Doting mates, coddling parents and a touch of tough love; the animal kingdom has a lot to teach us about rearing young.

As a wildlife photographer for 14 years, I’ve had the chance to see these parents in action, and feel the loss of young left to fend for themselves. 

I’ve spied a Cooper’s hawk, watching closely as its parents hunt, so it can one day feed its own family. I’ve seen an eagle drop a fish into a river for an eaglet, when their own angling skills weren’t yet up to snuff.

Perhaps the most relatable scene was a worn out male fox, taking an afternoon nap in the grass, as his kits rough-housed nearby.

From the fields, rivers and skies of Ontario, here are some of my favourite family portraits.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

It’s a windy night and unusually warm for October, as visitors gather at the Prince Edward Point Bird Observatory in Milford, Ont., for the “Starry Nights with Saw-whets” event. One barred owl was caught early in the evening, before any of the participants arrived, and is being kept in an owl carrier for closer observation later in the night. But now, word is getting around: it’s probably too warm to see any saw-whet owls, a disappointment to the attendees who have come to see them up-close and learn about nighttime migration monitoring. “South wind,” station manager Ashley Jensen mutters as she checks her phone for radar weather updates. It’s not the right kind of wind current for the migrating owls that are making their way from the north. 

At the observatory, volunteers gather for bird banding, a scientific technique in which a small, uniquely numbered metal ring is attached to a bird’s leg to track movement, migration routes and lifespan. Jensen is the bander-in-chief, while another bander, Ketha Gillespie, has donned a felt owl suit for the public event. Other visitors are humming with excitement despite the unpromising weather.

Prepared with thermoses and blankets, they gather in front of the banding station as Mira Furgoch, the observatory’s vice-president, gives a presentation about the owls and the station’s conservation efforts using a television that will also show live footage of the birds being handled. That is, if any are found. 

Bird-banding stations like Prince Edward Point collect data and conserve natural spaces that are invaluable habitats. They respond to factors affecting avian populations like disease, climate change, birth rates and more, while engaging the public in the natural world and promoting conservation. As of July 2025, the North American Bird Banding Program database includes 85 million banding records and 5.5 million encounters with banded birds. That includes both encounters reported by the public and recaptures reported by bird banders. 

Unlike people, birds cross borders freely, and the program relies on migration data collected and shared by both Canada and the United States. But the stability of American bird-banding efforts is at risk. The 2026 U.S. federal budget proposes eliminating the Ecosystems Mission Area, the parent agency overseeing scientific bird-banding efforts.

The possibility of disruption to scientific efforts in Canada as a result of what’s happening in the United States is real, and it is causing anxiety among some Canadian banding stations. If there were to be a shutdown on the U.S. side, Matthew Fuirst from Birds Canada explains that it would affect the collection of data that promotes conservation efforts. “If there was no U.S. bird-banding program, Canada would lose a crucial part of North America’s migratory bird science. It would really hinder our data availability, past and future, for population estimates, habitat protection and hunting regulations,” Fuirst says.

Despite these looming threats, the mood among the group waiting for owls at the Prince Edward Point observatory is peaceful. 

Engaging the public

Under the stars in Prince Edward Point, an audio lure designed to draw in saw-whet owls plays on repeat into the night. To everyone’s delight, one owl is caught before the event ends. A member of the public symbolically adopts the owl, makes a donation to the observatory and spends a few extra moments with it before it is released into the night.

Owl bander Gillespie, who also runs a youth ornithology program that introduces bird observation and banding to school-age children and teens, began her volunteer journey with a casual interest in birds. “I didn’t know a huge amount when I started here. I just came as a volunteer one day and was like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s so cool,’ and I saw birds I didn’t know.” From there, she started volunteering and “put my mind to learning.”

She also sees banding as a way to promote conservation, and to enrich the lives of people who live near the bird observatory but might not know about it. This reflects a public engagement challenge for many observatories: their remote locations. In the Prince Edward observatory area of Ontario’s Prince Edward County, tourism and wineries play a big part in the local economy. Gillespie sees an opportunity to expose the migrant workers who labour in these industries to bird banding, giving labourers the chance to see new birds as well as birds they may already be familiar with from their home countries. 

There have been changes to improve accessibility at the Prince Edward Point Bird Observatory, including the addition of walking canes and foldable seats to accommodate mobility needs, and a taxidermied owl display offering a tactile way to interact with bird bodies for visitors who might have limited vision. 

Some banders can recall a negative experience with the public, owing to an unfavourable perception of bird banding that is usually cleared up with education and an explanation of the process. Birds waiting in nets can look alarming to someone unfamiliar with banding, which is why net lanes at bird-banding stations are closed to the public. “They may try to remove or cut the birds from the net if they don’t understand what’s going on,” Jensen says, which adds an extra layer of stress for the bird. 

“Once people know what you’re doing and get to see birds up close, or even get a chance to hold a bird and let it go, then they’re really usually pretty good with it.”

A day of banding

On a fall day at the Bruce Peninsula Bird Observatory in Lion’s Head, Ont., as a beaver swims across the bay, three bird banders take note of bird migration patterns from their temporary home in Wingfield Cottage.

It’s not easy to get here. The location is remote and currently not open to the public, only accessible by a closed unpaved road. But the cabin, perched on the water and surrounded by trees peppered with colourful autumn leaves, is the perfect pit stop for migrating birds, and the banders who stay on-site can expect to interact with a variety of species each season. This is just one of the stations that bring people together to monitor migrating birds in the fall and spring, deepening their knowledge of the natural world. 

The banders at Bruce Peninsula wake up before sunrise, put up the mist nets and wait for birds to fly into them. Weaving through well-trodden but narrow forest trails, they check to see if any birds have been caught before carefully extracting them, placing them in a small cloth bag and carrying the birds back to a small shed for processing. 

During processing, the bird is identified and its data recorded: species, weight, wing-span, age and sex (where possible) and the date and location of capture. To determine the amount of fat the bird is carrying, banders blow lightly on its chest to separate the feathers for observation. Lastly, a metal band is attached to the bird’s leg before it’s released to continue its migration. 

In between net checks, banders cast a trained eye for birds. A small shuffle in a faraway bush might catch everyone’s attention: in moments, they’ve identified a bird that an untrained eye may not even see. “Junco.” “Hermit thrush.” They peer through binoculars.

The banders also take census on observation days: a walkthrough at the start and end of the day, slowly and attentively, identifying as many birds as they can. 

Bruce Peninsula’s bander-in-charge and station scientist, Stéphane Menu, has been doing this for nearly 20 years. His colleagues Michaela Parks and Catherine Lee-Zuck bring their own set of skills: Parks is also a photographer who donates her work to the organization, and Lee-Zuck is an ornithologist who has been banding for three years. They share the work of observing, documenting and banding birds during the fall migration season.  

Menu describes the importance of the information being gathered: “We provide a lot of data that we think is very useful for not just general knowledge, but also for the government to make management decisions on the cheap.” 

Much of the bird-banding labour is done by volunteers, who may receive a small daily food stipend like they do at the Bruce Peninsula Bird Observatory. In more remote areas, some locations offer accommodations, but banding stations in more urban areas allow for volunteers to come and go for their shifts. During my visit to Bruce Peninsula, locals come by the banding station to offer their help on a stonemasonry repair that needs to be done. It’s all in the spirit of collaboration.

The banders’ cabin is full of bird reference books and sunlight. There’s a large stone fireplace in the living room, a big open kitchen where Menu makes pancakes between net checks, and a couple cozy rooms — including one with bunk beds — that give the place an atmosphere of bird summer camp. Parks shows me some of the nature photography she has made during her stay at the observatory. Later, Menu describes the wildlife: “We have black bears, we have rattlesnakes, we have beavers here on a daily basis. You can see otters. I feel very privileged to be here.” 

Even though she’s sharing a space with her fellow banders, Lee-Zuck describes the period at the end of the banding day as her “me time.” Looking out over the bright blue bay in the sunshine, it makes sense.

“Birds don’t see borders”

Some Ontario station managers and banders are concerned about the political instability in the United States and its potential impact on cross-border collaborations. “It would be super unfortunate not to have that level of connection, getting band returns and sharing information back and forth with our American colleagues would be really unfortunate,” Jensen, the station manager at the Prince Edward Point observatory, says. 

