This region, formerly referred to as the Mid-Coast Timber Supply Area, is now commonly known as the Great Bear Rainforest.  Here, terrestrial and marine ecosystems nourish each other. Nutrients from spawning salmon feed trees, mammals, birds, insects and amphibians in the forest. Meanwhile the forest acts as a nursery, regulating the waters that rear the next generation of salmon. Ocean and forest are not distinct entities – they are a continuum.

By referring to this region as the “Great Bear Sea,” perhaps WWF will help people make the important connections between forest and ocean, as the public hearings for the Northern Gateway Pipeline get underway. The threats from the pipeline are not unique to whales, salmon or bears. Rather, they put a large complex system at risk – a system that includes people (namely First Nation communities) and multitudes of marine and terrestrial species.

According to WWF’s blog:

Upwards of 4,200 individuals and groups have signed up to have their voices heard (at the hearings) – the largest show of concern in Canadian history about the environmental impacts of an industrial project.

If you’re not sure why we should care about the proposed pipeline and the Great Bear Sea, this Youtube video (filmed during our excursion on the Island Roamer) will give you a taste of what is at stake.

To see more gorgeous footage, and to learn about the Northern Gateway Pipeline, watch the award-winning documentary SPOIL.

I went hiking yesterday reluctantly, wishing I was zipping through the woods on my skis. So, I was pleasantly surprised to find a bit of winter out there.  It has been cold enough lately to freeze Lusk falls in Gatineau Park, with the spray and water vapour creating a shock of white ice formations in an otherwise brown and drab forest. I was expecting a lack-luster stroll through the woods but this chance encounter made my afternoon feel like an adventure of sorts. And right about now, I needed that.

Pray for snow.

A leap of leopards. A prickle of porcupines. A romp of otters, an exaltation of larks.

Not typically very practical, yet the collective nouns used for animals are decidedly fanciful. And fanciful is good.

I like to think these charming phrases are inspired by the wondrous nature of the animal kingdom itself. I imagine that a parliament of owls, a consortium of crabs, or a gaggle of geese could send a scribe into fits of creative linguistics more than, say, a pile of bound paper. You cannot think of a sneak of weasels without smiling a bit, at least on the inside. You can’t. That is kind of sneaky, and neato.

A charm of goldfinches. A maelstrom of salamanders, an unkindness of ravens, a blessing of narwals.

I bet the person who gets the job of coming up with this stuff would say something like “yeah, well, the pay is miserable, the benefits are ghastly, but hey, it’s a fun gig.”

The great master of our language, Willy Shakespeare, coined many marvelous phrases including “in my minds eye”, “dead as a doornail,” “forever and a day” and even “knock, knock, who’s there,” (amongst many, many more). Yet I wonder if he would be a bit miffed that someone else came up with an “implausibility of gnus”.

Implausible? Maybe. But regardless of what Shakespeare may have thought, these terms are whimsical. And, collectively speaking, I think we need more whimsy. Here’s some:

A wisdom of wombats, a sleuth of bears, a consortium of eagles.

I haven’t searched too hard, but I cannot find a collective noun for an octopus. Nonetheless, I did find a great story about them in Orion magazine. The second paragraph reads:

I have always loved octopuses. No sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange. Here is someone who, even if she grows to one hundred pounds and stretches more than eight feet long, could still squeeze her boneless body through an opening the size of an orange; an animal whose eight arms are covered with thousands of suckers that taste as well as feel; a mollusk with a beak like a parrot and venom like a snake and a tongue covered with teeth; a creature who can shape-shift, change color, and squirt ink.

Reading that my mind suddenly leapt into action. I felt like a school kid waving his hand in the air shouting “Oh. Oh. I know, I know” – An inconceivability of octopuses.

Try to beat that. You won’t. You can’t.

It is also inconceivable that you will ever see a group of octopuses, anymore than you are likely to stumble upon a crash of rhinos. A pandemonium of parrots – perhaps. But a group of octopuses? Never.

You will also never taste anything with your fingers, change colour to match the wallpaper or squeeze your body into the recesses of an impossibly small space like, say, your dishwater.

An inconceivability of octopuses. It’s perfect.

But enough of my musings. If you want a beautiful reminder of how fanciful, wondrous, whimsical and inconceivable nature can be, you need not look any further than a murmuration of starlings.

If Canadian Geographic insists on including captive animals in their wildlife photo contests and Collector’s Editions, as they currently do, I think they should recognize them as a distinct category – apart from wild-shot images. People pay money to enter these contests on the faint hope that they might win a prize.  Apples should at least be judged against apples.

Most published images of cryptic animals like wolves, wolverines, lynx, cougars etc are taken at game farms where people pay money to photograph captive animals. Opinions vary widely on the merits and ethics of these activities, and I won’t go into a long debate about that here. But this much is undeniably true: photographing captive animals is not the same thing as photographing their wild brethren.

Notwithstanding the myriad differences between captive and wild photography, it is decidedly easier to get high quality photos of captive animals than wild ones – especially for things like wolves that are rarely seen.

