Vancouver Island Nature Tours

Recently a friend emailed me a surprising file. It was a PDF file (That’s Adobe Acrobat to some) of an old trail booklet of the Alberni Valley. Greg had kept this booklet, which is really just photocopies of drawn maps and of typed descriptions, for many years. Recently he scanned it and sent it to [...]

Edit 5 August 2008:
This is one of the most popular pages on this blog! So I’m asking you to tell me why you are interested in the Nahmint. And if you went there, were the directions good? Was it what you expected? Write a comment below.
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I have been to the Nahmint Recreation Site a [...]

I have been working for two years to get a tour to see the Vancouver Island Marmot going. Primarily, there was resistance from the British Columbia Ministry of Environment (MoE) because these animals are so rare.However we have reached an agreement that they will address government concerns and the tours will go ahead starting in [...]

It’s Good Friday today. This morning I hiked up to the Alberni Lookout. From Coombs Country Candy on Highway 4, it’s only about a 40-50 minute hike, depending on how fast you go. I’ve been hiking up regularly because it is a good bit of exercise. The weather was cool and foggy. But the [...]

Given my interest in birds, this is something I should have done a long time ago. But over the next few weeks, I am going to change this oversight.
For those who aren’t birders, a site guide is a way to guide a person around a park or public place from the point of view of [...]

As I have said on the Rainbird web page, there are over a hundred hiking trails in the Alberni Valley of various lengths and difficulty. The trouble is that very few of them are mapped - until now that is.Just recently the Alberni Environmental Coalition published the second edition of a trail guide that gives [...]

   
Hi. I just got off the phone with Don Doyle, the Provincial wildlife biologist on the board of the Vancouver Island Marmot Recovery Foundation. And I’m so excited I had to write an entry right away! Don Is a pretty key guy on the board. So his recommendation is very valuable. He says he will recommend [...]

Rainbird’s Mushroom excursions are a growing success! So much so that we put on an extra tour. The tour included an afternoon of picking mushrooms, primarily Chanterelles, followed by a gourmet dinner featuring the mushrooms we had just picked at Batstar Cafe & Picnic.
Although this year has been a poor year for mushrooms [...]

I got a thank you message today from a young couple who went to the Cous Creek estuary with me earlier in the month. I guess they just got back home to Florida. They said they really enjoyed the hike and would be glad to give a testamonial.

Don’t they look great together?
In case you are [...]

On the weekend I went birding with a couple from Widby Island in Puget Sound Washington State. It’s not very often I give tours to people as local as they are. Heck, they live on the American side of the border from Vancouver Island! But they wanted to get away for the weekend and they [...]