Carrie’s Ramblings

Birds and the bears
Carrie posted in Uncategorized on June 17th, 2007

This week I pulled a bunch of hours doing work for the Yukon Volunteer Bureau. We started this huge membership campaign and sent out over 200 letters to various organisations telling them about the YVB and all it has to offer. The hope is that with more members, the government will increase the funding that they cut off this year. Right now the Federal government (who used to provide over $120,000 to the YVB) has completely cut them off and the YTG only give $60,000. That’s no where near enough to support the organisation! Plus Thursday was Jen’s last day and so it was just me and Jonathan to hold down the fort. I feel bad for him when I go…there’s no way one person can run that place.

It’s been raining most of the week (awfully strange for a semi-arid climate) but I made it out to the last 2 birding trips of the season. It was really neat to go birding with an expert on bird calls and also to have the chance to see some birds through the spotting scope. You can see so much detail! Plus I made some contacts on the trips with individuals who volunteer so I’ll be busy with interviews next week.

This week I did a lot of research into different organisations and contacting people. A lot of emailing and playing phone tag. I also figured out the issue with the website and managed to get my abstract submitted to the ACUNS conference (Association of Canadian Universities in Northern Studies….or something like that). But mostly I spent my time working at the YVB.

Today Greg, Christian (friends from the hostel) and I escaped the rain and dreary weather to go on a road trip to Skagway. This time the border guy was a real prick. He kept lecturing us about how Skagway isn’t like going to Disneyland, it’s actually in another country and we need to be prepared for that! We were thinking, Disneyland is in another country as well…Of course we had a borrowed car with Manitoba licence plates, a German with his passport and visa, a BC licence and an Ontario licence, but we were clearly on a simple day trip with absolutely nothing with us but our wallets and cameras! Then he addresses me directly and says, “Where were you born?” and I say, “Calgary, Alberta but I have an Ontario driver’s licence because that’s where I live.” And he says, “Well it’s just a driver’s licence! It doesn’t prove you’re a citizen it’s just ID! When the government says ‘Proof of citizenship’ you have to be prepared to show more than just your drivers licence!” I didn’t say anything and sat there thinking ‘the government doesn’t say ‘proof of citizenship’ it just says, ‘government issued ID’. Anyway, he didn’t actually ask us any other questions but just kept lecturing us about travelling across the border and then Christian had to go pay $6 to get his visa. There were about 2 cars ahead of us and we were probably there for a good 15 minutes before we even got to the agent. Oh! and the clincher was that Christian had borrowed the car off his girlfriend but we didn’t have any proof that she lent it to us willingly (our bad, we should have thought of that). So customs officer says “Well you need to think about these things!!! Because what’s the first think a person does when they steal something!?!?!?” And this is not a rhetorical question, he wants an answer! We sat there staring at him expectantly until he looks directly at me for an answer so I stammer, “I don’t actually know…I’ve never stolen anything.” So he lectures us some more (we cut the engine a while ago) and then he lets us through, no further questions. Ridiculous. But I was inside making conversation with the other officers while Christian was doing the visa thing and they were super nice. The one guy was there the last time we came through and he was nice. On the drive to and from Skagway we saw a black bear on the side of the road. We pulled over and just watched it for about 10 minutes not 5 meters from the car. He was just chillin’, eating some Dandelions. But the second one was really young and we kept looking around waiting for Mom to show up but she never did. I don’t know if the cub was abandoned or what but I still had images of the velociraptor-styles sneak attack from the side. Nothing happened.

Tomorrow I move to my new and permanent housesit. Heather was kind enough to let me stay an extra week with her as her roommate instead of having to move back down to the hostel and then back up again. The new place is in the same neighbourhood so I’ll get to use the same trails to walk the dog with which I’ve already become so familiar. (That familiarity comes from hours of wandering around hopelessly turned around and trying to get out).

More to come!