While I’m uploading some new photos to my Kentucky photo set, here are a couple of favourites:
This dog was awaiting its owner outside of the monastery. It came over to confer with us, and paused only momentarily to check out this box turtle. The turtle, as you might imagine, was non-plussed:
Even in rural Kentucky, you can’t avoid the social media:
This sign is pretty self-explanatory:
I’m pretty happy with this mushroom photo, taken at dusk. Here’s a slight variation:
This week, Julie and I are in rural Kentucky, about an hour south of Louisville. Julie’s mom is Chair of the English Department at Trinity Western University, and a prominent authority on Thomas Merton. Merton was, by apparent consensus, the most significant American spiritual writer of the twentieth century. He was also a monk, and spent the latter half of his life at the Abbey at Gethsemani, a Cistercian monastery here in Kentucky. Julie’s mom spends time down here most summers, and this year we decided to join her.
We’re staying in a house near the Abbey that’s operated as a retreat centre. It’s commonly called ‘the Solar House’, as it was a kind of early green architecture effort. It used to have a translucent roof, to let in the heat. It’s built right into the hillside, on a gravel bed, which I gather helps moderate temperatures throughout the year. It’s got a peculiar, pyramid shape (here’s a photo), though it sits very pleasantly at one end of a huge meadow.
The surrounding countryside brims with life. I’ve seen deer, box turtles, snakes (larger than we grow them back in Canada) and all sorts of birds–blue jays, cardinals, herons, owls, turkey vultures, turtle doves and dozens of other species I don’t recognize.
Of all the places I’ve been, Kentucky reminds me most of Ireland. It’s extraordinarily green–it has rained here every afternoon, like it does in the tropics–and has charming rolling hills. Of course, in Ireland the fences are made of rock, not barbed wire, and there are very few pickup trucks, but there’s a lot of similarity. For no reason other than my own naivete, I expected Kentucky to be more like the country around Austin, Texas. Where Texas was dry and brown, Kentucky is humid and verdant.
I’ve posted a few photos from our trip to Flickr. Tomorrow, time permitting, I’ll tell you about the monks.
The calf’s tail poked out at 12:40 p.m., which started a series of contractions until the baby arrived at 3:39 p.m. in a cloud of blood.
“This birth was really textbook. You couldn’t really hope for a better birth,” said Vancouver Aquarium senior vice-president of operations Clint Wright. “[Aurora] looked to be extremely relaxed throughout the whole thing.”
Later, the piece discusses the odds on the baby’s survival:
Aurora’s calf appears to be healthy, but with the mortality rate for beluga calves estimated at 40 to 50 per cent, staff will be watching it closely. Aurora’s only son, Tuvaq, died just before his third birthday in 2005. Her other calf, Qila, gave birth to Aurora’s first granddaughter, Tiqa, last June.
When I read about Qila’s birth on Rebecca’s blog, I wondered about the survival rate for whale births in captivity. I did a little research, and found this list of 33 whale deaths at the Vancouver Aquarium over the past forty-five years. I also found this dodgy site which claimed that “Six out of seven baby whales and dolphins have died at the aquarium, but even the grisly spectacle of a dead baby whale is a huge draw for visitors.”
I contacted the PR department at the Vancouver Aquarium about that second statistic. Despite my repeated efforts to get an answer, they neither confirmed nor denied that figure.
They did provide me with some well-supported evidence that a beluga’s life expectancy in captivity is similar (or better) than that in the wild. I don’t think we should keep large, intelligent mammals in captivity though, so I’m not sure it’s a life worth living.
As an adult, I’ve always been conflicted about the Vancouver Aquarium. On the one hand, I admire their scientific research and educational endeavours. On the other, I find the whales’ continued presence despicable. It’s for this latter reason that, when were planning an event for this fall, we chose not to consider the Aquarium
In any case, I wouldn’t be too optimistic about the long term chances of any whale born in captivity.
I’m rather late getting to this, but I wanted to express my happiness about a successful conclusion to the Save the Great Bear project. Regular readers will recall that we were helping with the online outreach for this effort to ensure that the BC government kept its promises regarding protecting the Great Bear rainforest on BC’s central coast. From the Vancouver Sun:
Agriculture and Lands Minister Ron Cantelon said the Great Bear plan is an example to the world on managing human activity while protecting biodiversity. “The war is over. Now we can move on in a positive way,” he said in an interview.
The 6.4-million-hectare area is roughly the size of Ireland. The plan sets aside 2.1 million hectares of land as parks and conservancies. Over the rest of the land, resource development, specifically logging, is to be based on ecosystem-based management.
Environmentalists say the new logging rules will require streams, grizzly bear habitat and half the old-growth timber to be protected.
I confess to being reasonably naive about the politics and backroom dealings that presumably get these deals done. Most parties seem happy with the outcome, which is, inevitably, a compromise from everybody’s initial position.
We can only accept a sliver of the credit for this result, but it’s one of my proudest moments for Capulet.
