Tag Archive | Victoria BC

Weekend Expedition 38: Over Victoria

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Uplands Park, a favourite place of mine to take pictures.

This weekend, Catherine  and I came over to Victoria to celebrate my birthday in Victoria with my family. As a present, we went in a flight in a Cessna 172 with my brother, who is a pilot with the Victoria Flying club and a photographer as well. This was Catherine’s first flight in a small plane (although she has been in a helicopter), so we gave her the grand tour of Victoria from the air.

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Checking the fuel for water and debris.

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Victoria on a hazy fall day. This is typical light for this time of year, and you can see the Olympic Mountains across the Juan de Fuca Strait. .

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HMCS Regina (foreground) and HMCS Ottawa (behind) at dock in Esquimalt. They have material laid around them to protect the ocean from fuel spills, but I wonder, given our current government’s stance on oil spills on the coast, why they bother.

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The Gorge Waterway.

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My mom’s house, and where I grew up!

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Clover point, where later in the day we attended a large protest against the pipeline.

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Chain Islets, a good place to see breeding birds and resting seals.

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Island View Beach, from the air.

An overly-cooperative model?

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I found this beautiful gravid female Phidippus johnsoni hanging motionless, upside-down from a grass stem this morning. She had all the hallmarks of envenomation by a spider wasp (Pompilidae). She was unresponsive, had extremely limited movement upon prodding, and was basically dead to the world.  Being such a large animal, it is possible the wasp was unable to drag the spider to her burrow, or perhaps I interrupted while the female wasp was scouting the terrain ahead.  Anyway, I took some photos with this suddenly very easy to work with subject, and then returned her to her stem of grass. Perhaps the wasp will retrieve it, and if not it will make a good meal for someone!

You can see in this shot, there is something not quite right about how she is holding her legs…

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This shows how big the jumper was!