour the boats and take a 3-hour sail around the area, but we opted to just look at the boats from the docks. Another bit of luck was that although most ships required prepaid tickets just to get on board and look around, the Adventuress, a 133-foot schooner out of Seattle, was letting people walk around the ship for free. We took a look at all the intricate rigging, posed at the helm, chatted with the sailors, and toured the lower decks.









We also got introduced to a really neat band, the Rakish Angles. They're a 4-piece string band with a bass, violin, guitar, and mandolin. They describe their music as "Newgrass, Latin, Gypsy-Jazz and Oldtime." The music was really interesting, so if you like fiddle music or anything similar to that, definitely check them out!


After checking out the ships, we headed over to the village proper, where vendors and artisans had set up tents for the every-other-weekendly farmer's market. We tried some ridiculously delicious flavoured ganache by La Chocolaterie:


Davis's mission of the day was to visit Bell's Bake Shop - which he had read about in the paper - and get himself a Stanley Cupcake. Sadly, they were sold out. :(


But we shared a yummy coconut cupcake instead.


Steveston Village is one of my favourite places to visit, even when (or especially when) there's no festival going on. I love seeing the fishing fleet, eating fish & chips on the dock, walking down to the beach and watching dogs play in the surf. The Canada Day salmon festival in Steveston is always a lot of fun - we're more than likely going to be heading there on July 1 and I definitely recommend you do too!