Wherein motivation is found to remain motivated,
and the writer finishes her column

22. January 2014 · Write a comment · Categories: 14 Column Inches, In the Field, Keiran's World, Victoria Times Colonist · Tags: , , , , ,
Chocolate Cake… mmm, so tempting—so distracting! Photo © Hudson, The, on flickr

Chocolate Cake… mmm, so tempting—so distracting! Photo © Hudson, The, on flickr

I elected to write about motivation for this week’s column. The Editors approved. How timely, they said. Think of all the new year’s resolutions made, by now quietly regretted but not yet abandoned.

Many people who started 2014 fired up with enthusiasm and good intentions may just now be experiencing the first second thoughts about goals hastily set and commitments rashly made. They may be feeling the first hints of—ugh! Not again!—regret and disappointment about persisting with those resolutions. They may be enduring the opening sequences of internal dialogues between “I should” or “I promised” and “It’s too wet/cold/hard/yummy” or “I’ll start again tomorrow.”

Right about now.

According to one online calendar of annual commemorative days, yesterday was Ditch Your New Years Resolution Day.

Which kind of makes it official. And just maybe provides that hint of permission we might have been searching for.

So, yes, a piece about motivation is timely.

Yet, while the ghosts of New Year’s resolutions soon-to-be-past stretch their guilt-lashing muscles, lace up their running shoes of remorse, and tune their taunting laments, I find myself not writing….

Read the rest of this editorial in the Victoria Times Colonist….

West Coast weather wimp wises up
about winter in Winnipeg

11. January 2014 · 1 comment · Categories: 14 Column Inches, Science Scribe, Vancouver Island, Victoria Times Colonist · Tags: , , , , , , ,
Ploughing snow in Winnipeg. Photo © AJ Batac

Ploughing snow in Winnipeg. Photo © AJ Batac

I spent some time in Winnipeg before the holidays. While there, I had the dubious pleasure of experiencing, among other things, a goodly period of the city’s second coldest December on record.

Yay, me.

I grew up on the prairies, and I thought I knew what cold was. But apparently my time in Alberta was misspent. My time here in Victoria has made me even softer and weather-wimpier.

As many prairie-folk-come-to-Victoria can attest, –46-degree windchill is Something Else. Minus 46-degree windchill atop –35 degrees out of the wind, for day after day after day, is also exhausting and, in my case anyway, cranky-making….

Read the rest of this editorial in the Victoria Times Colonist….

From birds to stars:
Opportunities to add to how we understand the world

05. January 2014 · Write a comment · Categories: 14 Column Inches, Science Scribe, Vancouver Island, Victoria Times Colonist · Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Victoria residents recently demonstrated again how keen many of them are about birding. Preliminary results from this year’s Christmas Bird Count show more than 200 volunteers turned out in mid-December to watch for birds throughout the Capital Region. The birders recorded 144 species this year. Data collected by birders during the count are used to assess and monitor bird population numbers and health in communities across North America. Community organizers select one day from December 14 until January 5, and send their volunteers out to scour a 24-kilometre-diameter area that stays the same from year to year. Ninety-five communities in B.C. have taken part in the annual event this year. The final numbers of species sighted won’t be tallied until the event officially finishes tomorrow. Started by the Audubon Society in 1900, the Christmas Bird Count now provides 114 years of regularly collected data about bird population numbers across the continent. It helps bird scientists and ecologists assess and monitor species health in regions and individual communities. For example, scientists have used information gathered by community birders during the count to get the Western Screech-Owl, Rusty Blackbird, and Newfoundland Red Crossbill added to Canada’s Species at Risk lists. It also provides opportunity for regular people to engage in and contribute to science. In fact, the Christmas Bird Count is one of the longest-running and better-known citizen-science programs going. The concept of citizen science has grown in scope, popularity and opportunity during the last decade. Thanks in large part to advances in web technology, folk like you and me, who don’t have Ph.D.s and lack access to science labs, can make our own small marks in the scientific process—and learn more about things that interest us.