Matt Fuirst of Birds Canada explains what such a loss would mean. “If there was no U.S. bird-banding program,” he says, “Canada would lose a crucial part of North America’s migratory bird science.” It would hinder data availability, population estimates, habitat protection and hunting regulations. “It would kind of force Canada to determine a new system for regulating and tracking migratory bird data.”

“The Canadian Wildlife Service is committed to the bird-banding program in Canada,” Fuirst says, adding they plan to “continue operations as normal, continue bird banding, be maybe more conscious of reporting encounter data, or maintaining accurate band inventories.” The aim is to collectively stay on top of potential shortages of physical bands, which are manufactured in the U.S., while continuing data collection. He says the service has been “taking precautionary measures to ensure a mitigation plan.”

At Bruce Peninsula, Menu says he tries not to think about losing the collaborative relationship between nations. “It’s not just bird banding, it’s a service that’s been done since the late ’60s. Sixty years of breeding-bird surveys gone, and it’s done by volunteers. The organization and the collection of the data and the analysis of data is done by a federal agency, but the running of it is by volunteers.” 

Different places; same mission

Rick Ludkin, the co-founder of Haldimand Bird Observatory in southern Ontario, says birds are “telling us very clearly that our environment is declining in quality.”

Birds also show the impacts of good conservation practices, according to Ludkin. After soybean fields were replanted with prairie grass at Haldimand Bird Observatory, the number of birds banded increased from 90 to 450 birds in one year. 

Ludkin says the observatory has been getting rid of buckthorn, “a terrible invasive plant,” and also thinning out the walnuts. “Both of those species inhibit the growth of native shrubs and trees, and the impact of that has been pretty astounding.”

Jason Smyrlis, who has one year of banding experience, camps at the observatory when weather permits as a way to cut down on travel time. With the early mornings associated with banding, that creative solution to no on-site accommodations makes plenty of sense, even when it requires a double sleeping bag and multiple layers. “The light levels at night are tremendously reduced. It truly is a fabulous place to spend time,” he says. 

Different bird-banding stations have their own look and feel to them, but there are some common threads. For one, there’s the bander’s tools: the bands themselves sit on strings of wire before they’re attached to birds. Special rulers to measure the wing-spans sit on wooden desks; in some places these desks are doodled with highly accurate bird cartoons. 

There are also scales to weigh the birds, and small cylinders that house the birds while they are weighed. Different stations get creative with these containers in their own ways. At one place, empty Pringles cans suggest a love for snacks that conveniently supports science. At others, there are empty tennis ball canisters. At another, an empty tube that once carried a whiskey bottle.

What makes a volunteer?

To someone who isn’t familiar with the process, bird banding may seem almost like a secret club. “People that have been here will talk to other people about it,” Ludkin explains. “I kind of like the way we’re doing it, because you get people that really are interested and want to be here.”

To become a bander, the first important thing is the ability to identify birds by sight and sound. Volunteers can receive training to become banders but, says Jensen, “If they ever want to get to the point of being an independent bander, you have to be able to ID every single bird before you put the band on it. You cannot band a bird until you know what the species is.” 

With some popular banding sites like Long Point receiving more volunteer applications for banders than there are positions, finding a place to volunteer can be competitive. According to Menu, “It’s competitive because there are not a ton of positions but there are also not a ton of people with the skills. And then not just the skills but the desire to do this kind of work.” 

At Toronto’s Tommy Thompson Bird Research Station, located on Lake Ontario, volunteer positions are given by priority to those with a genuine passion for birds and those who intend to pursue a career in ornithology. Bander-in-charge Shane Abernethy says it’s important for volunteers to know how to handle animals, drawing comparisons to those with experience as vet techs or pet groomers. Even something seemingly random like playing a wind instrument, he says, can be a valuable asset at a banding station, as it can help with blowing on a bird’s chest to evaluate fat.

There is also a lifestyle factor: you must be willing to work according to migration season hours, often in isolation and with no days off save for the occasional weather day. “If you’re gone for two months in the spring and almost the same or more in the fall, it’s not necessarily a life that works well with what you can call a normal lifestyle,” Menu says.

All volunteers follow bander’s ethics: guidelines set out by regulatory bodies such as the North American Banding Council that are meant to guide people through the best ways to handle and interact with birds while conducting research. The code prioritizes the well-being of birds and the standardization of data collection and accountability. 

For stations that publish photos or share content on social media, photographic standards ensure the public image of bird banding promotes bird safety. “It’s admittedly very easy for the public to see a photo of a bird and think what we’re doing is bad. It happens more than you would realize,” explains Bird Canada’s Fuirst.

Birds and people are a double act

Thilini Samarakoon, a volunteer bander who just completed her third season, started out as a birder in Sri Lanka at the age of 13. Through a youth exploration society at school, she became very interested in birds and butterflies. 

Now she lives in London, Ont., and with her husband who is also a bander, she travelled to the Long Point Bird Observatory in Port Rowan, Ont., Canada’s oldest birding station. There, they met another bander visiting from Peru, and used an online translator tool to communicate.

There can be a special camaraderie among banders – after all, they spend time together hunkered down in some beautiful strips of nature, united by a common interest. Some return every year to these locations. Fuirst describes Long Point Bird Observatory as “a migration of people in addition to birds.”

“People from all across the country are spending their winter at home, and then spring comes, and the birds return. And the people also make this migration to a very specific spot. You know, this one trail that I love to walk every year. And it’s the same thing as what the birds are doing,” Fuirst says.

The interconnectedness of the birds and their environments is hard to ignore. Banders, whether they be volunteers or trained scientists, share stories about a love of nature and passion for wildlife that spans many years, often starting in childhood. It’s a deep passion for many, and one that quite literally moves people across borders. 

Faced with uncertainty about what the future of scientific collaboration may look like with the United States, the day-to-day reality of bird banding in Ontario bird observatories is quite normal. The NatureCounts database, which is an open data platform by Birds Canada that collects, interprets and shares biodiversity data, is running as usual. Volunteers, who have always been willing to give their time and expertise in exchange for some closeness with birds and time in beautiful natural settings, are still motivated to contribute their skills. 

Birds migrate. People migrate, too. Scientists and bird enthusiasts travel, sometimes internationally, to visit banding stations during migration seasons in order to earn banding experience, deepen their knowledge, receive training, get credentials, complete university studies, conduct research, make friends. 

“For me, I like birds but I also like migration. Birds connect the world,” Bruce Peninsula Bird Observatory’s Menu says. “They don’t really see borders.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Few of us will admit to loving coyotes. The distaste for this exclusively North American canid runs deep: in a 1985 Yale University study respondents ranked them beneath skunks, rattlesnakes and vultures in terms of popularity. But are they simply misunderstood?

I have been fortunate to photograph many coyotes over the years, including three adorable pups in rural southern Ontario. I have learned much of the negativity directed at them comes from fear. 

Urban coyotes have followed humans to dense population centres where rodents are in abundant supply, providing an ample food source. Despite talk of modern “coywolves,” these are the same eastern canids previous generations knew, whose crossbreeding with wolves happened over a century ago.

Naturally, there are occasional encounters with citizens — and their pets — which become news. If a coyote acts aggressively and bites someone it is widely reported, usually without important context.

A study from 2011 found, on average, three people are bitten by coyotes annually in Canada, compared with 300,000 dog bites. When coyotes do attack, it’s often after humans have fed them, either intentionally or inadvertently. Sadly, the common response to a coyote attack is for the animal to be culled.

Rural coyotes face a different problem. Having become the top predator in regions where traditional apex predators have been extirpated, coyotes sometimes target lambs and calves — if they can get inside their pens. But again, coyotes get blamed even when other species — such as dogs — might be responsible. The provincial government compensates farmers for livestock lost to predators. But coyote casualties and death by dog are treated much differently.

Losses due to coyotes are covered under the Ontario Wildlife Damage Compensation Program. Of the approximately $1.5 million paid out to farmers in 2024-2025, more than $1.2 million was for alleged coyote predation.

