A Year on the Wild Side: A West Coast Naturalist's Almanac

By Briony Penn

Shortlisted for a 2020 BC Yukon Book Prize

A freshly designed, new edition of a funny weekly chronicle that offers a year-long, intimate view of the flora and fauna populating the West Coast.

A Year on the Wild Side is a witty commentary on the social and natural history of Vancouver Island. Composed of short, readable essays arranged into 12 monthly chapters, this engaging book reveals the magic and humour of the natural world and reminds us of our place within it.

As the weeks and seasons unfold with the turning of the pages, you’ll be in sync with the living world that surrounds you. Discover what berries are ripe and the best time to pick them. Learn why the termites swarm, where the herring spawn, and when the maple leaves fall. Get up close and personal with fascinating creatures like the snowy owl, the giant Pacific octopus, the river otter, and more.

The West Coast is abundantly alive, and A Year on the Wild Side invites you to indulge in unforgettable experiences, week by week, all year long.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Touchwood Editions
• Release date: May 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9781771512688

Briony Penn

Briony Penn has spent the last twenty-two years working as an award-winning newspaper and magazine columnist/illustrator, having published over 400 columns on natural/cultural history in regional newspapers and magazines, including “Wild Side” for Monday Magazine and “Natural Relations” for Focus. She received a Western Magazine Award for Best Columnist and Feature Writer, won the Silver Environment Educator Award at the Canadian Environmental Awards and was nominated for best North American columnist in alternative weeklies. She lives on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia.

Book preview

To all the wild ones of the Salish Sea and Wrangellia, in particular Callum and Ronan—my sharpest eyes, fiercest critics, and staunchest supporters. And to my parents, whose joie de vivre is still circling on the passionate west winds.

Contents

Introduction

JANUARY

Another Seaside Attraction

Wrangellian Refugees from the South Sea

The Implicate Order of Douglas-fir

What Rhymes with Pigeon? Wigeon

Snowy Owls and Other Temperance Angels

Thrilled to Be Frilled: Anemones for ceos

Surviving Winter Confinement with Black Bears

Holding Crumbs and Cormorants

FEBRUARY

River Otters on the Steps: Wild with Civic Pride

Horsetails and Alpha Males: The Dinosaur Within

Gondolas among the Skunk Cabbage

Granny

A Whale of a Time: Communia Omnia

Sex in the City: Love in the Forest

Pacific Wrens and the Food of Love

Barnacles and the Battle of the Sexes

Games for Clamdiggers

MARCH

Nursery Guide to Amphibians and Other Canaries in the Swamp

Keeping One Eye Out for the Murrelets

A Twenty-four-hour Tribute to Spring

See Weed or Seaweed?

Grey Whales Where the Sea Breaks Its Back

Swan Song

Sea Squirts: Mascots for Activists and Boomers

APRIL

The Good, the Drab, and the Muddy: Geese in Gumboots

Temptation in the Oak Meadows, Resistance in the Lawns

Warbling with Miss Piercy

Sooty Grouse and Political Persuasion

Go Thou to the Ant

Flying Circus: Hummingbirds under the Big Top

Buddha and the Butterflies: Search for the Ten Most Wanted

Back from Extinction: Island Marble

Sea Stars and Other Precariats at the Edge of a Continent

Calypsos and Quests

MAY

Flight of the Dragons

Hypnotized: Harbour Seals Cast a Soothing Spell

Sex, Sweat, and Salamanders: Hot Hunt for Cool Creatures

Bring Back the Pacific Dogwood

Western Purple Martins in the Flesh

Barred Owls and Trendsetters

Bagging a Sea Otter: Unleashing a Kelp

Child-rearing Is for the Birds

JUNE

How Not to Travel in June

Enraptured by Raptors

Woodpeckers and Male Drumming

Tent Caterpillars: Gulliver’s Travels to Brobdingnag

Need a Porpoise in Life?