Victoria residents recently demonstrated again how keen many of them are about birding. Preliminary results from this year’s Christmas Bird Count show more than 200 volunteers turned out in mid-December to watch for birds throughout the Capital Region. The birders recorded 144 species this year. Data collected by birders during the count are used to assess and monitor bird population numbers and health in communities across North America. Community organizers select one day from December 14 until January 5, and send their volunteers out to scour a 24-kilometre-diameter area that stays the same from year to year. Ninety-five communities in B.C. have taken part in the annual event this year. The final numbers of species sighted won’t be tallied until the event officially finishes tomorrow. Started by the Audubon Society in 1900, the Christmas Bird Count now provides 114 years of regularly collected data about bird population numbers across the continent. It helps bird scientists and ecologists assess and monitor species health in regions and individual communities. For example, scientists have used information gathered by community birders during the count to get the Western Screech-Owl, Rusty Blackbird, and Newfoundland Red Crossbill added to Canada’s Species at Risk lists. It also provides opportunity for regular people to engage in and contribute to science. In fact, the Christmas Bird Count is one of the longest-running and better-known citizen-science programs going. The concept of citizen science has grown in scope, popularity and opportunity during the last decade. Thanks in large part to advances in web technology, folk like you and me, who don’t have Ph.D.s and lack access to science labs, can make our own small marks in the scientific process—and learn more about things that interest us.

Victoria residents recently demonstrated again how keen many of them are about birding. Preliminary results from this year’s Christmas Bird Count show more than 200 volunteers turned out in mid-December to watch for birds throughout the Capital Region. The birders recorded 144 species this year.

Data collected by birders during the count are used to assess and monitor bird population numbers and health in communities across North America. Community organizers select one day from December 14 until January 5, and send their volunteers out to scour a 24-kilometre-diameter area that stays the same from year to year. Ninety-five communities in B.C. have taken part in the annual event this year. The final numbers of species sighted won’t be tallied until the event officially finishes tomorrow.

Started by the Audubon Society in 1900, the Christmas Bird Count now provides 114 years of regularly collected data about bird population numbers across the continent. It helps bird scientists and ecologists assess and monitor species health in regions and individual communities. For example, scientists have used information gathered by community birders during the count to get the Western Screech-Owl, Rusty Blackbird, and Newfoundland Red Crossbill added to Canada’s Species at Risk lists.

It also provides opportunity for regular people to engage in and contribute to science. In fact, the Christmas Bird Count is one of the longest-running and better-known citizen-science programs going.

The concept of citizen science has grown in scope, popularity and opportunity during the last decade. Thanks in large part to advances in web technology, folk like you and me, who don’t have Ph.D.s and lack access to science labs, can make our own small marks in the scientific process—and learn more about things that interest us….

View the rest of this article in the Victoria Times Colonist….

Picky Eaters Club fetes the season with feasting

28. December 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: 14 Column Inches, Victoria Times Colonist · Tags: , , , , , , ,
Feast of the bean king, by Jakob Jordaens (1593–1678). Wikimedia Commons
Feast of the bean king, by Jakob Jordaens (1593–1678). Wikimedia Commons

Feast of the bean king, by Jakob Jordaens (1593–1678). Wikimedia Commons
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jakob_Jordaens_016b.jpg

I don’t know about you, but I’m finding having people over for dinner for any occasion is getting more and more complicated.

First, there are the scheduling issues. Who is available when, and can we please—please!—manage to get together, all of us, just this once this year? Okay, how about once this decade? This lifetime?

And then there’s the food. With every invitation I send out, I’m tempted to include a dietary-needs declaration form to be filled in and returned with the r.s.v.p. Maybe guests can arrange for their family doctors to sign it, too, or have it notarized. You know, in case they forget something critical.

One friend calls our circle of mutual friends the Picky Eaters’ Club. We include the usual assortment of celiacs, nut and dairy allergies, vegetarians, and blood-sugar problems. We also have some well-meaning foodists—those who choose a particular life or eating style for moral or philosophical reasons, or for just plain personal preference….

Continue reading this editorial at the Victoria Times Colonist.…

Investing in shared experiences increases happiness

25. December 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: 14 Column Inches, Victoria Times Colonist · Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Saint Nicholas taking on new experiences by exchanging reindeer and sled for a goat. Image: WikiCommons (commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Santaandgoat.gif)
Saint Nicholas taking on new experiences by exchanging reindeer and sled for a goat. Image: WikiCommons (commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Santaandgoat.gif)

Saint Nicholas taking on new experiences by exchanging reindeer and sled for a goat. Image: WikiCommons

A friend rings me in December every year and warbles, “Santa baby, slip a sable under the tree for me.” Her sometime-Eartha Kitt, sometime-Madonna Material Girl imitation morphs into one of a 10-year-old requesting a hippopotamus for Christmas.

Then she moves onto the greedier lines of Jolly Old Saint Nicholas, and ends with a rousingly nasal rendition of the Chipmunks demanding hula hoops and planes that loop the loop. We call this annual singsong The Gimme, Gimme, Gimme Medley. It seems to suit the season.