Domestic dogs aren’t covered by that program at all. Those losses fall under Ontario’s Protection of Livestock and Poultry from Dogs Act, which offers generally lower compensation than the wildlife damage program.

All over the world farmers complain of livestock loss due to dogs, so it’s curious why it is not widely acknowledged here. It’s a reason conservationists have suggested coyotes might be taking some of the blame for dogs.

No doubt coyotes are more than a nuisance to some farmers. If a coyote, particularly one with mange, hangs around their house they will shoot them.

But many I speak with say coyotes around fields are mostly left alone, because they control populations of rats, mice and even groundhogs — a significant role. Coyotes are amazingly resilient, and their populations quickly rebound after attempts to cull them. They’ve migrated to every U.S. state (barring Hawaii) and every Canadian province and territory.

In a typical coyote family only the parents will mate, but if one or both parents are killed any females will come into estrus earlier or disperse to find mates and start a family. And they will have larger litters if the food supply is abundant.

But their bad reputation remains. In Ontario, hunting and trapping of coyotes is allowed all year, everywhere except in and around some provincial parks — a restriction put in place not for the coyotes’ sake, but to protect the endangered eastern wolf, which can look similar. In much of southern Ontario there is no limit to the number of coyotes that can be hunted. 

In Ontario, provincial law empowers municipalities to kill coyotes that pose a threat. Until recently, one outdoor store in Belleville, Ont., held an annual coyote killing contest. Animal conservationist groups took the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry to court in 2022 arguing they were not complying with the law preventing bounty hunting. Although they lost the case, the contest does not appear to have been held since.

But those of us who appreciate the animal for its resiliency, its devotion to family and its adaptability, know getting rid of them is nearly impossible. It is estimated the coyote species can withstand a kill rate of 70 per cent of their population, year after year.

It’s denning season now across Ontario and in the coming months coyote pups will appear. I, for one, hope people can accept them as a valuable species, playing a vital part in our ecology.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

The cold snap held its grip on southern Ontario for weeks. On the shores of Lake Erie, some speculated this could be the year the ice makes it all the way across — something that hasn’t happened in three decades.

Erie, the shallowest of the Great Lakes, typically sees the most ice cover. Still, the most recent full freeze-up was in 1996, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data.

On a Sunday in early February, as ice cover crept over 95 per cent, locals and visitors braved frigid temperatures to look out across the frozen surface. 

Among them was photographer Carlos Osorio, who captured the lake and the people who set out across it — on foot, studded-tire bicycle or all-terrain vehicle. Wind had sculpted blowing snow into rippling waves, as if the water, on a blustery summer day, suddenly stood still.

“When you think about water freezing, you think about smooth ice, and then you come here and the ice almost looks like frozen waves,” Frank said. “You can just imagine the water swelling up and down, but it’s not, it’s just frozen.”

“This is exceptional,” Gerald Meyering said, marveling at the amount of ice and snow on the lake, compared to recent mild winters.

— With files from Carlos Osorio

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

‘Na̱mg̱is Chief Ho’miskanis, Don Svanvik, is on the phone when I walk off the little ferry in Alert Bay, B.C.

“Standing water and wood is never good,” he says to the person on the other end. “I can come by after I drop my truck off, maybe tomorrow.” 

Svanvik, a hereditary chief and former elected chief, hangs up and tells me he was talking to someone in Port McNeill, B.C., about a support system for a totem pole he helped carve. 

“Usually we put them at the back,” he explains. He drives us to the ‘Na̱mg̱is burial grounds, where he wants to show me the steel braces at the backs of the poles there, overlooking the bay. The Port McNeill pole, he says, has a brace in the middle — which is aesthetically pleasing but not great at withstanding the weather.

Alert Bay is a quiet community on a little island near the northern tip of Vancouver Island. Sea otters and seals swim the semi-protected waters of the bay as eagles lazily circle above the trees at the top of the hill that climbs steeply up from the shoreline. The weather here can be relentless, especially this time of year. Winter storms batter the community with heavy winds that regularly knock out the power, sometimes for days on end. Svanvik says things have changed since he was young. Then, he says, the island would often be blanketed under deep snow for weeks at a time. Now, snow is a rarity and the storms are unpredictable, sometimes blowing in from the opposite direction to the prevailing winds.

As we drive around the island, we talk about stewardship and sovereignty and how the ‘Na̱mg̱is, who are part of the Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw, or Kwakʼwala-speaking peoples, made ‘Ya̱lis, a winter village on the little island, their permanent home. He says when the colonial government set up the reserve system and allocated land to settlers, ‘Na̱mg̱is were told they didn’t need it.

“I don’t know how many acres we have but it’s not much,” he says. “They said we didn’t need the land because we had the ocean.”

Winter here moves at a slow pace. Around 1,000 people, give or take, live on Cormorant Island, which is about four kilometres long and one kilometre wide. Little in the way of shops and restaurants are open and the town’s mayor, Dennis Buchanan, says it’s hard to attract businesses, in part because of the regular power outages.

“One year we had 21 power outages,” he tells me over a cup of coffee. “The grocery store here lost over $40,000 in product one time.”

Still, Buchanan says he wouldn’t trade it for anything. Arriving here in the 1970s, he fell in love with the place (and a woman) and never left.

At the far end of the bay, past the village of ‘Ya̱lis, a handful of derelict boats sit on the gravelly beach, tilted at crazy angles. Lorne Smith, a clam-digger, stands on the deck of one, tying off a rope. He says he’s hoping to salvage the radar mast when the tide comes in.

John Webster pulls up in his truck, poking around to see if there’s anything worth snagging for his boat. Among other jobs, he fishes up north with the Haida. The two joke with each other and tell me about the challenges of getting fish these days. Both remain hopeful about the future but there’s a wistfulness to their stories that says times are hard.

While the fishing fleet here is a shadow of its former size, the ‘Na̱mg̱is and non-Indigenous allies are working to rebuild struggling fish populations and develop land-use plans that support sustainable forestry practices. Elected Chief Victor Isaac wasn’t available to meet in person, but tells me on a phone call the nation is making strides at getting the provincial government to respect ‘Na̱mg̱is sovereignty.

“Everyone was in their siloes before,” he says. “They didn’t listen to us, the stewards.”

He says things are slowly changing and people are coming together, listening at last.

G̱ilakas’la (thank you) to the ‘Na̱mg̱is, stewards of all the places photographed for this story, and to everyone who made time to speak with me.

Updated on Feb. 13, 2026, at 8:44 p.m. PT: This story was updated to correct the location of a totem pole in Port McNeill, not Port Hardy. It was also updated to add context that the village of ‘Ya̱lis predates the arrival of settlers.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Ken Johnston walks north on a gravel road through southern Ontario farmland on a July morning. It’s cool just after sunrise, but in a few hours everything will be enveloped in thick midsummer humidity.

“By 10 or 11 o’clock, the land was just on fire, like walking in an oven,” Johnston says. He wasn’t expecting this heat in Canada, he says, nor the bugs. He dabs his face with a bandana.

“Look how dense it is in there,” he points to a thick stand of trees in Wellington County, about an hour west of Toronto, as mosquitos buzz around him. “Freedom seekers would have had to fight their way through that.”

Gravel crunches under Johnston’s brisk footsteps. On his pack swings a placard that reads “Northern Underground Railroad — Niagara Falls, NY to Owen Sound, ON” and a leather strap of jangling bells.

“These are not bear bells,” he says. “They’re bells I wear to signal to the ancestors and spirits that I’m here, if they want to reach out and communicate.”

Since 2018, Johnston has been retracing freedom routes used by African Americans escaping slavery on the Underground Railroad, through his project Walk to Freedom.

He followed the footsteps of abolitionist and conductor Harriet Tubman from her home in Maryland to Niagara Falls, N.Y., and is, on this hot July day in 2025, closing out the final 265 kilometres from the U.S. border to Owen Sound, Ont., a major terminus for the Railroad. When he finishes, he will have walked more than 1,360 kilometres on this route.

Johnston has commemorated other freedom struggles on walks through the Deep South, Massachusetts, Puerto Rico, Texas and Northern Ireland — in total, he’s trekked some 3,540 kilometres. When he’s not walking, the 65-year-old works in visitor services at the Penn Museum, an archeology- and anthropology-focused museum in Philadelphia.

