The locavarian on a couch-a-tik

I began training at the Churchill Regional Health Authority (aka the town’s hospital) as a “casual”, basically a back-up for any health care aides, ultrasound clerks, or home care services workers who cannot make it into work. Instead of being behind the wheel of a bus, or bundled with many layers of down and fleece on a snowmobile, I was clad in scrubs, striding up and down fluorescent halls. My time at the hospital was short, yet intense. I learned a great deal about clerical work, the workings of a northern ultrasound clinic, and of course, caring for our sick and elderly. It was a valuable lesson to me, how to keep a strong face in the presence of nasty substances, particularly those emitted from a human. Now, I won’t go into the repugnant details, but be sure to give extra credit and consideration to the nurses and health care aides who cross your path, whether now or later on in life. It is sometimes only they who see the most intimate and embarrassing details of one’s physiology.

A fun social activity that I enjoyed doing this winter were poker derbies. These are done by snowmobile, or in my case in part, a four-wheeler with snow-tracks on it. Essentially, people man outposts, with bonfires to stay warm if it’s outdoors (as opposed to a cabin). These are supplemented with a deck of cards, and often with hotdogs and/or smokies, various snacks, tea, and of course beer. For one, we refurbished a komatik with a loveseat, a chair, a small coffee table, and an ashtray. This, we conveniently re-named the “couch-a-tik”, which acted like an awesome fancy plough as it barreled down the narrow paths, with sheets of slush flying up and onto the contraption, which made traveling on it a bit wet, to say the least.

As spring brought warmer weather, meaning windchills that were no longer staying around -30 and below, the birds began to migrate back and through Churchill. The most celebrated of them being the Canada Goose. This spring, I witnessed the whole process of attaining a water fowl meal (goose), from the hunting to the lengthy process of plucking, gutting and the removal of unnecessary appendages, then of course comes the seasoning and roasting… the rest you can imagine was similar to that of Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners… mmm, mmm. I just recently read an article in a magazine called Up Here, that coined the term “locavarian”, meaning one who eats local foods. I think that has applied to me; with the delicious hormone-free wild game of Canada’s North, to the organic strawberries and raspberries from Nova Scotia’s fields.

For the love of the Earth

After the Earth Watch teams left, things were quieter at the Churchill Northern Studies Centre. After working with the teams and helping to maintain the other ongoing research (mercury rain collector, radio waves analysis, geomagnetic forces) for other institutions, the three of us science ladies (Carley, Lee Ann and I) from the Centre took a trip to York Factory National Historic Site, along with Leonard and Rodney, who were there as Parks Canada staff. We hopped on the train for a 12hr + train ride to Gillam, the next stop before Churchill going North on the rail line. It was a long rickety ride thanks to permafrost and undermaintained tracks, but the company I was with made it worthwhile. We spent the night at the only open motel in Gillam, which had the only restaurant in Gillam as well. Turns out that they closed the motel restaurant the night we were there, but thanks to the helicopter pilots we were flying with the next day, they invited us to their staffhouse for a bbq. A quick run to the grocery store and liquor mart made it into a fun little evening out.

After an early rise the next day, which happened to be my birthday, we discovered that the Gillam motel restaurant was still closed yet. With no helicopter pilots to the rescue, we broke into the coolers we had packed for our trip and had a feast of peanut butter and jam on bread. A 1hr helicopter flight brought us to our destination of the old Hudson Bay Company post called York Factory, now a National Historic Site. Us girls from the CNSC sampled snow for the better part of the afternoon before relaxing in the staffhouse. I was pleasantly surprised that evening with a sexy hubba hubba chocolate man-cake, fit with a banana, which I will leave to your dirty imaginations ;) While we were celebrating, the rest of the world, including my mom were lighting candles in honour of Earth Day – pretty cool, eh? Part of the York Factory historic buildings include the Depot, a big 2-story square-donut shaped building, with a lead roof. Inside, it is filled with artifacts, and reputed to be haunted (we checked at midnight, but as I expected, there was no evidence of ghosts).

