
People & Culture
Renaming places: how Canada is reexamining the map
The history behind the Dundas name change and how Canadians are reckoning with place name changes across the country — from streets to provinces
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Places
Off the northwest tip of Vancouver Island, an isolated speck of “inhospitable” land is home and sanctuary to millions of seabirds
As he approached the fog-shrouded cliffside, photographer Ryan Tidman began to notice specks of black breaking through the low-hanging cloud. Drawing closer, he realized he was seeing a natural wonder — thousands upon thousands of common murres circling the island as they prepared to nest. Though a mere dot in the ocean 45 kilometres off the northern tip of Vancouver Island, Triangle Island is home to more than two million birds. It’s in what’s officially called Anne Vallée (Triangle Island) Ecological Reserve, after a researcher who died there in 1982.
Tidman, who says he has “loved all things in nature” since he was a kid, studied environmental sciences at the University of Guelph and visual communications at the Royal Ontario Museum. Now a photographer documenting Canada’s most iconic animals and landscapes, he has been captivated by Triangle Island since first spotting it in the distance while sailing past on an expedition to the Great Bear Rainforest. “It’s Game of Thrones-esque,” he explains, “truly a surreal place.”
The ecological reserve is off-limits to visitors (only a few researchers are permitted to land each year) so Tidman captured these photos from a catamaran anchored offshore. He visited three times over the last few summers, “parking” for two- or three-week stints to collect footage for a National Geographic documentary for Disney+ about the island’s Steller sea lion rookery. But in his spare time, he focussed on the seabirds — auklets and puffins, guillemots and gulls, cormorants and murres. The island is home to the largest and most diverse seabird colony in B.C. — a noisy and frenetic place where the action takes place in the air, on the land and in the sea.
Follow him on Instagram @ryantidman.
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British Columbia Birding
British Columbia is a magnificent province that has much to offer the naturalist explorer, from wild Pacific coastline to alpine tundra, and from arid desert to lush rainforest and more. This ultimate tour of Canada’s westernmost province could in fact be the ultimate temperate birding and wildlife adventure!
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This story is from the May/June 2022 Issue
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