Gumboot Chiton Dancing

Unplugging Midsummer’s Eve with Raging Grannies

Pipefish Dreams in Eelgrass Meadows

To Bee or Not to Bee

JULY

Chasing Fears and Bats: Mayan Gods to Mosquito Kings

Is There Life after Nighthawks? Healing up High

Heron Aid: Goo-goo-goggles on the Big Blue Bird

Moonlight Snailing: Taking the Plunge

Nudibranchs for Idleness

Don’t Bullhead Me

Rockfish and Beautiful Bob

AUGUST

Huckleberry August: Chaos and Harmony in the Classic Berry Patch

Planktonic Relationships

Passionate Sightseers: Guillemots and Terminal Wildernesses

Antlions and Paradox

Good-luck Swallows

Serpent’s Kiss: Plumpness of Summer, Sliding into Winter

Voles, Monogamy, and Morality

Glaucous-winged Gulls and Adolescence

Nocturne of the Polyphemus Moth

Medusa and the End of Summer

SEPTEMBER

Losing Marmots: Politicos, Helicopters, and the Future

Warhol’s Salmon: Fame for Fifteen Minutes

Tale of Tails: The Taming of the Shrew

Raising the Dead: Better Burials through Turkey Vultures

Eves, Amazons, and Bushtits

Embrace Our Native Earthworms

Iron and the Bear Necessities

Wolves in and out of Courts

OCTOBER

Summer’s End: Termites and Humans Shed Their Wings

Acorns and Other Little Nuts

Arachnophilia: Pirates and Spider Treasures

Maple Leaf Rag: Leaf Me Alone

Fungus among Us: Sherlock Holmes and the Mushroom Mystery

Rogue Waves and Renegade Birds

Cozying Up to Kermode Bears

Holding Out for Bigfoot

NOVEMBER

Slugs at the Speed of Light: Land Molluscs on the Move

Super Fragilistic Winter Birds

Ferns and Soap Operas

Path to Enlichenment

Squirrel Nutkin

DECEMBER

Rampant Buffleheads: New Age Heraldry

Arbutage: Berry Weapon for Urban Blight

Joy to the New World: Rudolph the Red-nosed Caribou

Halcyon Days: Chatter Darts at Winter Solstice

Rattle of Ravens: Winter Relief

The Lizard of Oz

The World Is My Oyster

Antler Envy: Does and Stags with the Racks

Further Reading

Acknowledgements

Index

Introduction

THIS BOOK REALLY BEGAN IN A HIGHWAY DITCH AT MIDNIGHT. THE DITCH WAS near a grove of rare, ancient Garry Oak trees inhabited by Northern Alligator Lizards, which I had grown up defending. I was in the ditch because I was trying to hide—a challenge, as I was nine months pregnant. Remaining incognito was essential, since I was about to amend a rezoning sign that was hammered into an oak in a cavalier fashion. I stumbled out of the ditch, lumbered to the sign, and painted REZONE FOR OAKS in red paint under the cover of darkness; then I fell back into the ditch. Panting there, I pondered if there wasn’t an easier way to whip up enthusiasm for a disappearing natural world.

Twenty-five years, two boys, and nearly 500 columns later, I still haven’t made up my mind which is easier: direct action or writing columns. There is a certain amount of risk in both and I still work at midnight, sometimes in ditches. I also haven’t made up my mind which is more successful from the point of view of the lizards, oaks, and other non-humans. In the last 25 years, some things have improved for this battered coast, such as the spectacular return of species like the Humpback Whales and Sea Otters. What has gotten worse is a longer list that makes us despair. What hasn’t changed and what occurred to me most vividly that night in the ditch is that both nature writing and activism are rich in paradox and humour. There is something absurd but poignant about composing slogans for a bunch of lizards that would rather meet a slug in a ditch than a pregnant woman well past her bedtime. Our paradoxical attitudes to the natural world have been as much a source of wonderment to me as the species that inhabit it. So this book is a social and natural history comedy about this place, written in metaphorical red paint to galvanize us all to action.