After three sunny days with brilliant blue skies wit helicopters flying back and forth, and after hundreds of photos taken with my new Nikon D60 (thank-you mom :), we flew by chopper back towards Gillam, and into a snowstorm, go figure! By then, the Gillam restaurant was open, and we were able to have a greasy meal, and hung-out in the motel until the train came late at night, back to Churchill.

I had a few more days of work at the CNSC, but our trip to York Factory was indeed a grand finale to my seasonal contract with them.

The Great Big Whites

I met my mom and Brian in Kelowna, BC to ski 4 wonderful days at the Big White mountain resort in early February. It was a bit of a trek to get there: flight from Churchill to Winnipeg, overnight stay, flight to Vancouver to Kelowna, but I made it with all my gear, although one bag was on the next flight behind me from Vancouver because it had been accidentally unloaded by airport staff. My mom and brother arrived not long after I received my second bag. We were able to visit some friends who were working at the Lake Okanagan resort – Kelowna oddly enough is becoming the new Burlington, with the masses of people that I grew up with, who have now moved out West, particularly to this city.

At the resort, we had a lovely condo with all the amenities, slope-side. However, slope-side doesn’t mean that it’s down-ward sloping, as we huffed and puffed (usually twice a day) to ski-skate uphill through a tunnel, along a short path to the main hill that took us to the first lift. The good news was that coming back, it was all downhill. We were fortunate that there was a snow storm well-enough in advance of our arrival that the airport and roads were open and cleared, but the hill was covered in a fresh powder. Blue skies and warm temperatures for three days were bliss on the slopes. The fourth day was cloudy and snowy, but beggars can’t be choosers – we saw what Big White got its name from (a blanket of fog that covers the mountain). Coincidentally, some folks from the Cedar Springs Ski Club in Ontario were visiting friends and skiing while we were there, and one day unexpectedly bumped into them at the summit of the mountain. We joined them that evening for dinner at one of the mountainside restaurants, famous for its “shotgun coffee.” With lavish preparations, and us expecting a big bang, it was instead a silent stream of ignited booze trickling down the barrel of an old shotgun into our beverages.

I stayed a few days in Burlington after our ski holiday, madly sorting, shopping and going to appointments, before returning to the great white North. To my surprise, we had a new inhabitant of our house – a hedgehog! Leonard had brought this creature back from Winnipeg (with a stop in Gillam for a hockey tournament). Sure enough, it started escaping from its cage at night, and bee-lining for our bedroom. Our Houdini rodent continued to escape despite taping up the sides of the cage and the addition of plexiglass. That said, this nameless little animal has informally been given the name, “little bastard.”


Shortly after my return, I started as a research assistant for the Churchill Northern Studies Centre, a research base 20-something km outside of town (formerly a rocket range run by the military). My job included working closely with Earth Watch teams, which consist of individuals from all over the world. I maintained the snow machines, and pulled team members behind me on a bone-jarring ride, with a komatik. Despite attempts to mitigate the pounding on snowdrift formations called zastrugi, passengers still feel as though they are about to rupture a disc. With many laughs and layers, we sampled snow in many different locations, looking at layers, density, depth, crystal types, and more. Samples by Adirondack snow core were taken back to the lab for investigating pH, conductivity and the like. Under the watch of a PhD candidate, teams sampled the branchlets of (black spruce) trees that spanned from the tundra to the forest. With over six dozen branchlets and their fragile needles, it took our team of 15 quite a bit of effort to get them measured, recorded, waxed, weighed, and into their appropriate slots for site/location/height, with some close calls along the way. Each day, all of these samples are weighed yet again, to measure the rate of moisture loss in the needles. Luckily, that isn’t my task, but for those unfortunate few who stay behind each morning to do it - I’m sure they’re dreaming numbers…