The ancestors “willed me to do this walk,” he says. Months earlier, he had been waffling on whether to commit to this particular trip when he saw a U-Haul truck parked in front of his home. On its side was an illustration of a freedom-seeking woman, carrying a lantern and peering warily into the unknown. Behind her was a map of eastern Canada and the U.S. marked with arrows pointing north. “Venture across Canada,” the slogan cheerily invited, with a write-up of the Underground Railroad.

“The woman is literally staring right at my front door,” he laughs. “I remember looking up to the sky and going, ‘I hear you! I hear you!’ ”

Not all freedom seekers ventured all the way to British North America, which had abolished slavery in 1834. Movement accelerated after 1850, when U.S. Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act. Escaped slaves and free folk in the northern free states could be kidnapped by slavecatchers and sent back to the South, which meant northern states were no longer a safe haven.

An estimated 30,000 to 40,000 freedom seekers pushed to Canada. They came overland on foot, but when possible also used trains, horses, wagons and carriages. Ships carried them across the Detroit, Niagara or St. Lawrence rivers and through the Great Lakes to port towns like Owen Sound.

“The American narrative is they made it to Canada and then they were free. Well, the story continues on the other side, and that’s what I discovered when I reached St. Catharines,” Johnston says. “They had extraordinary lives.”

Ontario towns such as St. Catharines, Windsor, Hamilton, Guelph and Chatham became cultural and economic hubs for these refugees, full of settlements, churches, businesses, newspapers, schools and abolitionist organizations. As one example, Chatham’s population was one-third Black and regarded as a “Black Paris” in the 1850s, according to Kristin Moriah, an associate professor of African-American literary studies at Queen’s University.

“This idea of being able to start your own businesses, to support the Black community, to really celebrate the kind of freedom you specifically had in Canada, makes that area very special,” she says.

These are the Railroad stops on Johnston’s walk: Tubman’s church in St. Catharines, monuments, early settlements that fostered economic independence and the museums dedicated to preserving these local Black histories.

Connecting the stories and places of the Underground Railroad is an intentional part of his walks, Johnston says, amid efforts by U.S. President Donald Trump to round up undocumented immigrants, crack down on Black Lives Matter protests, scrub government websites of Black histories and end diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

“Democracy in the United States is backsliding, and here in 2025, in the second Trump administration, protecting and preserving civil rights is more important than ever,” he says. “That’s sort of the idea behind these walks: to encourage people, to meet them one-on-one in their communities, in the streets, to engage in conversations with them about some of the erosion of civil rights we’re seeing.”

In an era when so much political activism happens online and furiously, he finds intention in the slow act of walking — as people did during the Montgomery bus boycotts or on civil rights marches in the 1950s.

“It generated a lot of activity and forced people to engage. … The energy of that movement I feel is what’s been lost,” Johnston says. “We saw a little bit of it after George Floyd’s death, there was a spontaneous movement of Black Lives Matter, but then that dissipated and there was no leadership to really keep it moving forward. So this is my way of encouragement to get that movement back, to find that energy.”

On the road, he channels the same struggles, suffering and emotions as his freedom-seeking ancestors, but also meditates on his own life.

“I’ve enjoyed the ebb and flow of marriage, the delight in raising a child, the profound grief of losing a child and finally divorce,” Johnston writes on his website. His daughter, who passed in 2008, had severe disabilities. He wrestled with the way the world engaged with her, and in return what autonomy and access she had. 

“After all these experiences, I’ve learned one has to keep going in life because another horizon awaits you over the next mountain.”

Escaping enslavement required expert outdoor survival skills

Walking up the shoulder of Highway 6, Johnston follows the rough trajectory of Garafraxa Road, which first connected Guelph to Owen Sound. Garafraxa was one of many colonization roads criss-crossing southern Ontario, which cleared the first paths for British expansion and opened up new areas for settlement. 

It provided access to a region called Queen’s Bush, stretching from Waterloo, Ont., to Lake Huron. Though it’s now a paved two-lane highway, when Garafraxa was first surveyed in 1837 it would have been a boggy, densely wooded and miserable stretch.

“It required a huge amount of backcountry skills to be comfortable walking the trails, navigating as you made your way north,” Jacqueline L. Scott, a Toronto-based scholar on race and nature and contributor to The Narwhal, says. “You are working out your route as you go along, not knowing what’s around the bend or corner. You mostly hiked in the evenings because when you run into white people, you don’t know if they are friend or slavecatcher.”

It was a rough journey up this corduroy road, made of timber laid down in the mud. On one stretch dubbed “The Long Swamp,” wagons and oxen would sometimes slip off these bumpy, jolting roads and sink to their doom in the water and mud. In total, the 113-kilometre trip from Fergus to Owen Sound would have been a four- or five-day journey.

One person who escaped enslavement only to find themselves on this mucky route to freedom was John Little, who fled Tennessee in 1841. Little’s testimony is included in the 1856 collection The Refugee: or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada. He recounted how he and his wife Eliza were on the run for three months before finally arriving in Windsor, Ont.

Six months later, “​​We heard of the Queen’s Bush, where any people might go and settle, colored or poor, and might have a reasonable chance to pay for the land,” he recalled.

With $18, two axes, a few kitchen tools, flour, pork, a blanket and bedquilt, he and Eliza “marched right into the wilderness, where there were thousands of acres of woods which the chain had never run round since Adam. At night we made a fire and cut down a tree, and put up some slats like a wigwam. This was in February, when the snow was two feet deep.”

Wolves, bears and lynx roamed the bush, thick with old-growth maple, beech, elm, birch and ash trees. The land was so thick that often only three or four acres could be cleared and cultivated in a year.

Little was proud of their grit, producing thousands of bushels of produce and livestock out of nothing: “The man who was ‘a bad n—r’ in the South, is here a respected, independent farmer.”

Freedom seekers were indeed expert survivalists. Whatever food they could not carry, purchase, beg or steal they supplemented with foraged plants, fish and small game.

Tubman’s early life prepared her for the 13 missions she took back to Maryland to lead about 70 friends and family out of slavery. Her enslavers tasked her to harvest timber, trap muskrats and work the fields. Like a modern wilderness guide, Tubman navigated water and land, read stars, foraged for food and plant medicine — and did so all while keeping her fellow freedom seekers alive.

The idyll of a summer hike doesn’t capture the terror of fleeing for one’s life in midwinter, without the luxury of waterproof boots or Gore-Tex, Scott says. “When I look at what they had to do on that trek, it loses a lot of its romance. It’s not an outdoor adventure … to prove I can walk 500 kilometres in however many days, right? That’s an adventure quest.”

These traumas shape how Black folks relate to the outdoors today, Scott says. Off-leash dogs on a hiking trail can evoke the slavecatchers’ hounds. Police are still a common threat for Black people in nature, like birdwatcher Christian Cooper, who was falsely accused of threatening a white woman in New York’s Central Park, or Ottawa cyclist Ntwali Bashizi, who had 911 called on him by a white woman that accused him of blocking her path in a park.

Canada can’t achieve its land conservation goals without nurturing future generations of racialized outdoors enthusiasts, especially when a quarter of Canadians identify as what Statistics Canada calls visible minorities, Scott says. “Why should we care when we’ve never felt like we belonged there or were invited to be there?”

Canada’s complicated history of enslavement, Black Loyalists and Indigenous displacement

Canada was the Promised Land, in both the aspirations of freedom seekers and our present-day mythologies. While that narrative should rightly be celebrated, slavery is, as Scott puts it, “as Canadian as our snow or maple syrup.”

Olivier Le Jeune was the first documented person of African descent to be enslaved in what is now Canada. Sold as a child, Le Jeune was brought to Quebec City during English occupation around 1629 to 1632.

Over the next 200 years, some 7,000 people, including Indigenous individuals, were enslaved in British and French colonies. It’s just a fraction of the 12 million African lives stolen in the transatlantic slave trade, but chattel slavery is very much part of Canada’s foundation.

Ships built in Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Newfoundland carried captured Africans from as early as 1725 until the early 1800s. The worst, cheapest grades of cod fished from the North Atlantic were shipped south to the Caribbean to feed the enslaved on British plantations. 

