July 2024
A few trips to Victoria
It's summer and my kids are lucky enough to
spend the week with my parents - all I have to do is drop them off
and pick them up in Victoria. Since I'm in Victoria, I like
to stop in at some of my favorite places.
Outerbridge Park
Outerbridge Park is a small (5 acre)
community park just down the road from my parents house. The
kids like to sleep in at Grandma's house, but I find sleeping in
hard. I sometimes go for a walk in the morning before the
kids get up. The garden is an interesting mix - it is full
of garden store plants, but it's right at the edge of a real
forest so there are native oak trees and other native plants close
by.
The park has several large freshwater
features which brings insects. Insects bring birds.
The wide walkways bring lots of dog walkers.
This year I wanted to take more photos of
butterflies which are generally an early summer animal. I
spotted a Lorquins Admiral stopping for drinks, but sadly this is
one of my most photographed butterflies (probably because it's
very patient).
This part of Vancouver Island is now saturated with the invasive
European Wall Lizards. These lizards are everywhere (I
spotted several at Uplands park) and I really wonder what it is
that they are eating to keep such a large population alive.
Outerbridge has a number of stones perfect for sunning which makes
the lizards easy to spot.
There is a pond where I once saw a Western
Painted Turtle. Every time I walk by that pond, I look again
for the turtle but sadly I haven't seen it again.
After dinner walk
We like to keep our eye on the tides as
Cordova Bay does have a nice sand bank if the tide is low
enough. The tide pools had a lot of fish in them. For
the first time I spotted lots of tiny gunnels swimming in the
water.
Uplands Park
Somehow Uplands became on of my favorite parks in Victoria. In
the spring Uplands park has amazing flowers. Apparently it's
also a decent place to spot butterflies. It was worth a drive
out.
The park has changed a lot from
spring - the grasses are taller and dried.
But within
minutes, I found new things to me. This is wild Garlic (I had
no idea) - it's invasive and sadly quite common in the grassy areas.
I found some ochids growing in the grass that turned out to be a new
variety of Orchids to me. BC surprises me - this is my 9th
Orchid species in BC and 12th species for Canada. I don't
associate Canada as a huge reservoir of Orchid species and I'm
really not trying that hard to find them.
I spotted a Brown Creeper on an Oak tree which was patient while I
got out my long lenses.
At first my butterfly quest didn't get very well - my best find was
a European Skipper.
But I then I found an amazing moth - a Western Sheep Moth hanging
out in full view. This is a colourful insect with lovely bushy
antenna.
This insect was very patient, I don't think it was because of the
air temperature. Apparently these are pretty common insects,
but it was the first time I had ever seen one.
Victoria Breakwater
My parents were off to a wedding this afternoon so we had to do our
own activities. We took the kids shopping (they needed
more summer clothes) and then we went to the breakwater so stretch
our legs. We spotted a seal as soon as we arrived and the high
vantage point gives you a good view of the fish diving for
cover as the seal swims by.
On our walk back we spotted a river otter pulling up and eating
fish. The river otter had no problem finding prey so I can
imagine there will be a happy family here soon.
Dominion Astrophysical Observatory
In the summer the Dominion Astrophysical
Observatory has public star party programs where you sit under the
dome and see what the telescope sees on the big screen. Some
Saturdays they also have a guest speaker. This week they had
Andrew Weaver speak about his time in politics and climate
science. We booked tickets online
The Andrew Weaver talk went over really well - it was in two
parts. The second part got some hecklers (we can't build
enough electric cars fast enough) which was the first time my kids
had seen anyone really push back on the "we need to change to
prevent climate change". The talk did raise a few good points
- Climate change is a partisan issue in North America, but not so
much in Europe and much of the plant is really reducing climate
pollution. The BC NDP didn't come out of the presentation
looking too good, but neither did the Green party. Our next
election will be interesting.
The kids didn't stay for much of the telescope period. The
speakers audio wasn't working well and the kids couldn't hear enough
to understand what was happening. Hopefully another less well
attended event will be do better for them.
Celebration of Light - Saturday, Portugal
The Celebration of Light is earlier this year - starting about two
weeks before the BC long weekend. The kids wanted to see the
fireworks from the bridge so we made our usual pilgrimage.
Portugal did really well - with not very windy and not very dark
conditions. They had a lot of orange fireworks and had the
"Portugal Flag" type firework that was half red, half green with a
yellow center burst inside.
Celebration of Light - Wednesday, Malaysia
I love fireworks, but at a certain point, they are all the
same. You can liven that up by changing the background, but
that is also limited as the shows are designed to be seen from a
specific beach. I discovered that a timelapse makes a good
image of the event and as an added bonus there is lots of frames
you can review to see if you happened to get a lucky composition
worth repeating.
The Malaysia show really was spectacular. Seeing it from a
downtown beach is always going to be great because the sound is so
much closer, but seeing it right on the beach is amazing.
I inadvertently photographed some abstract shots. While
shooting the time lapse I pivoted the camera to get other shots
and the tripod made for nice trails behind the fireworks.
I did take some photos of the crowd. I was on the rocks near
the Inukshun as you can see both the shore and you are really
close to the small boats. Just to make it exciting, the
ropes on the human powered boats collapsed just before the
fireworks started and the wind pushed everyone on shore.
Sadly, sitting in the wind for 4 hours did take it's toll - I was
sick on Friday.
Tags: fireworks(20), Uplands Park(8), invasive(6), Outerbridge Park(5), Vancouver(5), abstract(3)
People: Nara(3), Claira(3), Helen(2), Janet(1)
From: John Harvey Photo > Blogs for 2024 to 2005 > July 2024
Last Modified Monday, July 29th, 2024 at 23:00:06 Edit
Copyright and Contact Information.