SALISH SEA AND WRANGELLIA

This place is the shores of the Salish Sea nestled in the heart of Wrangellia—both are manufactured place names, one of which has caught on officially. I heard a Lummi woman in the San Juan Islands use the name Salish Sea in 1991 and I borrowed it. Over the years, I have collaborated with American/Canadian biologist Bert Weber and we have both worked at getting the name into common usage on both sides of the manufactured border. I can proudly say that these columns provided some of the evidence submitted to the Geographical Names Board of Canada proving that the name Salish Sea was in common usage. Now Salish Sea is official and adopted by everyone from plumbing companies to chocolate factories, but back then only my faithful readers knew what the hell I was talking about. I hope it is helping us pull together as an ecological and cultural region, because that was the point of the whole exercise.

For those who are new to the Salish Sea: this is the unceded territory of Coast Salish–speaking people, whose welcoming cultures evolved within this distinctive inland sea that empties into the Pacific Ocean. It stretches from the Straits of Georgia and Juan de Fuca down to Puget Sound. When I started writing, there was no English name for one of the ecologically richest inland seas in the world. It was like writing about the Mediterranean without having a name for it.

As for Wrangellia, the name was coined by a bunch of wild geologists on either side of the Iron Curtain—back in the day when the curtain was made out of iron not digital weapons. The geologists, despite some political odds, proved that the West Coast islands all the way to Alaska were once a super-island archipelago (which they call Wrangellia) in the South Pacific that drifted and docked into North America. It helps explain lots of things, like why West Coasters have a distinctive culture from the rest of Canada and don’t rave about ice hockey. Wrangellia is the subject of my second essay (Wrangellian Refugees from the South Sea, p. 15) and the name of my gumboot dance group.

There are 98 essays in this new edition. They either come from my fortnightly column in Monday Magazine, Wild Side, which ran from 1993–2007, or my monthly column in Focus Magazine, Natural Relations, which ran from 2007–2013. The first edition of this book featured 52 essays selected from Monday to create weekly natural history events through the calendar year. An additional 46 columns have been added from Monday and Focus for this edition.

This book captures common things that you will see during the different months of the year, much like an almanac. Turn to the first week in August, for example, and you’ll find out what berries to pick that week. Another week will describe why the termites are swarming, or where the herring are spawning, or when the maple leaves are falling. Embedded in the chat about natural history are tips on how to increase your berry patch, save the herring, or cultivate mason bees. There is also the odd philosophical meditation on subjects such as why children like dinosaurs, why we are unfaithful, or the future of our maple leaf flag. The coast is a busy place, especially in the winter, and, once you get to know it, there is lots going on every month to inspire some activity.

I did an illustration for each story. Some people only look at the pictures and that is fine. When I see my drawings pinned up in school classrooms I feel quite gratified. As a school kid in Victoria, British Columbia, I was subjected to endless pictures of Cardinals, Blue Jays, and Bison shipped out by textbook imperialists from the east. Every nature book had a Kangaroo and Gila Monster, but where was a picture of our local Roughskin Newt? In the same vein, you will find that the full common name of every species is capitalized. This is because, for example, a Roughskin Newt is different from a rough-skin newt (any unmoisturized member of the family of newts) and a Great Crested Newt, which lives in England. Naming is a political act, like riding unicorns. When you capitalize the name of a species, a subspecies or a population that is special to one’s region, people stand up and notice. The Southern Resident Killer Whales are a perfect example of a distinct population or ecotype of Orcinus orca at risk that have even got the politicians’ attention—finally. The exception to capitalizing species is when it is a shortened or there is a collective of species, like the blowflies, newts or ferns, then we can all relax and stay lowercase. Where there might be ambiguity with common names, I follow up with the Latin in full italics—Quomodo excitando (which translates to something to get excited about.)