Even after Britain abolished slavery, racist sentiments remained. The Ontario-based newspaper Provincial Freeman, published by abolitionist, educator and lawyer Mary Ann Shadd Cary, put it plainly in 1853: “Prejudice against negroes, so prevalent in various parts of the Province, as maintained by many persons of all nations … is one of the strongest pro-slavery influences that disgraces and degrades our fair country.”

Still, leaders like Shadd Cary were committed to the idea of Black settlement in Canada. “She really supported the British colonial project, and I think that she thought of it as a project that was directly in opposition to the evils of U.S. chattel slavery,” Moriah, of Queen’s University, says.

Viewed today, with an understanding of how colonization harmed Indigenous nations, this is an uncomfortable position. But Scott lays out the scant choices for a Black Loyalist, the name given to Black people who supported the Crown in the war against the United States. “You’ve fought for Canada because the fear was that if the U.S. won, the U.S. would reimpose slavery in Canada. … You know that freedom is hanging by a thin thread. Your reward is to be given land grants. … But it’s Indigenous land grants that you’re given.”

“And so the intertwining of that complex history — freedom for one group, the promise of freedom, of economic prosperity — it’s based on taking away the land from a different group,” Scott says. 

Canada’s promises to Black Loyalists were hollow. Most weren’t awarded the land they were owed, while others received “the worst land grants, smaller size, in the middle of nowhere, so far from the roads and later far from the railways, so it was economically unfeasible,” to earn a living there, Scott says.

Many lost their homes after white labourers, resentful of perceived wage undercutting, instigated the first recorded race riot in North America in Shelburne, N.S., in 1784. Disillusioned, more than 1,000 people, representing a third of Nova Scotia’s Black Loyalists, left for Sierra Leone just eight years later.

Some who lived along Johnston’s route were left disappointed, too. On Highway 6, near Williamsford, Ont., Johnston stops at an intersecting dirt road. Here, where a stream meets old Garafraxa Road, some 50 families of Loyalists and freedom seekers settled in what became the Negro Creek Settlement.

Black settlers were among the first non-Indigenous residents of the Queen’s Bush, as early as the 1820s. Their presence predated county surveys in 1851 that carved up plots of land. Though they had done the hard work to clear their land, many of these families could not afford to buy it. Without titles, land agents regarded them as squatters. Other families could not afford the land payments.

What followed were threats, evictions, harassment and coercion to sell or simply walk away. By the early 1850s, families migrated out of the area. Only a handful were established enough to hold onto their plots. By the 1960s, the community cemetery had been desecrated. All that remained were the signs for Negro Creek Road.

In 1995, perceiving the name to be politically incorrect, Holland Township announced the street would be renamed Moggie Road after an early white settler. Descendants of early Black settlers marched in protest, calling it an erasure of their families’ presence, and filed a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Nearly two years later, the town backed down.

This spring, community members intend to break ground on a memorial park on two acres of land donated by Jim Douglas, a descendant who still owns his family’s 300-acre parcel. Descendants continue to gather their histories in an online archive.

Johnston’s route doesn’t quite reach the town of Priceville, Ont., just 34 kilometres away, where Black residents were also pushed out violently. Eventually all that was left was a cemetery, which was razed in the 1960s for a potato field. Some tombstones were hidden in a stone pile near the local school, while others lined the floor of a barn and the basement of a farmhouse, as revealed in the 2000 documentary Speakers for the Dead.

Local white kids played baseball using a piece of a broken headstone for home plate. “I think it said Margaret,” one resident tells the camera with a laugh. “Pitch it to Maggie!”

In Dresden, Ont., an emotional meeting with descendants of early Black settlers

As 2025 drew to a close, Johnston was called again by the ancestors to walk. He set off from Detroit on Boxing Day, bound for the Black settlements of southwestern Ontario.

His trip landed during a cold snap. Some freedom seekers chose — or seized the opportunity — to leave in winter, when the long dark nights provided more cover. In freezing temperatures, they would have been able to walk over the frozen Detroit and St. Clair rivers.

“One of the things I did not fully understand was the psychological journey for these people coming across,” Johnston says. “They were happy to be free, but the psychological weight of the cold as I experienced in the last week dampened my spirit a little.”

On his route were sites with rich Black history: Chatham, Amherstburg, North Buxton and Dresden.

The Dawn settlement in Dresden was founded in 1841 by the abolitionist, preacher and Underground Railroad conductor Josiah Henson. Enslaved in Maryland and Kentucky, he had been permanently disabled by beatings that left him unable to lift his arms above his head. After discovering his enslaver had cheated him out of an agreement to buy his freedom, he escaped at the age of 41 with his wife and four children.

Henson, who advocated for economic independence and self-reliance, built a co-operative farm, church and vocational school to teach residents the skills to work at nearby sawmills and gristmills. His life was the inspiration for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s often-misunderstood anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and his home sits on what is now Freedom Road.

On those 200 acres, Dawn’s early residents began the task “of settling upon wild lands which we could call our own; and where every tree which we felled, and every bushel of corn we raised, would be for ourselves; in other words, where we could secure all the profits of our own labor,” Henson wrote in his 1849 autobiography.

A century later, the area became a part of Black history as the site of Canada’s first racial discrimination trial. Many businesses in Dresden refused to serve Black customers, most notoriously Kay’s Café and Emerson’s Soda Bar Restaurant.

Hugh Burnett, a Dawn descendant, and his neighbours formed the National Unity Association in 1948 and lobbied town council and then the provincial government to pass anti-discrimination legislation. They succeeded in 1954, but some local businesses refused to comply. Two years later, after sit-ins and two drawn-out provincial trials, the owner of Kay’s Café finally served his first Black customers in 1956.

“It has been stated you can’t make a law to make one man love another — I think they knew very well the law would not do that — but it would eliminate the act of discrimination,” Burnett said in a 1954 National Film Board documentary.

On the final day of his walk, Johnston was greeted at the foot of Freedom Road by several dozen Black residents, many of them descendants of Dawn settlers. They walked arm-in-arm toward the museum, singing a gospel hymn.

Retracing Ontario’s Black history ‘touched me to my core’: Johnston

For those who made it to the end of the Underground Railroad, life was bittersweet. Though many freedom seekers found a piece of their Promised Land, the pains of dispossession, prejudice and slavery were ever-present.

“I reached Canada about a year ago. Liberty I find to be sweet indeed,” Henry Atkinson recalled in 1856, after escaping enslavement in Virginia. “I found an opportunity to escape, after studying upon it a long time.”

“But it went hard to leave my wife; it was like taking my heart’s blood: but I could not help it — I expected to be taken away where I should never see her again, and so I concluded that it would be right to leave her. I never expect to see her again in this world — nor our child.”

After the American Civil War and emancipation in 1865, this yearning drew many freedom seekers back to the U.S. in the hopes of being reunited with their families, Moriah says. Having achieved economic success in Ontario settlements like Elgin (in what is now North Buxton) which grew to 1,000 Black residents at its peak, families chased opportunities in bigger cities like Detroit or Toronto. Today these clans are transnational, slipping between countries with family, friends, school and work on both sides.

The magnitude of these many journeys hit Johnston when he first arrived at the border divide in Niagara Falls.

“I’ve been tracing the footsteps of Harriet Tubman, from the banks of the Choptank River in Maryland on the eastern shore all the way to St. Catharines,” he says. “Harriet Tubman rescued her brothers in Christmas of 1854. They made that journey to St. Catharines in one month. It has taken me five years.”

“Just looking back and seeing how extraordinary that journey was that they made, and the sacrifice that many people made — many people left their families and they weren’t going back,” he says, pausing as he tears up.

“I had the privilege of knowing I was going back home to my family and friends. It touched me to the core of my bones just what that walk meant to them.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Standing on the Athabasca Glacier in Jasper National Park, Alta., the wind picks up with an icy bite. 

It will be a lot warmer down there, our guide tells me, pointing to a moulin, a hole in the glacier formed by meltwater.

Trusting my rope, I, like the others, lean back and descend 35 metres down until my spiked feet land inside a sculpture of perfect blue ice. 