It’s never fun when somebody loses their pet, but I was struck by the careful wording on this sign that I spotted in Victoria. He’s not big or fat, he’s heavier set:
Today we drove into Wimberley, Texas for lunch. On the way there, we spotted what appeared to be a freshly killed deer on the side of the road. A group of turkey vultures had begun to have a lunch of their own.
About two hours later we returned on the same road (Wimberley was lovely, incidentally), and I snapped this photo (click for super-sized bird action):
I was surprised that, in the ensuing two hours, they hadn’t made a bigger visible dent in the remains.
When it comes to the outdoors, James is ridiculously capable. A couple of years ago he took me fishing up in Squamish. Well, he went fishing. I floundered around in a freezing river, waving a long graphite stick at the fish who mocked me with their toothy grins. That followed the time we went snorkeling for crabs.
Here’s James’s latest demonstration of woodsy prowess (caution: graphic photos of the inside of a small deer ahead). Boris, Travis and James, among others, discovered a fawn that had frozen to death in Boris’s parents’ backyard on Bowen Island:
In truth, I felt pretty unsure. ‘Doing something’ meant butchering the fawn. I was all for wild game but I didn’t know that everyone at the open house would be as open. And I didn’t have any hunting knives. I had excuses: I had never butchered a deer that wasn’t a fresh kill, I had never butchered a deer, never mind a fawn, in BC, within sight of downtown Vancouver and the birthplace of Greenpeace and all those moral vegetarians.
But, in the end, he went to town and they had a deer feast. I might have even temporarily suspended my no-red-meat habits for a taste of Bowen Island deer.
When I lived in Yaletown, I would frequently see sweater-clad chihuahuas being walked by their Lululemon-clad owners. If it wasn’t the dog days (sorry) of August, these poor beasts would often be shuddering and shivering with the cold (and, no doubt, the threat posed by larger dogs and humans).
As such, it’s always seemed a little cruel to own a chihuahua in Canada. They are, after all, Mexican, and not built for the cold. If your dog frequently needs a sweater to go outside, maybe it’s not well-matched to the climate in which you live.
While in Panama, I happened to see a very content-looking chihuahua, and it sparked an idea.
Julie and I decided we should open a chihuahua reserve somewhere in Central America. We’d stalk the wintry streets of Canadian cities for shivering, be-sweatered chihuahuas. We’d mace the owner, snatch the dog and bring it south to the sunny, humid climes of Ecuador or Panama. There it could romp and breed, sans doggy clothing, with its liberated brethren as it was always meant to. We even devised a bad URL: www.sweaterfreechihuahuas.com.
We’re back in Bocas Town for some internet access and a few days’ change of scene after a week out at Punta Laurel. I just uploaded sixty photos from the trip (here’s a slide show). If I had to pick three favourites, they would be:
Punta Laurel is essentially a series of thatched huts connected by walkways, built around a big rock and above a coral reef. It’s designed for groups of up to about ten people, but we’re the only people here.
It’s a bit like camp. Things are kind of rustic–there’s a generator for lights in the evening and recharging our laptops, a composting toilet and an outdoor rainwater shower. There are simple activities–swimming, snorkeling, reading, sleeping like a teenager. And somebody cooks for us. Two local women come over in a little boat from the nearest island. The food is simple–fish, lobster, shrimp, lots of rice and fresh fruit–but very satisfactory.
The weather here is as changeable as I’ve ever seen anywhere. The sun shines, it rains, the wind whips up, the sun shines, all in the matter of an hour. It’s been mostly bright, with occasional intense showers.
Muchos Flora y Fauna
It’s a joy to be surrounded by so much wildlife. I spotted my first ever moray eel (I mean, aside from the local aquarium) while snorkeling the other day. I was floating about three feet above some coral, and he unfolded out of a crevice. He rose toward me, all freckled and the bright green of an under-ripe tomato.
I’m man enough to admit that I panicked a little. His snout was easily as big as a small terrier’s. There was no doubt about who was the resident and who was the interloper. He stopped after a foot or so, though, no doubt intimidated by my manic thrashing. I’ve returned to his nook on several occasions to observe the eel, but I’ve kept a little more distance.
I’ve seen dozens of other species of fish whose names I don’t know. Big schools of them. I also saw bioluminescent algae for the first time in my life. Little clouds of it floated by one evening, looking rather like (I searched for a more decorous metaphor) irradiated semen.
There are also flocks of seabirds who regularly circle our little island. Pelicans skim over the waves, frigatebirds wheeling overhead, big white egrets fish off the rocks and little terns spend their evenings perched on the dock. We also saw a harpy eagle, Panama’s national bird.
We’re headed to a different, waterborne resort for a couple of days, and then back to Punta Laurel for another five or six days. On Boxing Day it’s back to Bocas Town, then back to Panama City the next day. We’re going to explore Panama’s capital for a few days before it’s on to Manhattan for New Year’s, and back home in the first days of 2009.
