Category: nature

My visit to Highgate East Cemetery

During my visit to London, I met veteran videographer Brian Kelly, who took me and my nephew Christopher Christou on a tour of the famed Highgate East Cemetery. (My second great grandfather George Hugh Doherty Pennell (1832-1902) is buried at Highgate but due to post Covid staffing issues, it wasn’t possible to locate the grave […]

Portraits of Northwestern Crows

The weather in Kitimat has been awful during most of the fall, cold, windy, rainy, foggy and generally miserable. Not unexpected in a La Nina year. I went down to Kitamaat Village for the monthly bird count in a rain squall. So the visibility was pretty bad. As I was about to leave, a half […]

Remembering my visit to Florence, Oregon, which inspired the novel Dune

It was forty years ago, in August, 1980, that a friend and I drove from Vancouver, BC, where I was living at the time, to spend a weekend at Florence, Oregon, which inspired Frank Herbert to write the famous novel Dune. Like many at the time, I was entranced by Dune as soon as I […]

Kitimat Christmas Bird Count 2019

For the Christmas Bird Count in Kitimat, there’s usually a lot of ground to cover in a very short period of time–that’s because here in the northwest daylight hours are limited as we get closer to the Winter Solstice. So we started before dawn, which is OK for those who are counting but not so […]