Every spring and fall since 2022, photographers Jim Elzinga and Roger Vernon, with mountain guide Dylan Cunningham, venture to the Columbia Icefield. Their mission is to capture the vast glacial expanse straddling the Alberta and British Columbia border before it’s gone.

“This is the beauty,” Elzinga says. “But this is what we’re potentially going to lose.”

Glaciers in Western Canada are melting faster than ever, and the last four years have been particularly devastating. From 2021 to 2024, glaciers receded twice as fast as in the last decade due to low snow, high temperatures and wildfires darkening glacial ice as ash and soot on the surface absorb heat, according to recent research published in Geophysical Research Letters. 

On our current trajectory, Environment and Climate Change Canada predicts glaciers in the Canadian Rockies are likely to all but vanish by 2100, according to a statement emailed to The Narwhal. The consequences are far-reaching, impacting everything from water security to infrastructure to ecosystems and contributing to sea level rise. 

But below the surface of the Athabasca Glacier, encapsulated in its water-sculpted walls, that’s easy to forget. The ethereal blue seems endless, engulfing our senses and filling our peripheral vision.

It’s inescapable — a feeling Elzinga and Vernon strive to replicate with their photography. 

Vernon made sure everyone touched the ice with their bare hands to experience the smooth texture. 

Capturing the beauty of the Columbia Icefield glaciers 

For three decades, Elzinga and Vernon were in the same social circles in the mountain community of Canmore, Alta. But it wasn’t until 2021, when Vernon got a call from Elzinga asking to collaborate on a glacier project, that the pair got to know each other. It was a natural pairing.

“When we came together there was such a common language,” Vernon says. 

Their goal too, was shared. In a world inundated with images, they want to take photos that grab people’s attention at a scale that’s difficult to ignore. 

“We wanted to have our images so big that if you stood back at this distance,” he says, holding his arm out wide, “it still smacked you in your face, commanded your presence.

That shared vision led to Meltdown — a photography project exhibited in large scale at galleries and museums capturing the beauty of the Columbia Icefield glaciers before they are gone. It’s part of a larger initiative by an educational non-profit called Guardians of the Ice which Elzinga cofounded. The group aims to raise awareness of the consequences of losing Western Canada’s glaciers by marrying art and science.

For Vernon, it’s a bit of a shift from his other life behind the camera on the big screen, where he has a long history as a cinematographer, including documentary films and Academy Award–winning movies. 

Elzinga, meanwhile, is an accomplished alpinist who has spent a lifetime guiding and exploring in the mountains at high altitudes. In 1986, he led an expedition when the first North American woman summitted Mount Everest.

While both Elzinga and Vernon have accomplished much in their careers, they brush it off when we talk. The current mission takes centre stage — they are living and breathing glaciers.

Vernon first became aware of the impact of glacier melt when volunteering with a Calgary-based non-profit focused on water security. His work there took him around the world, to Zambia, Ethiopia and Congo. When Elzinga approached him for Guardians of the Ice, Vernon saw an opportunity to have an impact on water security locally.

“Imagine 50 years from now when we don’t have our glaciers. … Those folks aren’t going to have the water,” Vernon says, pointing to downstream Alberta communities. “That’s our food production.”

Water from glaciers in the Columbia Icefield joins rivers, streams and eventually the Pacific, Arctic and Atlantic oceans. As glaciers retreat, declining meltwater supply may impact freshwater availability as early as 2050, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada.

Elzinga, who studied photography in university, dreamt of photographing mountains since the 1980s but had to wait for technology to catch up with his vision. Elzinga and Vernon use a high-resolution camera capable of aerial mapping and space quality imagery to capture the detail and scale of their photography.

The team uses a Phase One camera, a high-resolution camera that allows Elzinga and Vernon to capture the scope of the mountains and glaciers without sacrificing fine details.

Elzinga and Vernon use a technique called photo stacking which combines multiple images to increase the quality of their photos. The technique has been useful for capturing moulins, in particular.

Witnessing glaciers disappear

Before everyone ventures into the moulin, Elzinga and Vernon stand to the side of the opening, looking at their phones. They wait for Cunningham, the mountain guide who supports their work, to text photos to the pair so they can preview the spot and make sure the imagery is what they’re looking for.

Together, Elzinga and Vernon have the mountaineering experience required for the project, but they’re now in their 70s, so they enlisted Cunningham to focus on safety and technical requirements while they focus on the art. 

“We get wrapped up in the minutia of what’s in our eyes,” Elzinga says.

Today we’re also joined by alpine guide and long-time climbing partner of Elzinga’s, Ian Welsted, who volunteered his time to facilitate bringing a reporting team on the shoot. While Elzinga and Vernon take photos, Welsted explores the darker reaches of the moulin.

Behind the camera, Elzinga and Vernon can work together almost wordlessly, an important skill when conditions get rough, they say, like the cold winds and snow when I visit. 

While finding the exact image is a know-it-when-you-see-it scenario, the areas photographed are very intentional. 

A few days after the photoshoot, at Vernon’s home base in Canmore, Alta., he unfolds a map with mountain peaks marked one through 12, the starting point four years ago, when the duo was planning where to photograph. 

The mountains flanking the icefields are known as the “guardians of the ice,” he says, the origin of the non-profit’s name.“Now all that glacier is gone,” Vernon says, pointing to different spots on the map. He points to another area — “gone.” And another, gone.

 Features the photographers planned to capture had vanished or receded remarkably year over year, like the Columbia Glacier, which they estimate to have receded 100 metres from one photograph to the next.

The art of changing people’s minds

While Cunningham has always felt a responsibility toward the environment, working with Elzinga has had a “profound” impact on his outlook, he says. 

When Cunningham gets cynical about climate change, Elzinga’s optimism has the power to pull him back.

“You can’t think that way,” Elzinga will tell him. “We can solve this, we’re making a difference, and we’re going to keep pushing.” 

Giving up isn’t an option for Elzinga.

“It’s really easy to look at this stuff and be overwhelmed by it,” he says. “My attitude is, well, at least you’ve got to try and do something.” 

The non-profit supplies Alberta Tomorrow, a free educational platform, with their materials from the icefields, and plans to expand to the university level as well as experiment with other mediums, like virtual reality. 

Elzinga hopes that awareness will then ripple through every aspect of people’s lives, including the ballot box. “It’s at government levels that you can get policy change,” he says. 

The climate crisis is like a virus, Elzinga says. Even if people are aware of it, they can’t really see it. And as the urgency increases rapidly, maybe art can help show people what’s at stake. 

Among the photographs displayed in the Columbia Icefield Glacier Discovery Centre, where Meltdown is exhibited across from the Athabasca Glacier from May to September until 2027, a wall titled “no action too small” encourages visitors to be mindful of their environmental impact through pledging to take small actions such as eating less meat or divesting from fossil fuel. 

Not everybody who sees the images will make choices for the planet, but some might, and for Vernon and Elzinga, that’s what counts. 

“Sometimes people say, ‘Well, what I do is not going to make a big difference,’ ” Elzinga says. His comeback is to flip the concept of a drop in the bucket on its head. 

“A lot of raindrops go into a rain barrel and then eventually that rain barrel is overflowing.”

As he sees it, if 75,000 people see the images at the gallery, not everybody will make a change — but the percentage of them that do, he says, will “go out and within their circle, they can make a difference.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

I’ve spent 18 years documenting Prairie life in western Manitoba, mostly photographing the people who make up the province’s small towns, farms, Hutterite colonies and First Nations. As photojournalists, we are constantly in and out of people’s lives, which is an amazing privilege — but it can also be exhausting.

This year, I decided to spend my time with bees.

My friends and apiarists Andrew and Hiltje Vander Velde happily agreed to allow me to come and go from their hives, letting myself in and out of the electric fence meant to deter bears looking for honey. I spent hours at a time in the early morning and late evening watching the honeybees work, collecting pollen from near and far and bringing it back to the hives. I got to see the different colours of the pollen up close.

I wanted to capture the detailed lives of bees, including macro-lens portraits. This was not an easy task. Macro lenses have narrow depths of field — and flying bees move quickly and erratically, usually coming in and out of my focal plane faster than I or the camera could register. I wanted photos that felt like portraits, so I set up backdrops, relying on crafting or scrapbooking items I purchased. I’d pick a colourful piece of cardboard paper, line it up vertically against a side of a hive and focus my camera on the action just outside the entrance so I could get bees returning to their home or heading out on their missions. It might sound simple — but it required taking thousands of photos each sitting to get a few that were in focus. 

