Vancouver

Susan and I were in town for a week to attend a couple of conferences. The Congress met last year in Saskatoon and was here at UBC this year. It is a ragtag collection of about 65 learned societies, whose members all get together once a year for a couple of weeks in the same spot. These are societies from the arts side of campus. The Congress this year was the biggest ever, with over 9500 delegates. My research teams gave papers at the Society for Digital Humanities, and Susan had a paper at the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science. We had a simply wonderful time at these conferences, then spent our leisure hours wandering around this corner of the city, meeting some of the local flora and fauna.

A couple of raccoons
We went walking in the rain in Stanley Park, and were standing around under the cedar trees at one point, admiring their age and size, when who should stick her head out from around a tree trunk but a ratty wet raccoon. She stood on all fours and looked at us for a while, then stood up a little and showed us her empty hands. It finally occurred to Susan that she might be interested in a little dried fruit strip. While Susan was fetching that out, along came another, older raccoon, much less wet, and Susan fed the two of them the whole bar, tossing the pieces onto the ground in front of them. The older one rubbed the piece of fruit between her hands before eating it. After we finished and were walking away, I looked back to see them walking up the side of a cedar tree, like a couple of giant squirrels.

Water birds
The geese have their goslings and the ducks their ducklings, and you can walk right up to where they are. The family units mostly stick together, but there always seems to be one of the crowd who is not clear on the concept and ends up wandering around and dithering a little. We also had a chance to see several great blue herons, always individually. One was flying by with a stick in his beak, and a couple of them were standing at the water’s edge with the wind blowing their beards. One tonight was perched on the top of a sign down at the beach, looking from the back, Susan said, like an undertaker. Apparently Stanley Park has one of the largest urban colonies in the world; in 2004, eighty of them showed up and started nesting here.

Harbour seal
We walked the sea wall several times with our friends, and saw in the distance some swimming animals, but we never got close enough to decide whether they were otters or seals. Tonight one of them swam close enough to the wall where we were standing that we could have dived down and touched her, and she was clearly a seal. She was larger than the ones I saw in Cape Town, and spotted rather than the uniform colour I saw there. She was floating gently on the surface and took a good long time, even swimming closer at one point while looking right at us. It was clear though that she could swim like the dickens, and when she was underwater you could see her white belly as she swooped around catching minnows.

That’s a Triathlete
One of the other harbour sightings I made tonight was of an ungainly looking creature flopping about a little. I wondered if it was something injured. It turned out, of course, to be a human swimmer. The triathletes are in town, having arrived from all over the world, wearing their spiderman costumes in all weather and making the rest of us look just that little bit more tired and fat. We saw a sign in the lobby today mentioning that the kitchen was going to open early for them, since they want to breakfast between 4 and 5 a.m. rather than at the more conventional 7:00. God love them.