Post Polar Bear Season

It was a relief after bear season for Churchill to return its quiet Northern existence. I moved out of the North Star staffhouse and into a cozy 2-bedroom house with Leonard. With no obligations, I spent the next two weeks doing absolutely nothing: sleeping, watching HOUSE on DVD, taking Kona for walks and cracking down on her house manners. She managed to rapidly learn a few cute tricks like roll-over, spin in a circle, and shake a paw… but definitely not “come” or “stay” while she was outside. The little brat escaped over a snowdrift against the fence in our backyard a few times and gallivanted around town with the neighbourhood dogs on several occasions before we figured out what she was doing!
In no time, Christmas-time was approaching. Leonard and I took a trip to the old Dene village, which consists of the concrete bases of many small establishments within a boreal forest setting. Churchill had a fairly heavy snowfall, and the coniferous trees were weighted down by snow. With this in mind, we agreed to get a tamarack tree, a species that loses its needles for the winter. After finding the right tree, we tossed in the bed of the truck we had borrowed, and carried on back to town. It didn’t take long for us to lose the tree, as we hadn’t strapped it down at all… and had been driving for a ways before we realized it was gone! Luckily, Leonard had a makeshift belt made out of string, which he took off in order to tie down the tree. It had to be adjusted once or twice again before we made it back to town, only 20 km or so from where we were! Having chosen a tamarack tree, we hadn’t realized that it would look rather scraggly in the context of our living room. The bare branches and lack of green made it look like it was out of a Charlie Brown Christmas cartoon, or the Nightmare Before Christmas movie, which was rather funny.

New Year’s Eve, Leonard and I went out to Goose Creek, a cottage subdivision, not far from the old Dene village. We hung out by a bonfire with some friends for a few hours, had some beers and some good laughs. A few fireworks were set off, accompanied by nature’s own light show, the aurora borealis. We carried on home not long after midnight, and after picking up Kona at home, continued to a house party in town.
I had bought myself a yellow Ski-Doo skandic, a hefty machine. One particularly beautiful day in January, I took Kona for a long run with the ski-doo, up and down town. On our way back, I stopped in at Home Hardware, her favorite spot, because the clerks behind the counter always gave her TLC and cookies! I could never walk past the store without her leash on, because whether or not it was closed, she would beeline to the door and wait to be let in for her treat. After I got home that day, we romped a bit in the snow, and while shoveling off my steps, she bounded off to visit her neighborhood canine friends. Unfortunately, after that wonderful day, it was the last time I saw Kona alive. Sadly, she was run over not long after, down the street and around the corner from our place. We cremated her later that week, and bid her a fond farewell.