I sat in the grass, my face and camera lens inches from the upper entrance to the hive, my neck and shoulders contorted into uncomfortable positions. And I photographed, while enveloped in the droning sound of thousands of bees at work. Sometimes I listened to podcasts, other times I listened to the songs of the western meadowlarks, bobolinks and least flycatchers. 

Some days I’d wear the full beekeeper suit that Andrew and Hiltje lent me, other days just a T-shirt and shorts. Aside from one poor bumblebee that inadvertently got pinched in my elbow crease, I was only stung less than six times in total, each when I was wearing my beekeeper suit. Most were just one sting at a time, on an exposed bit of wrist or ankle. 

Once I had a group of angry bees following me back to my car. I’m not sure how I inadvertently caused them stress that day, but I could register their agitation in the change of pitch in their buzzing — the wing vibrations they use to communicate. 

The mesh head covering, which hung off a rimmed hard hat, was a pain in the ass to photograph through so I’d often ditch it, especially in the evenings when the bees were calmer. Over the years I’ve learned to follow beekeepers’ leads. My friends at Deerboine Hutterite Colony rarely wear any protective covering so if I’m around them, I also don’t wear anything. When I came across apiarist Mike Clark, director of the Manitoba Beekeepers’ Association, pulling honey boxes from hives amid a strong late summer wind, he also wasn’t wearing any protective gear. Meanwhile, thousands of honeybees, blown out from frames of honeycomb with a leaf blower, filled the prairie air with chaos. 

“Shallow breaths,” Clark told me. “They’re attracted to carbon dioxide.” That day was magical. Dozens — if not hundreds — of bees explored and rested on my arms, legs and torso while I photographed their hives shortly after their honeycomb was collected. I didn’t get stung once; I gently brushed them off my body as I changed positions. 

The backdrop to all of this, of course, is that bees are under threat. Canada is home to more than 800 species of wild bees, many of which are rare. The threats to them are many: pesticides, invasive species, climate change and more. Honeybees are also under threat. Mites and the viruses they spread led to 30 per cent of honeybees dying in Canada last winter, according to the Canadian Honey Council, though not all apiarists experienced this same level. However, the conversations around the threats are nuanced and complicated. Beekeepers tout the importance of honeybees in pollination and how they can benefit wild bees and wildflowers. Not to mention, the harms versus benefits are situational, based on competition for pollen and other factors. 

But this project wasn’t about the big picture. It was about looking closely, and enjoying the moments with a tiny insect many of us never turn our full attention to. It was a case study in zooming in and slowing down.

Summer evenings at the hives were especially beautiful. The low sun backlit the bees, still active in the airspace above their hives, with trees in shade providing a dark backdrop to their glow. There’s something beautiful about getting to know a subject beyond the surface level. I spent hours watching bees take evening naps on plants just outside their hives, or casting shadows on and through the delicate petals of poppies in the garden at Deerboine Colony. 

The beauty was in the details: leafcutter bees store their collected pollen on the bottom of their abdomens using specialized hairs called scopa to grasp the powdery plant fertilizer. When leafcutters plunge themselves headfirst into flowers, their pollen-covered back ends stick out. Bumblebees, of which Manitoba has several species, sometimes climb out of flowers looking like they fell into a vat of pollen, with it clinging to every part of their fuzzy, barrel-shaped bodies. Patches of goldenrod and fireweed were the bee equivalent of a Manitoba social. 

Some evenings at the hives, shortly after the sun had set, coyotes filled the air with their cries from every direction. Activity slowed as bees entered their hive for the night, congregated on discarded honeycomb or rested on plants in the field. 

The occasional firefly would glow alongside the bees still moving across the dusk-blue sky. 

I sat and watched the activity slowing — and felt lucky to be there in that moment.

Updated May 25, 2026, at 9:00 a.m. MT: Due to an editing error, this story previously misnamed the Canadian Honey Council. It is the Canadian Honey Council, not the Canadian Honey Bee Council.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

The woods surrounding the Highwood Pass, a mountain valley southwest of Calgary, are quiet. The traffic snarls of fall, which brought day trippers flocking to see larch trees pop yellow against the green hills, are gone. The road through the pass is closed until the spring. 

Gone too is a temporary camp and barrier across a logging road, set up to protest in advance of clear-cut operations in this popular corner of Kananaskis Country along the rocky spine of southwestern Alberta. At least for now. 

At first blush, it’s odd for protesters opposed to logging to leave the area before the logging starts, but that wasn’t really the point of the camp set up by a group called Defenders of the Eastern Slopes. 

“Yes, we want to protect these valleys from the logging and protect the fish from the logging, but one of our goals is also to start the process of creating a culture of civil disobedience,” one of the organizers, Michael Sawyer, says. 

It’s not something generally associated with Alberta and it’s not something Sawyer has always focused on. He’s spent decades fighting through more official/polite/formal channels: in courts, through letters, within environmental organizations and without. But in this time and place, he thinks a more direct approach is needed. 

“I would argue that, given the politics in this province, and I would even say nationally, we need more and more citizens who are prepared to stand up against undemocratic and illegal activities by the government.”

So while the camp is gone and the woods are still, the group behind regular gatherings on the outskirts of the cutblock are ready to put their bodies on the line at the first sign of activity.

“We’re keeping an eye on things,” Colin Smith, another member of Defenders of the Eastern Slopes, says. “We’ve got eyes and ears out there.”

The area in question and why it matters

The area in question is surrounded by protected land in the multi-use area known as Kananaskis Country — a mishmash of parkland, recreational spaces and industrial activity along the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. 

It’s an area popular with residents of nearby Calgary, but has been set aside for logging since before Kananaskis was established. It’s also the headwaters for all of the creeks and rivers throughout southern Alberta and into the wider Prairies. 

In 2024, an earlier clear-cut plan covering 1,100 hectares, an area the size of over 2,000 football fields, was shelved after pushback and the sale of Spray Lake Sawmills to B.C.-based West Fraser Timber. Now, it’s been revived.

New permits have been issued by Fisheries and Oceans Canada for the construction of logging bridges across rivers and creeks in the valley. Those permits allow disruptions to habitat for endangered native trout species in the valley — a fact that frustrates the group.

In an emailed statement, West Fraser Timber said it understands “how important it is to protect bull trout and westslope cutthroat trout habitat in the Highwood” and that as part of its planning, the company will be “monitoring conditions before and after harvest to help inform responsible stewardship.”

The company said it paused Spray Lake’s earlier plans to “hear from people who live, work or recreate near our operations,” and added operations won’t start until its planning processes are complete. It did not say whether or not those operations would start this winter.

But it’s not just logging the group is concerned about. The eastern slopes face multiple threats, from clear-cutting to the potential for new coal mines south of Kananaskis, all of which could impact the water that flows from these headwaters across the Prairies. 

Denuded hills don’t hold on to water, which exacerbates the risk of flooding during rainfall and leaves the area more parched during droughts. Pollution from reopened mines would rush off the hills and into irrigation channels and drinking water. 

Sawyer, who lives in nearby Nanton, says his tap water comes from these hills.  

“We’re treating our foothills headwaters like they don’t matter from a water point of view, but they’re absolutely critical, and the government is just not paying attention to it,” Sawyer says.

West Fraser Timber said it will establish buffers of at least 30-metres around watercourses.The office of the Minister of Forestry and Parks did not respond to an interview request prior to publication.

We’re suing the RCMP to fight for press freedom

In November 2021, photojournalist Amber Bracken was arrested by the RCMP while on assignment for The Narwhal. So we launched a lawsuit to take a stand for press freedom. Now, we’re in the middle of our trial.

The eastern slopes: ‘vital’ to ecosystems, water and more

The Rocky Mountain headwaters have been the subject of increasing concern to Albertans. The United Conservative government is working to reopen coal mining to the south of the pass, at the same time that reservoirs and rivers across the province have seen consecutive years of depletion due to droughts. 

