planted city

Seen around town: Bird houses and trees on False Creek’s Habitat Island

Seen around town: A flock of Canada Geese flying (mostly) in V-formation

Around Town: Granville Street, just south of West Georgia (Downtown)

earlier this week

Public Space:

When they built the urban plaza in the Southeast False Creek neighbourhood (2010 Olympic Village) here in Vancouver they “put a bird on it.” Actually, they put two birds on it, but you can only see one of them in this photo.

I’m a big fan of artist Myfanwy MacLeod’s ‘The Birds’. Every time I’m down there I see people and kids especially reacting to them in such fun and curious ways, as if they are trying to figure out if they are friendly, menacing or something in between. I also like the reminder that they offer that nature is larger than us humans. As for the official explanation of the piece:

The work highlights both the lighter and graver sides of what can happen when a non-native species is introduced to an environment, how the beauty of birds can sometimes mask their threat to biodiversity.

If you’re interested, I’ve got more pics here.

Snapped this Pacific Gull ten storeys up, on the roof of a condo building the other day. Seagulls are one of Vancouver’s signature urban critters. Squawk!

From The CBC:

A new NASA study predicts massive ecological changes for Canada’s Prairies and boreal regions by the year 2100.

Those areas are in “hot spots” highly vulnerable to massive environmental changes this century due to global warming, the study states.

Much of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba is predicted to see major shifts northward of plant and animal species.

“By about 2100, the climate change projections that we have today would suggest that there would be pressure on that grassland so prevalent in [the Canadian Prairies] to move further northward — and at the expense of the forest moving further northward as well,” said NASA climate scientist Duane Walliser, who spoke with CBC News from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Walliser said that all across the globe, whole ecological zones such as deserts and tundra will be on the move because of “unprecedented” warming at a pace faster than at any time in 10,000 years.

But Western Canada will be among the areas hardest hit.

A map of the globe on the NASA study shows much the Prairies in bright red “hot spots” of ecological stress, where 100 per cent of the landscape is predicted to see major changes in plant species.

…

The NASA study says 37 per cent of Earth’s land surface will transform from one major ecosystem zone, or biome, into another, while 49 per cent of land surfaces will see at least some changes in plant species.

Bergengren said some wildlife will not survive these transformations.

“Obviously, it is much easier for plants and animals to migrate or adapt to this level of climatic change over 10,000 years than it is over 100 years,” he said.

Check out the rest of the article here. You may also be interested in the recent study that found Canada’s ’Boreal ducks threatened by climate change’.

(Image credit: NASA; Photo credit: CBC)

I snapped these Canada geese in Port Moody, BC a couple of evenings ago. They may make a mess under foot but they’re certainly majestic in flight.