The first and only journalism trick I learned while writing for magazines was the device of a hook to lure in your readers. I will use any devious means to get a hook, like starting off columns with sex or rock stars. This all stems from my feeling that most people think nature writers are sexless, earnest sorts of people, and that nature writing doesn’t relate to their lives, though really it is the crazy comedy that surrounds us all.

This takes me back to the ditch and why I got started in this business in the first place. There is now a church and a huge parking lot where that grove of oak trees was. I dream that one day that congregation will suddenly have a change of heart and decide to turn their church back into a grove of oak trees. Who knows, they might see the light in the eyes of the alligator lizards. So when I write, I’m always thinking of that congregation.

I also write for a woman in red spandex I met in a nightclub. I was there doing a variety show in aid of another grove of doomed Garry Oaks—a little bit of preaching, a little bit of singing, and a little bit of Wrangellian gumbooting. After too much of the first, she yelled at me, Just shut up and keep dancing. For the red spandex lady and others like her, here is my gumboot dance beside the glitter ball of the Salish Sea.

Another Seaside Attraction

SHE WAS WASHED UP ON THE SHORE: A QUIET MASS OF MOTTLED PINK flesh diminishing, even in the thin heat of the January sun. The remaining arms and glassy eyes were the only recognizable features that identified her. We stared at her, so did the crows hopping anxiously at a safe distance from us. She was a Giant Pacific Octopus (Enteroctopus dofleini). Her arms would have curled from my head to my toes had we met each other deep in the Saanich Inlet on the east coast of Vancouver Island, where she washed in from. Grounded, she stretched four metres (12 feet) from tip to tip. She became a seaside attraction; everyone came to look at her until another high tide dragged her back into the sea, slightly the worse for wear. I checked her every day out of a sense of duty—an irrational kinship with this mound of evaporating flesh, anxious to see her well thought of by the visitors.

Most people who have lived on or by the sea have an octopus story, and I heard some of them during my vigil by her side. One fisherman told a story about trying to chase an octopus that had come up in his net around the decks. Tentacles flying, it eventually squeezed its huge body through the gunwales to escape. Another halibut fisherman told me his deckhand got wrapped up in the tentacles of an octopus he was trying to kill. The captain threw them both into the fishhold so that he wouldn’t have to see his deckhand eaten alive. The mate escaped out of the hold, threatened to eat the captain alive, and abandoned ship with the live octopus.

One scuba diver recounted a story about a male threatening him when he interrupted a breeding session. The males enlarge and modify part of one of their tentacles into a sexual organ. They use it to remove a package of sperm a metre long from their mantle and deposit it in the mantle of the female. The arm of a Giant Pacific Octopus is daunting enough at 20 metres (65 feet) below the surface, without it being twice its normal size, laden with sperm, and waving at you.

An aquarium buff testified to the fact that octopi have long-term memories, unlike any other invertebrates, and can perform problem-solving tricks. An eight-year-old boy told me that a Giant Pacific Octopus could eat a BC Ferries vessel. A six-year-old child told me that if you blindfold an octopus, it could tell the difference between two objects. These were all pertinent anecdotes, but I needed an octopus expert to answer a simple question that everyone who visited the roadside attraction asked me: why did she die?

Pacific Giant Octopus dwell along the Pacific shores, but the largest ones in the world have been found in Saanich. Typically you only see them around docks in their early phase, a swarm of young octopi changing colour from brilliant green to deep blue, feeding on the plankton. But what happens after that? When do they descend to the bottom of the sea to start their adult life? Everything loves to eat baby octopi, but what preys on the large adults?

In 1922, Dr. Fisher conducted the first Western scientific documentation of their life cycle by watching a female kept in captivity. She laid thousands of eggs, looking like long bunches of sultana grapes, which she attached to the ceiling of a den in a tank. The female tended her eggs, swooshing water through her siphon over them, carefully cleaning them with her suction cups, and forming her body into a basket shape around them to keep them safe from predators. He never saw her leave them, nor did she accept food. Instead, she picked up food that was offered her and, flushing reddish-brown, hurled it away from her den. The eggs started to hatch into tiny larvae two months later, and she stood guard by them until the last egg hatched. She died shortly thereafter. Researchers have repeated Dr. Fisher’s historical observations many times over. Octopus may live beyond five years, but as soon as they breed, they die, like salmon.

