Nature lovers should check out “A Year on the Wild Side”

By Keith and Heather Nicol

    Broiny Penn has written and illustrated a very readable book on how nature unfolds through the

Nature lovers will love this book

seasons in and around Vancouver Island. The book is broken down by month and each month has anywhere from 5 to 10 entries which detail some aspect of this region’s birds, animals and vegetation that is significant. But Broiny Penn doesn’t write in a clinical “bird book” type prose but rather as an offbeat story telling adventure. Along the way you learn about garter snakes, woodpeckers, sea lions, and arbutus trees. Many of her stories have humorous sensual overtones as the titles of some entries suggest- “Sex, Sweat and Salamanders”, “Pacific wrens and the food of love”  and “Barnacles and the battle of the sexes”.  

      Another strong point of the book is the Briony’s colourful full page illustrations which accompany each 3-4 page section. This is a book that you can pick up at any time and read a section or two. For instance, we liked reading a July entry about the moon snail and their elaborate egg casing.  We happened to read about them just before a recent kayak trip to Tree Island near Courtenay where we saw several fine examples of their egg casings on an exceptionally low tide.  We thought some of the most useful sections dealt with topics like various ferns, winter shorebirds, berries and how to tell one type from another.  There is even a section on the plate tectonics that formed Vancouver Island complete with a sketch of Wrangellia colliding with the North American plate roughly 100,000,000 years ago to form Vancouver Island and the adjacent land. If you want to know about the Vancouver Island’s varied and amazing animal and plant life then this book is for you. We fully recommend it either for yourself or as a gift. “A Year on the Wild Side” is published by Touchwood Editions. For more information see:  https://www.touchwoodeditions.com/.

We saw moon snail egg casings on a recent kayak trip to Tree Island near Comox

Learn about Orca and other whales that populate the Salish Sea