Island NatureExploring nature on Vancouver Island, British Columbia and beyond

We’ve always liked growing our own food and have four very productive raised beds in the backyard garden. These have been a great source of fresh produce throughout the summer and the kids love to help with the harvesting. The gardens are also a bit of a biodiversity oasis in our little patch of suburbia [...]

I recently read an excellent post by Julia Craves over at Urban Dragon Hunters about the dangers of using images on the internet to identify insects so I’m being more than a little cautious about my identification of this large fly. Here’s what I do know (or at least I think I do). I feel [...]

Time flies when you’re having fun, and one of the things that makes time fly is watching flies. I had a spare hour this week, and on a sunny afternoon decided to check out a purple aster on our back border that was in full fall bloom. This late in the season, anything that is [...]

One of the great things about backyard gardening, especially in an urban/semi-urban setting, is the different kinds of wildlife that turns up. We’ve got four raised beds in our small garden and the flowers and vegetables attract a whole host of insects and birds. The insects that are attracted to the flowers and water sources [...]

We keep an informal backyard bird list and this week a new year bird showed up to investigate our fuchsia out front and our garden in the back. We’ve got lots of flowers in bloom and it seems like this immature Rufous Hummingbird (Selasphorus rufus) was stopping in for a quick feed. The hummingbird dropped [...]

On certain warm, summer nights in Courtenay on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Common Nighthawks (Chordeiles minor) put on a complicated and beautiful display that surpasses that of the annual Snowbird performance at CFB Comox. Last Sunday evening Common Nighthawks were out in numbers, and birders were reporting them feeding over urban areas in both Parksville [...]

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve never been a big fan of cats, probably has something to allergies. My neighbours however do like cats very much, so much so, that they have somewhere between six and a dozen. We’ve never been able to get a conclusive count on these wily felines. Unfortunately, our [...]

It’s been a busy month so it was great to have a bit of downtime this afternoon in the backyard garden enjoying the sun and a cold beer to celebrate the end of the teaching year. Both of the kids were out in the yard and I was nominally on child minding duty when I [...]

We’ve had a small apple tree in our backyard in “downtown” Courtenay for a couple of years now but it has yet to produce blooms. It’s actually a refugee from my mother-in-law’s place in the country where its growth was effectively kept in check by deer browsing. Looks like the little tree is finally feeling [...]

Black Barred Camel-cart Classification: B/1 or possibly A/9 Earlier this week I spotted a cart in an all too common situation. Clearly disturbed by the noise of the near constant traffic of Comox Road this Black Barred Camel-cart was attempting to roll its way towards the quiet serenity of nearby farm fields. While this species [...]