Last Friday, Rosa's school had an in-service day, so Rosa went birding at Point Pleasant Park. She brought the cardboard binoculars she got for Christmas. She spotted a Common Loon trying to swallow a whole crab: Way off the tip of the park, she spied a Common Eider Drake: A Northern Pintal was hanging around First Beach. Notice his blue bill? Here he is again, standing on one leg: A Pintail-Mallard hybrid was resting on the sand: A Red-Breasted Merganser was drying his feathers in the sun...

25 February, 2012

A view of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and parts of Maine and Quebec, taken from the International Space Station. Click the image for a larger version. The bright spot at the left side is Montreal Quebec City;* that on the middle right is Halifax. Other bright spots include (left to right) Bangor, Saint John, Moncton, and Charlottetown. Close inspection reveals Truro, New Glasgow, Antigonish, Port Hawkesbury, and Sydney. The St. Lawrence River appears as a string of lights heading northeast from Montreal, and the Gaspe Peninsula is outlined in light. I believe the aurora borealis accounts for the greenish hue on the horizon. A...

14 February, 2012

Contrarian reader George Gore liked the video if Guillaume Blanchet, The Man Who Lived On His Bike, because: I lived for four months on a bicycle in the fall of 2006 and spring of 2007, riding from Chester to Ciudad Victoria, in Mexico, and then up the Rio Grande valley from Matamoros to Alpine. Gore also shares my non-hostility toward Amazon: In 1961 I was a twenty-one year old college freshman partially supporting myself by working in a bookstore. The store manager was Bobby Berg, who was the best bookseller I have ever encountered, and I shared that opinion with a lot of...

12 February, 2012

  On December 12, Harvey Morash and Michael Gerhartz went diving at Grand Narrows, Cape Breton, where the two great basins of the Bras d'Or Lake* converge amidst the treacherous currents of the Barra Strait. Those currents make the water in this video disturbingly murky, but the fecundity of the sea life—the profusion of urchins, anemones, not to mention perch, lobster, and cod—is something to see. The aerial photo at right shows the two bridges, highway and railway, that span the strait, from Iona on the left to Grand Narrows on the right. * Lake? Lakes? An eternal argument. The Bras d'Or Lake Biosphere Reserve...

20 December, 2011

In an almost perfect illustration of Donham's Law, the New York Times reports this morning that New English fishermen are pooh-poohing calls from fisheries scientists for greater restrictions, or even an outright ban, on cod fishing in the gulf of Maine. The scientists point to new data showing cod stocks in much worse shape than previously thought; the fishermen say there's an abundance of fish. “Fishermen will almost always tell you that, and it’s not that they’re lying,” said Mark Kurlansky, whose 1997 book, “Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World,” documented how Canada’s once-abundant Atlantic cod were fished almost...

11 December, 2011

I'm a friend and admirer of Jamie Baillie from long before he ran for office, but his recent foray into energy policy makes me nervous. Granted, the climate of public (and media) hostility to Nova Scotia Power makes the utility an almost irresistible target for politicians aiming at the premier's office, but Baillie's demand for easing up on renewable energy targets sounds to me like a short-term anaesthetic for long-term pain. The Pictou Bee, an NDP-flavored blog, sees it the same way, calling it Baillie's "unforced error." [O]ddly, Jamie Baillie and his Conservatives have decided that attacking renewable energy is good politics...

22 November, 2011

Earlier this week, various blogs and media outlets reported that Beijing was experiencing frightful levels of air pollution. To document the crisis, China hand James Fallows cited what he called "the indispensable (and highly controversial)" Twitter feed @Beijingair, which produces hourly readings of  fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in Beijing. On Monday, @Beijingair showed readings in excess of 300 µg/m3, contributing to conditions the US EPA characterizes as "hazardous," and warranting "health warnings of emergency conditions." What caught my attention was Fallows's assertion that the @BeijingAir feed is "the only known source of PM 2.5 readings in China." That is astounding: one PM2.5...

04 November, 2011

The Cape Breton Post's Chris Shannon has a thorough and detailed account of Environment Canada's failure to monitor or control rampant siltation from the Sydney Harbor dredging boondoggle project (first reported here). In among the buck-passing and not-my-department quotes lies this gem: The federal environmental screening assessment report is supposed to be posted online. But a check of each of the departments’ websites didn’t turn up the report. A spokesperson for the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency said the screening report couldn’t be found on its agency’s website either since it doesn’t conduct that type of environmental assessment. “It’s really the responsible authorities that are responsible...

19 October, 2011

Reporters attending Parks Canada’s Sable Island announcement this morning at the Halifax Citadel were apparently in stenography mode. Or perhaps they had been instructed to fish for soundbites on more urgent stories, like the confusion around environmental and salvage measures for the grounded bulk carrier MV Miner. Whatever the cause, they came ill-prepared to probe the most contentious issue surrounding plans to make Sable Island a national park: the Harper Government’s impulse to promote private sector tourism development on the island. Environment Minister Jim Prentice touched off a furore in January, 2010, when he first announced plans to make Sable a...

17 October, 2011
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