Polar bear season

Bears typically come onto land in June, which is when the Hudson Bay has broken up considerably. Once on land, they are fattened up from eating seals and fish all winter and tend to lie low for the summer. However, once fall rolls around, the bears’ food reserves are getting low, and it is not easy for them to hunt on land, as they are more of a marine mammal than anything. This is when they migrate to Cape Churchill from their disembarking points (wherever they chose to leave the ice floes as they melt in the spring – they stay on the ice, to hunt seals for as long as they can). Cape Churchill is a piece of land geographically set-up in such a way that the ice forms here before anywhere else in the vicinity. The polar bears are eager to get back onto the ice and start hunting again. Cape Churchill is not far from the town of Churchill, so it is not surprising that all the enticing smells coming from town result in curious bears and a high density of these white furry visitors as well!
I returned to Churchill in October to work for North Star Tours as a bus tour guide and shuttle driver for “bear season”, which essentially runs from early October to late-November. It was a short work-term, but an extremely busy one! I worked literally 24-7, on-call. It was tiring, but exciting. Driving a little white mini-bus, I saw ample wildlife and met lots of interesting tourists from all over the world.
Essentially, my job was working alongside tour organizers such as Natural Habitat and Frontiers North, both which required shuttles to their tundra vehicles: Great White Bear and Tundra Buggy Tours, respectively. I gave these groups a tour of the town and area, as well as individual travelers (not part of a formal tour group). Churchill has a lot going for it, above and beyond the bears, which is I elaborated on to a point on my tours. I learned a lot from the questions people asked me, my colleagues who have worked for North Star for several years, and from personal observation. Nearly all the people were wonderfully friendly and excited to be in Churchill, which was encouraging for me and gave me the extra push for the last week or two of my high-energy job. It took some determined driving in some treacherous conditions (near zero visibility, ice and snow drifts), getting stuck a few times along the way… but I made it through in one piece!
On a particularly snowy afternoon in early November, I was digging my bus out of a snow drift when I made an unexpected find: a little black puppy in the middle of the road! Seeing she was shivering and so young, I gathered her up in my arms (with her almost getting hit by a car in the meantime), and brought her into the staffhouse I was sharing with three roommates. We gave her the remainder of a caribou bone, which she attacked with fervor. Not sure what to do with this hungry black mutt, I found out later on that day that she was from a litter born under a house, not far from where I was living. Seeing a potential bleak future for this sweet creature, I decided to keep her, and with help from a roommate, named her Kona; Cree for “lots of snow.”
Kona proceeded to accompany for the rest of bear season on some of my shuttles. She was very popular among the people who traveled with us, but preferred to curl up on my lap and sleep while I drove to our destination. She was excellent company while waiting some cold nights for a Great White Bear buggy to return from its evening tour, and an angel with everyone who wanted to kiss and ruffle her soft puppy coat. People looked forward to seeing Kona and I, their dynamic driver and companion!
She may have been well-behaved on the bus, but she certainly was trouble in the house! Aside from the usual puppy behaviour of crying, chewing things and having accidents, she thought it humorous to snatch each of my roommates’ underwear on several occasions and run downstairs for all to see! She also had a tendency of taking off upstairs and leaving a mortifying steaming “surprise” for each of them in their rooms, before I knew what was happening. She also managed to find a squeeze bottle of purple paint, which she squirted all over our carpet in the middle of the living room… Needless to say, everybody learned to keep their doors shut while Kona was loose in the house!

Keji 2008: Christmas in July

Keji has not only the well put-together species at risk program that I am a part of, but also an extensive interpretive schedule. Every day and evening there are different interpretive events – the evening programs especially, are quite entertaining (I’ve made a point of going to all of them).
On July 25th, we had a Christmas in July bbq/potluck at our place… or at least we tried to! Only two people showed up, and not for long, so the three of us headed over to the evening program that night (which my supervisor and another interpreter were in)… to make the evening a bit more interesting, I dressed up as an elf, complete with pointy paper ears, a toque, tights and bright red crocs, and paid a surprise visit to them on stage (I popped up in front of the crowd and wished the two of them a happy Christmas in July, and gave them burgers!)
The park had its 39th Birthday on August 2nd, a day full of birthday festivities. I ran one station (of four) as part of a special walk in honour of the birthday, where two team members (one blindfolded) find a tree in the forest, which was fun to watch. How it worked: the blindfolded person was led by the other team member to a tree in the forest, the person feels the tree and is led back to the starting point, the blindfold is removed and that person (without help) has to find the tree they were led to, based on touch. That evening, I took part in a species at risk play on the beach: Campsite Crime Scene Investigation (CCSI). My role was minimal, but very important because Bertha the shy Black Bear (me) came forward at the last minute to reveal the sneaky condo developer who crushed the piping plover eggs. It was a riot to watch and take part in!
Lately, the conditions have been favourable for snakes, and I’ve caught a couple of Eastern Ribbon Snakes, a Threatened species. These are black, with three yellow stripes down their back, and spend a lot of their time on the water’s edge or in the water. The snakes themselves are not very big (about the width of your index finger, with even smaller heads), and are very tricky to find and catch (cryptic). There’s only estimated to be about a hundred of them in the main area of the park, called Grafton Lake. Snakes, having no arms or legs are very difficult to permanently mark. The least invasive way to mark these ones has been to clip certain scales on their bellies to identify individuals, the codes only lasting for about a year or two (depending on the frequency that the snake sheds), which makes population estimates even more difficult. There’s so little known about this species, that everything we are collecting from the habitat they live in, to individual characteristics contribute to a greater understanding of these animals and how to better protect them.
Another snake related project that I am helping with is using coverboards. These are squares of varying material that have been placed in various areas where snakes have been known to inhabit. Not much luck yet, but we’ve been experimenting with plywood, metal, shingles, landscape fabric, and soon, cotton t-shirts. It’s being done for an undergrad thesis project, to see if snakes prefer a certain type of cover, in what kind of habitats, what species use them and in what temperature range. Data collection is the most important thing for all of the research that gets done… so lots of writing on data cards, pictures and measurements need to be done (even if we don’t find anything). What we may not find useful now, might be useful one day, for another project in the future.