For me, part of the excitement of real wildlife photography is that there are no guarantees. It can take days or weeks of trying, and countless shots, to get one keeper. By comparison, photographing captive animals is akin to fishing in an aquarium.

Difficulty aside, staring at a grizzly through a fence in a zoo is just not as exciting as watching one splash through a salmon stream in a misty fjord. Nor is a photo of a captive grizzly as interesting as a wild-taken photo. At least, not in my opinion. Looking at the latter makes me feel robbed of the experience I am want from wildlife photos.

When done well, an image of a bear in a stream can pull me into the photographer’s experience, evoking the sensation of being there amongst the ancient cedars – salmon thrashing around my ankles – as the bruin creeps towards the riverbank.

By comparison, imagining somebody snapping photos from behind a fence, or at a game farm with animal handlers all around, leaves much to be desired.  I know I am talking subjectively here. I know many will not agree with me. But I don’t believe the essence of wildlife can be found in a zoo, nor the essence of wildlife photography found in captive-made images.

In the 2010 Wildlife Photography Contest, a picture of a captive grizzly bear won the Mammal category. The accompanying caption for that photo on Canadian Geographic’s website says the photographer “tried not to get too close to this eight-year-old resident of Kicking Horse Mountain Resort’s Grizzly Bear Refuge, near Golden, B.C.”

How do you get too close to an animal on the other side of an electrified fence?

Perhaps the editors who wrote the caption did not realize the Kicking Horse Refuge is a captive facility? Or, at worst, they were insinuating that the photo was taken in the wild (I sincerely hope not). Either way, I think the caption is implicit recognition that there is something different about photographing animals in the wild – on their terms – where one has to keep their wits about them and not get too close.

We endured some truly harrowing weather this fall with hurricane force winds and near-monsoonal rains. Nonetheless, watching grizzlies and spirit bears devouring salmon, pacific white sided dolphins racing away from transient orcas, humpback whales erupting from the ocean’s skin and so much more, made up for the cold and wet.

After soaking ourselves with rain, we lounged in hot springs, ate fresh seafood and stayed warm with hot tea and good company.   It has been nearly a decade that I’ve been guiding on the raincoast and I just cannot seem to get enough of the place.  It simply refuses to be anything but epic.

Now that I’m back home I am looking forward to doing some badly needed updates on this neglected blog, including new photos, a new projects page and other neat stuff.  So, check back again soon.

A Spirit Bear shaking water from its white coat after a meal of salmon. Photo by Tim Irvin

While working on the story, I figured it would be fun to hear what Malcolm Gladwell had to say about this social phenomenon, especially since he is a runner himself.  (He was the 1500 m Canadian record holder during high school).  So I emailed him.

It was a shot in the dark, to be sure, but a day after I sent my note a response appeared in my inbox.  I think Gladwell’s stories and books are fascinating and I was thrilled he responded to my query.  That is, until I opened his message. As it turned out it was his assistant emailing to tell me that Malcolm regretted that he was too busy with other obligations to take a phone call from me.

I’ve emailed a lot of people, who are far less prominent than Gladwell (i.e people who do not have three NY Times bestsellers) who did not respond to me.  Granted, many of them likely do not have personal assistants.  Nonetheless, it was nice to get a response. Hell, even the guy who owns the magazine I was writing for didn’t return my email or phone call  (nor has his company paid me for the story which ran five months ago. But that is another matter).

Anyhow, I almost talked to Malcolm Gladwell recently.  I guess that is not very cool. Bummer.

The ship’s massive hulk is now 1500 feet underwater, still leaking diesel into coastal waters. With that tragedy fresh in people’s mind, the looming threat of Enbridge’s Northern Gateway Pipeline Project has people on edge.

The proposed pipeline would bring dirty oil from Alberta’s tar sands, to Kittimat where it would be pumped onto large oil tankers that would thread through the archipelago of BC’s Great Bear Rainforest – one of the most spectacular ecosystems anywhere.

Staggeringly, these tankers house two million barrels of oil each, which is ten times the amount of oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez in Alaska. The navigational hazards for such colossal ships on this stretch of coast are formidable. Even more frightening when one considers that the Queen of the North and the Exon Valdez both went down while making comparatively easy navigational manoevers.

Accidents will happen. And the consequences of a big spill here have unimaginable consequences for coastal ecosystems and people. That is why First Nations and conservationists are vehemently opposing the Northern Gateway project, even while our government and Enbridge are moving forward with this plan.

If you haven’t visited the central coast (and odds are you haven’t – it isn’t easy to get to), then this 40 minute film will give you a taste of the magic of the place and get you up to speed on these issues.

The stories and images in the film are breathtaking. The threats it revels are real, but the film has a hopeful message. The pipeline has not been built, the Great Bear is still oil free, and we have a chance to keep it that way.

Higher quality viewing available here on the website of the International League of Conservation Photographers.

For more on this story, and some gorgeous photos, check out the July 2011 issue of National Geographic.