This was the crucial piece of information I was looking for. My intuitive regard for this overworked mother (they can brood up to 200,000 young) was justified. I could empathize with the exhausted heap of mottled pink flesh with only two glassy eyes and a few remaining arms—there are many of us who answer to that description. She was hounded by fishers, chased into tight corners, and deafened by oil tankers. She performed party tricks behind glass and still found time to suction off dirty offspring. She deserved to lie in dignity.

Wrangellian Refugees from the South Sea

ONE MIDWINTER DAY I WAS FEELING SO BLEAK THAT I READ A GEO-logical journal. Between the dust mites, I read about a theory that blew away my blues better than a westerly. The theory concerns continental drift and the story of our continent. As it turns out, our continent had nothing to do with North America until we had the misfortune to crash into it 100 million years ago. Our continent (or mini-continent) is Wrangellia and if North America (or Laurentia as geologists called that land mass) hadn’t been in the way, the inhabitants of the Pacific Northwest would be Wrangellians, still drifting happily around the Pacific Ocean.

Two hundred and seventy million years ago, the islands of the Salish Sea, Vancouver Island, Haida Gwaii, and the islands of Alaska were one massive island archipelago in the making, 10,000 kilometres (6,214 miles) away in the South Pacific Ocean. This was a pleasurable notion to me because it explained many things: why I hate ice hockey, why I like to lie under the trees and watch the world go by, why I have a spiritual kinship with other islanders, and why I feel compelled to stop for refreshment at four o’clock. The South Pacific is my spiritual homeland.

Those who study rocks and fossils are responsible for this theory. Don’t let the appearance of dusty rocks suggest that geologists lead dull lives. From various chemical and magnetic experiments and the fossil patterns of rocks, geologists construct epic dramas about the oceanic Pacific Plate carrying islands like a conveyor belt for thousands of miles and depositing them at the edge of North America like baggage at a carousel. The rocks under your feet as you read this, for example, contain evidence that they were made from volcanoes gaily spewing their lava and ash into the steamy, turbid waters of what is now Tahuata in the South Pacific.

As the sea washed around the shores, great swarms of marine creatures with names like Elasmosaurus, Mosasaurus, Lithophaga, and Crinoid clung, bred, and died upon the rocks, creating limestone beds over time. Upon the land grew gingko trees, palm trees, pine trees, and ancestors of the Garry Oak. These fell into swamps and were immortalized in the fossil record. The sea floor spread and the super island (what geologists call terranes) of Wrangellia was carried northward. When we docked into the western edge of North America, the Pacific Plate was subducted under the continent, and the molten lava that formed spewed up through new volcanoes or solidified and scrunched up, forming the massive Coast Mountains.

Apart from the allure of a great action drama, our geological heritage has two bearings on day-to-day life that are comforting. First, Wrangellia reminds us that life is transitory. Much of the oceanic crust carrying Wrangellia, moving at the same rate as human hair grows, has already disappeared under the continent of Laurentia. Even at half this rate, Wrangellia will still end up subducted or a complete train wreck by the next epoch. Monument-builders and excessive avarice upset me, especially in January, so I find comfort in the fact that the only humans that will be immortalized will be those who throw themselves into a swamp and turn up in the fossil record 100 million years later. Most of our puny efforts to leave a mark will be sucked under a continent or metamorphosed into the thinnest veneer of gneiss.

Once I knew that life was gneiss, I discovered a second reassuring idea. Our distinct heritage has its origins in the vicinity of the Marquesas Archipelago. The Marquesas Islands are where Gauguin lived and painted. Everything there is purple, scarlet, and green, life is gentle, and wildflowers are still honoured. The human history of the Marquesas is a good example of the changes in people when they settle on the shores of volcanoes formed in the Pacific.