Keji 2008: Sponge Bobbie Squarejacket

June has come and gone, and interpretive programs are now in full-swing! June was a busy month with preparations for summer interpretive programs and Blanding’s turtles were nesting. These turtles are really neat in that once the females mature, they continue to go back to the same site to nest year after year. Volunteers and staff go out nightly for the month, and if a turtle is sighted and lays her eggs, the nest is protected from predators with an enclosure. Hatchlings will come out in the fall, and researchers will monitor the nests once again so that they can mark and release them. Watching the Blanding’s turtles nest was a unique experience. The turtles go into a trance once they start laying their eggs, and become oblivious to all else around them. They lay typically around 10 eggs, and the whole process takes a few hours. First, she digs a hole, then lays her eggs (each time she lays one, her head juts way out, then back into her shell to squeeze the egg out), then she covers the eggs and conceals the nest so that it is practically indistinguishable from the surrounding surface. Afterwards, people sit around the campfire with a beer and snacks, which sometimes happens at a pretty late hour depending on when the turtles have finished nesting for the night.
I took a canoe training course – a level B certification is necessary for doing interpretive paddles. It was a fun day of practicing different strokes and movements in the canoe. The best part was the canoe rescue and in-water portion of the course. If a canoe is submerged, one of the methods to get it to shore is to get in it, full of water, and paddle back, which was a lot of fun! Only, I didn’t realize how large my PFD was, and after I jumped out of the canoe, the back part went right up over my head so that from behind, I looked like a relative of Sponge Bob… Sponge Bobbi Squarejacket!
My first Snake n’ Bake, Shell Raisers and Pirates of the Kejimkujik went smoothly, and the rest of the summer is looking promising. Snake n’ Bake is a hike on snakes of Nova Scotia, with an emphasis on the threatened ribbon snake. Shell Raisers is a paddle on turtles of Keji, with a focus on Blanding’s turtle research, and finally Pirates is a kids paddle (we sing YO HO, YO HO, A PIRATES LIFE FOR ME as loud as we can, or at least we try to get the kids to sing along!)
I’ve been out with researchers, learning more about their turtle and ribbon snake research. There was one day I went for a paddle with a turtle researcher doing GPS logging. We had gone up a brook and reached a point where logs were blocking our progress. I hopped out, and when it was time to get back in… I ended up teetering and falling into the brook – well, it was refreshing anyhow!
Recently, we had a big event at Keji – Blanding’s turtle release day! With over 200 people, the media and important people from all over, I ended up being part of the camera and bbq crew. I swear, I’ve never cooked so many burgers or hotdogs in my life! I was throwing hamburgers on the grill like Frisbees and yelling out “who wants hot dogs!!” to the mile-long line up for food! Turns out most people prefer hamburgers… The event was to celebrate the release of 34 Blanding’s who had been captively reared for the last 2 years (given lots of food and warmth to increase their growth and consequently their survival rates). We’ll be keeping track of their progress with radio transmitters over the summer.
I had a lovely weekend with my aunt Diane – we started off at old friends, the Kidson’s organic farm in Centreville, stayed overnight on their refurbished sailboat in the Dartmouth harbor right by the ferry terminal, toured Halifax, Peggy’s Cove and Hubbards. We visited my grandfather’s grave, shopped at Mountain Equipment Co-op and the market, sat at cafés sipping lattes, drove along the coast to Hubbards, strolled around Peggy’s Cove, and rode the ferry across the harbor with a gorgeous sunset, it was quite the weekend!