Yet, despite singing about wantin’ stuff, Bev and I inevitably end up talking about events and activities. The concerts we attend during December. The dinners with friends. The family gatherings, the anticipated holiday vacations, the quiet days with good books… .

Some of the activities we talk about come with price tags. Some require only time and effort.

Chances are, those experiences will influence our emotions to greater, longer-lasting and more positive effect than any possessions we acquire during the season, no matter how much we may covet the objects.

According to San Francisco State University psychologist Ryan Howell, people who invest in acquiring experiences over obtaining possessions report greater happiness and life satisfaction. Experiences can include anything from attending concerts or theatre to spending time at the spa, to travel or even going for walks….

Read the rest of this editorial in the Victoria Times Colonist….

An epitaph for quiet

07. December 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: 14 Column Inches, Science Scribe, Victoria Times Colonist · Tags: , , , , , , , ,
fog at Macaulay Point, Esquimalt. September 14 2013, 6:00 p.m.

Some of Victoria's quieter places. Photo by Andy M. Smith

Quiet may be extinct, I thought atop the Highlands’s Jocelyn Hill. I was far from the nearest road, but the whine and hum of traffic climbing the Malahat drifted across Finlayson Arm.

And then a helicopter whirred into view below, drowning out pretty much everything else.

My friend Don tells me he found true quiet once. He had to climb to the top of the El Teide volcano on Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, to find it.

That’s a long way to go to find absence—absence of sound.

For the record, I don’t classify sounds of nature as noise. There are exceptions: the shotgun-crack of acorns hitting the rooftop, or predawn choruses of birdsong … or monkey screams or jackal howls or Nature Boy’s snores, depending on where I’m trying to sleep.

Research indicates we humans find run-of-the-mill everyday nature sounds relaxing. Serenades of birdsong and squirrel chatter soothe our usual stress responses, lower our blo.od pressure and heart rate, and slow and deepen our breathing….

Continue reading at the Victoria Times Colonist…

Returning sea otters are returning marine ecosystem
to how it was before Europeans arrived

30. November 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: 14 Column Inches, Science Scribe, Vancouver Island, Victoria Times Colonist · Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sea Otter Moms with Pup, Morro Bay CA 13 Dec 2010. Photo © Mike Baird, www.bairdphotos.com

“Sea otters, bah!” Nature Boy says, tongue in cheek. “They’re too easy to love. How can you respect a plush toy?”

Nature Boy is responding to recent reports of sea otters off Langara Island, in Haida Gwaii, and elsewhere on our coast. Although still not common in mid-B.C. waters after its 1970s’ re-introduction, the small marine mammals are slowly repopulating their historic range.

The sea otter’s return is one of Canada’s conservation successes. Confirmed as extirpated by the 1920s, listed as “threatened” in 2002, the sea otter is now considered a “species of concern.”

Nature Boy continues, “Now, the sea urchin—that is a remarkable animal. It has these amazing, intricate jaws….”

“—No match for sea otter jaws,” I interrupt. “Nor is the sea urchin a species at risk. Unlike the sea otter. Or the abalone.”

“Abalone are pretty cool, too,” he admits. “They have those weird breathing holes in the shell, and of course lovely mother of pearl. And they taste real good, too.”

Always a disadvantage for an animal….

 

Read the rest of this editorial at the Victoria Times Colonist.

Nature schools put the kinder back into the garden

23. November 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: 14 Column Inches, Science Scribe, Victoria Times Colonist · Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Young girl in nature. Photo © Julie Morris, www.BuffaloLucy.com

Young girl in nature. Photo © Julie Morris, www.BuffaloLucy.com

Nature schools are popping up like mushrooms around here. The preschools and kindergartens immerse kids in local parks and green spaces for half-days and full-days at a time. The kids play outside. They stay outside. They learn about plants and animals, they look at bugs and pond critters, they make friends with trees.

Colwood’s Sangster Elementary program started the trend. Parents have even camped out overnight to register their children in the program.

Saanich’s preschool at Swan Lake Nature Sanctuary started September fully booked, and takes advantage of nature programs offered by sanctuary education staff. The Cridge Centre also started a nature preschool this year. Kiddie Kapers operates out of Commonwealth Recreation Centre, and Victoria Nature School runs out of Mount Doug park and Gordon Head Recreation Centre.

Programs like these put the kinder into the garten — the child into nature. They capitalize on the benefits of being active and outdoors on kids’ mental, physical and emotional health and development….

Read the rest of this editorial in the Victoria Times Colonist….

Child on park boardwalk. Photo © Richard Step, richardstep.com

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