The Polynesians discovered the islands 2,000 years ago, a mere millisecond in geologic time. They arrived with fervour, as all invading things do. Half of the bird species were hunted into extinction before a century was out, and their municipal councillors spent all of their time building monuments, swinging subdivision deals, and creating schemes that involved human sacrifice. Not surprisingly, their monumental culture collapsed and the citizens adapted to a more leisurely lifestyle in the forest. For example, today on the island of Tahuata there are no hotels and the ferry is a fishing boat. So now when I go get my hair trimmed, I remember that all the architectural monuments to Laurentian commerce, including big-box stores and ice-hockey arenas, will be that many centimetres closer to getting sucked under the continent and converted into gneiss. And in the meantime, I understand why I long for summer days when I can frolic on these volcanic shores, act like a Crinoid, and have a cup of tea at four.

The Implicate Order of Douglas-fir

THIS WEEK, I THREW ON MY LITTLE BLACK WOOD-FIBRE DRESS IN A ceremonial replanting of our Douglas-fir solstice tree (yes, a Christmas tree) and put the theory of implicate order to the test. The theory, proposed by the famous quantum physicist David Bohm, contends that the universe is not reducible to fragments or particles. It is a single, whole coherent domain in which matter and movement are unified. In the simplest terms, my rayon dress, my thoughts, my pounding heart, and the Douglas-fir are all one and the same thing; all are simply different manifestations of the same matter and energy flows on this particular day.

Of course this idea is not new on the coast. A word for everything is connected exists in all Indigenous coastal languages. It just took a while for the scientific establishment to catch up to those seasoned coastal matriarchs and put a mathematical formula next to it to prove it to themselves. Bohm never did work out the formula, but he discovered some interesting things along the way: subatomic particles communicate spontaneously even when they are so far apart that the physical transfer of energy isn’t possible. He also found that electrons are able to feel the presence of magnetic fields even when they are travelling in a region that has no field strength. In other words, subatomic particles behave like intuitive, animate beings. To the human eye, Douglas-fir, dress, and flesh are distinct entities. At the subatomic level, there are no real boundaries in space or time; matter, whether it is flesh or cellulose, looks the same. The seed that this Douglas-fir came from—a mouse-like seed tucked under the bracts of the fir cone—is the aperture through which energy and matter flow to produce the tree.

I plant the tree directly next to the stump of a Douglas-fir that came down in a big windstorm right before my eyes. It missed me by a whisker when it fell. Sweat originating from my adrenal glands still flows in the soil. That and the rotting cellulose of the old tree will be part of the matter that will nurture the new one. The solid cellulose, bucked up with an axe, flowed as heat from my fireplace into my body. Surrounding the tree is a patch of Salal. The dark blue berries attract boys and birds that, in turn, bring their snot and guano as they make forts and nests among the branches. The underground roots and mycorrhizal threads connect water, guano, snot, and gossip to the tree. Deer Mice and Townsend’s Voles form their own nutrient-transfer networks called tunnels in the vegetation. The residual matter of small births and deaths slide through the aperture, oiled by a squeak, and pour into the roots on the wish of good shelter and a shag.

Newts regularly cross this way in their seasonal rambles betwixt swamp and forest, leaving a few sloughed-off skin cells from their bumpy bodies, a trail of toxin. As a result, a weakness develops, or maybe it is a wild flow of wind forging an opening in the trunk. Small beetles find their way into the cambium and lay their eggs. Subatomically, the hard metallic shiny shell of a buprestid beetle is no different from the soft surface of the white larvae that pours out of the aperture of its egg. Pileated Woodpeckers excavate inch by inch, the tree alternately dying and growing on the detritus of their excavations. Red Squirrels leave piles of masticated cones to find their way through the aperture. They themselves crawl into the aperture of the excavated hole to produce more birthing and dying matter. At the sight of a lady in a little black dress, they sit up and scold, and