A common loon snags a green crab at the Halifax waterfront: Let the meal begins. Credit the bird with skilled fishing, and with helping clean up an invasive species. Credit Joshua Barss Donham with the photos....

12 February, 2016

Let's get two things straight. Kirby McVicar was dead wrong to release personal health information, particularly mental health information, about former cabinet minister Andrew Younger. Information and Privacy Commissioner Catherine Tully is dead wrong to propose sweeping expansion of privacy policing in response. The point about McVicar is so obvious it hardly needs stating. Everyone knew it was wrong the second he did it. The fact he made these disclosures in an attempt to save his own skin only compounds the error. But Tully's over-reaching proposals—to install a Chief Privacy Officer, subject every civil servant to special training in privacy protection, and generally ramp up government's already excessive privacy...

11 February, 2016

Yesterday I decried the decision to close most mainland Nova Scotia schools, all mainland universities, and as of 1 pm, when nary a flake was yet falling in Halifax, all Nova Scotia Government offices. The post touched a nerve, and I'll be discussing the issue tonight at 6:30 with Steve Murphy on CTV-Atlantic. I was critical of school boards, Environment Canada, and the media, because all three bear responsibility for our over-reaction to routine storms—or in yesterday's case, storms that have not yet happened. The problem is much broader than storm days however, and the fault goes well beyond those three culprits. We are terrible at making personal decisions about safety and...

09 February, 2016

Here is the map meteorologist Kalin Mitchell used to tell CBC viewers how much wind they could expect during last night's storm: It's full or angry reds, purples, and scary numbers. Wow! The wind's going to be 100 kph in Cape Breton. But Mitchell isn't actually discussing wind speeds, or even maximum wind speeds. His maps shows "maximum wind gusts," the biggest, scariest number he could cite and still claim to be basing his forecast on something real. In a storm, maximum gusts are often 2 to 3 times higher than the actual wind speed. So what actually happened in Nova Scotia at the height of yesterday's storm?  Here's the...

09 February, 2016

Here is a screenshot of all 51 Nova Scotia highway cams as of 2:50 p.m., Monday, February 8, a day on which every school on mainland Nova Scotia west of Antigonish was cancelled: Only four of the 51 cams show any snow cover on the roads they monitor. Three are at the extreme southwest end of the province, where the storm was just getting underway by mid-afternoon; the fourth is in the Cape Breton Highlands. Forty-seven roads were clear; the four with light snow cover posed no problem to professional drivers of vehicles equipped with snow tires. Yet the Annapolis Valley, Chignecto-Central, Halifax, South Shore, and Tri-County regional school boards closed...

08 February, 2016

A yellow-breasted chat that somehow lost its beatings has been feeding on seeds, nuts, and jam set out by birders at Pleasant Hill Cemetery in Lower Sackville. (Photo: Joshua Barss Donham. Click to view a larger image.) The chat is North America's largest woods warbler, normally a rare summer visitor to Nova Scotia. Its usual summer range extends only as far north as southern New York state. This time of year, it should be 4,000 kms. to the southwest of Halifax, in Mexico or Central America. Wikipedia describes the chat as "a shy, skulking...

06 February, 2016

One of the many counterintuitive facts about Sydney's notorious Tar Ponds is that, in their final years, the ponds were a haven for wildlife, especially shore birds and waterfowl. Several factors made this possible. The ponds were fenced to keep people out, and keeping people out is a boon to wildlife. Until the mid-oughts mid-aughts, the ponds served as dumping ground for much of Sydney's sanitary sewage. A profusion of lush shrubs, marsh plants, and wild flowers around the ponds' edges attested to the copious influx of nutrients. While the pond sediments contained a huge volume of moderately contaminated industrial waste, the toxins they contained were mostly not water soluble. Today,...

05 February, 2016

This is a photo of the al-Kindi hospital in Aleppo, Syria, taken in 2012: Here is the same hospital photographed in 2013: The Guardian has published a series of before-and-after photos showing the toll war has taken on the old cities of Syria. Go have a look. Here is the Old Souk market in Aleppo, which Wikipedia describes as, "the largest covered historic market in the world, with an approximate length of 13 kilometres," photographed in 2007. Here's the Old Souk in 2013: We need to keep these photos in mind as we consider Canada's and Nova Scotia's role in responding to the Syrian refugee crisis. There's more. Here's a...

05 February, 2016
Show more
Loading...