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Puffins
are truly at home at sea, where they dive and use their wings
to literally fly underwater |
Robson
Bight Provincial Park, 20 kms south of Telegraph Cove in Johnstone
Strait, provides ocean adventures with a sure thing when it comes
to whale watching. In this case it's actually
killer whale (large dolphins called
orca) watching. Pods of orcas come to this part of Johnstone Strait
each summer to rub on the barnacle-encrusted rocks at Robson Bight.
As the top predator on the inland-water food chain, they are also
attracted by the annual salmon runs that funnel through the strait
beginning in late June.
Perhaps no other bird is so synonymous with the British Columbia coast
as the Tufted Puffin. They are most
often encountered when they are at their breeding colonies, but these
colonies are almost all on islands which are not easily accessible,
on Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands), and on Vancouver Island's
west coast. The largest colony is on Triangle Island, off Cape Scott
on the northern tip of Vancouver Island. Whether they are seen by
millions or not, it is nice to know that they're there.
Between 1969
and 1972, almost one hundred sea otters
were relocated to the waters of Checleset Bay (north of Kyuquot
Sound and south of Brooks Peninsula) from the Aleutian Islands.
This transplant was part of an experiment to replenish a once-thriving
population that had been hunted to the point of extinction on the
west coast of Vancouver Island in the early part of last century.
Sea
otters off the west coast of Vancouver Island |
Checleset's
remoteness, coupled with an abundance of shallow reefs and a good
food source (primarily sea urchins) have brought sea otter numbers
back to a current level of more than 900 animals.
In addition, sea otters have spread out from the 33 000-ha Checleset
Bay Ecological Reserve and have been spotted as far south as
Barkley Sound and north of the rugged Brooks
Peninsula.
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