Mike Judd, another member of the Defenders of the Eastern Slopes, says the government and industry hold too much power, which allows them to enforce a narrative focused squarely on resource extraction.  

“They have the propaganda machinery to keep a constant conservative message out there, which is the eastern slopes are a warehouse of treasures that keep the Alberta economy rolling,” he says. In his mind, that’s a narrow definition of wealth. 

“There’s not a thing in their message that’s about the eastern slopes being the vital water source for Alberta, about it being the vital place for so many different species of birds, fish and animals, and for being the vital place for so many people to have a recreational outlet.”

It’s another reason Judd and Sawyer believe civil disobedience is a necessary tool — to draw attention to their fight and, as Judd puts it, “rattle the chains” a little. 

Starting in October, the defenders hosted weekend events nearby, to introduce people to the issues and the idea of civil disobedience. The community made art that could be hung on the barrier across the logging road. 

Without any current logging or bridge building to oppose, there was no standoff or risk of arrest — yet. 

“It’s just giving people who have been interested in doing something like this a place to show up and meet other people,” Smith says.

“This hopefully can be a catalyst to future actions.”

Group hopes to ‘bridge political polarization’ over shared concern for headwaters

The Defenders of the Eastern Slopes isn’t solely focused on the Highwood Pass. The group might plan blockades in other areas of the vast stretch of woods and mountains that skirt the border of B.C. and Alberta, according to Smith. 

He’s been contacted by the RCMP, who sent out a liaison officer and he’s heard the company doesn’t plan to start operations this winter, but there’s no confirmation as yet. 

The RCMP did not response to a request for comment by publication time.

Smith says the threats to the region are a unifying force. He said that, while at the camp this fall, he had conversations with hunters and a coal worker that involved both disagreement, and finding common ground.

“Water and land protection and stewardship can bridge political polarization — especially water,” he says. “Most people can agree that we need clean water.”

— With files from Amber Bracken

Updated on Dec. 19, 2025, at 10:39 a.m MT: This story has been corrected to identify larch trees properly. Lark trees, as previously written, is not a tree species.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

For the past 12 winters I have been photographing and observing snowy owls in farmers’ fields northwest of Elmira, Ont. — with permission from the landowners, and a pocketful of dog treats to befriend off-leash farm dogs.

While snowy owls typically roost on the ground, they prefer a higher perch — a tree, a fencepost or hydro pole from which to hunt prey.

To witness a hunt is truly a memorable sight.

Their feathers allow near-silent flight as they swoop down to attack their prey, such as meadow voles, mice and birds. But it takes practice; I’ve witnessed inexperienced young owls chase pigeons round and round a grain silo and fail. Meanwhile, a mature female I encountered one winter targeted a pigeon 300 metres across a field and snatched it out of the sky.

In a good year, I might have seen as many as 10 snowy owls in the roughly 10-square kilometres I routinely cover. But in the past two years, only two or three have made their way to these fields for the winter, after spending the summer on the Arctic tundra. Birders and ecologists across Ontario and Quebec have also reported fewer sightings in recent years. 

Although some snowy owls remain in the Arctic year-round, many begin migrating southward in late autumn. In years when an abundance of lemmings can be found on the tundra, the number of chicks born — or the clutch size — can be larger. The young owls aren’t ready to compete with experienced hunters, meaning they are pushed south.

Some migrants enjoy wintering in Ontario’s lake country, where waterfowl are abundant, while many prefer flat, open farmland that resembles tundra. With incredible eyesight, the ability to turn their heads about 270 degrees and phenomenal hearing, they are able to home in on mice and voles across a field.

But snowy owls that find their way south face human-related threats such as electrocution from power lines and rodenticide poisoning in the mice and voles they eat. Automobile collisions, though, appear to be the most common cause of death among snowy owls wintering in eastern North America.

In the North, climate change has severely impacted Arctic ecology, with the region warming three times faster than the global average, threatening the survival of many plant and animal species including the snowy owl. As the treeline creeps north in the warming climate, the snowy owl’s tundra is also giving way to forest.

Lemmings are their main source of food in the Arctic, and breeding success is intertwined with any fluctuation in the population of these rodents. A healthy number of lemmings generally means more “snowies.” The opposite is also true. As snow cover thaws and refreezes amid warmer temperatures and rainfall, lemmings — who can forage plants and lichen through snow — are prevented from reaching their food sources by the ice. 

Warmer temperatures could also see the northward advance of insect borne diseases such as West Nile virus, which has been found in migrating snowy owls. Snowy owls are also gradually losing their circumpolar habitat as mining interests grow in the Canadian North and oil and gas interests take up space, such as along Alaska’s northern slope. The massive oilfield in Prudhoe Bay is 300 kilometres east of a traditional snowy owl breeding site in Utqiagvik, Alaska. And there is also the looming threat of legacy oil spills in the area, south of Utqiagvik, the town formerly known as Barrow. 

There has been a 30 per cent reduction in the breeding snowy owl population over three generations, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Since 2017, the International Union has classified snowy owls as vulnerable to extinction. The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada reported in May that, with a population decrease of more than 40 per cent over the past two decades, snowy owls are now threatened — one step away from endangered. 

The winter still brings snowy owls south. But for how much longer?

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Under heavy rain, an electronic sign by the side of the road in a small northwestern B.C. town warns passersby, “Flare height will vary.” It flashes to the next message: “Between 15 meters [sic] and 90.”

Kitimat, B.C., a coastal community about 1,400 kilometres north of Vancouver, is home to around 8,000 people — and Canada’s largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) processing facility. For the past 14 months, LNG Canada has been periodically burning excess or waste gas, a process known as flaring. At its highest, the flame is about as tall as London’s Big Ben or New York’s Statue of Liberty — not just the statue’s torch but the whole lady herself.

Speaking in the neighbouring community of Terrace, B.C., on Thursday, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced another LNG export facility — Ksi Lisims LNG — will be referred to the federal government’s newly established Major Projects Office. Projects flagged to the office are developments the Canadian government is endorsing as part of its efforts to diversify trade away from the United States, and considering fast-tracking through certain environmental and other approvals. 

“We are home to the world’s fourth largest reserves of natural gas and we have the potential to supply 100 million tonnes annually of new LNG exports to Asia,” Carney said.

Ksi Lisims LNG will be built about 200 kilometres north of Kitimat and supplied by the 800-kilometre Prince Rupert Gas Transmission pipeline, yet to be built. At full capacity, it will export around 12 million tonnes of LNG per year.

Meanwhile, the flare in Kitimat has been impacting the lives of residents and raising concerns about health and climate impacts. On social media, some Kitimat residents are grieving the loss of the night sky, posting photos and videos of a dull orange glow looming over the town. Others worry about the impact of emissions on their health, citing research on toxins emitted during LNG operations. Many have compared the near-omnipresent flame to the “Eye of Mordor,” from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

Natural gas is mostly composed of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that is invisible and odourless. Methane, which is responsible for around one-third of global warming since the industrial revolution, traps 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. In other words, methane emitted now — or leaked into the atmosphere from industrial infrastructure — will directly increase the likelihood of climate disasters like wildfires, floods and droughts over the next two decades.

Burning excess gas, as LNG Canada is, reduces the amount of methane that ends up in the atmosphere by instead turning it into carbon dioxide and other toxins — meaning it still comes at a cost for locals, and the planet. 

LNG Canada — a consortium of foreign-owned fossil fuel companies led by multinational oil and gas giant Shell — maintains flaring activity is a regular part of start-up operations and says its emissions fall within provincial standards.

“Flaring is a provincially regulated safety measure that ensures the controlled, efficient combustion of natural gas during specific operational phases,” LNG Canada said in a public notification.

On Nov. 9, the consortium told the public that “flaring associated with the start-up … will be extended beyond the originally anticipated timeframe” and warned residents this would mean “intermittent” noise and emissions. LNG Canada previously offered to pay to temporarily relocate some residents living close to the flare, according to a leaked document reviewed by The Narwhal and confirmed by the consortium.

The facility is currently in its first phase, operating four gas-powered turbines that supercool the gas to -162 C, reducing its volume for transport. An already approved and permitted second phase would double the plant’s production, adding another four turbines, corresponding flaring facilities — and, presumably, more warnings to residents.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.