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In the evening on the
14th, my parents had arrived, so on the fifteenth I had six visitors:
my brother, sister-in-law, two nieces, and parents. It had become
a regular family gathering. Despite the fact that it was already
mid-April, the weather was cold, windy, and wet.
But my family wasn't
in town for long, so we went out anyhow. We started from my place
with a walk down the New Westminster Quay. A little ways along,
there's a playground, and my nieces couldn't resist having a go.
Here's Sydney at the top of a big spiderweb.
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| Chloe couldn't
climb the spiderweb, but she had a lot of fun on the slide. |
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| We continued
down the quay, looking at the flower beds, and taking some time
for a posed photo or two. |
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| I had my
short zoom (24-120mm) on the camera, so I was able to get a few
flower shots. This was the prettiest of the bunch. |
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| I wasn't
the only one taking photos. Here's my dad, bundled up against the
weather, taking a photo of the girls with the camera in his phone.
And that's my mom looking on from behind. |
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If you know the quay,
then you can see in the above photo that we'd almost reached the
market. Once we completely reached it, we stopped and had lunch.
At lunch we decided on trying to find something indoors to do,
because the weather had been fairly unpleasant.
Eventually we settled
on visiting the Vancouver Aquarium, and soon we were in the van
heading down to Stanley park. Due to some construction and some
uninformative signs, it took us a while to find where to park
and where the aquarium was relative to the parking. But eventually
we made it there.
Once inside, we went
towards the wing that had tanks of local flora and fauna. I used
to scuba dive some locally, and it was neat to be reminded of
some of the interesting stuff I used to see in our waters. Like
these white stalked things: Plumose Anemones.
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| On the left
in the photo above, and the main subject in the one below, is a
Basket Star (a type of starfish). I've never seen one of these in
the wild. |
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| On the other
hand, I've seen plenty of Moon Jellyfish in the wild, so they were
easy to recognize. The aquarium had an interesting background and
lighting on the tank that contained them. Unfortunately, this tank,
like most of the tanks, didn't have enough light to get really clear
photos with my lens (I still had the short zoom on the camera). |
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| Here's another
photo that got a little blurry because of the low light; those things
are called Sea Pens. Like corals and anemones, they're actually
animals. |
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| As near
as I can tell, the following photo shows a Painted Star and a few
White-spotted Tealias. Tealias are a type of anemone. |
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| Like this
spectacular anemone, which is called the Fish-eating Tealia. |
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| Unfortunately,
I don't have good reference material on all of our underwater species,
and so I haven't been able to identify either the sea star or the
anemones in this photo. |
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| But that
didn't stop my nieces or my brother Sam from enjoying them. |
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| After finishing
off the local-waters exhibits, we headed outside to see what was
in the outdoor tanks. The first critter we came upon was a Sea Otter,
tending to his fur. |
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| At the next
tank, this big fella (a Steller's Sea Lion) swam over to greet us.
He didn't seem to mind the rain. |
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| He must've
thought that Sydney and Chloe were doctors, because he swam right
over to them, opened his mouth, stuck out his tongue a little, and
said "aaaaah". |
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At least, it sounded
a little like "aaaaah" to me. But whatever it was that
he said, he said it pretty loudly. It surprised us all.
This seal, a much more
quiet fellow, was hanging around on the other side of same tank.
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| In the next
tank over, I caught a photo of this big white lump. The lump is
actually a Beluga. The aquarium has Beluga shows, but we had arrived
too late to see one. But we did get to see this one swimming around. |
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| In fact,
our next destination was a room underneath where I had taken the
last photo from. In that room, there's a big window onto the Beluga
tank, and we were able to watch them swimming from underwater. I
caught this photo of five of my visitors when we came out. My sister-in-law
Becky is the only one who didn't make it into this photo; she must've
been hiding. |
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| We backtracked
by the Sea Otter tank, and found its occupant playing with a ball. |
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| Now, even
at an aquarium, and even with a small lens, I am apt to get photos
of critters that fly. |
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| That flying
wonder is Spinnaker, a Pacific White-sided Dolphin. Here he is again,
up on a floating platform. |
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| We were,
perhaps obviously, watching a dolphin show. Here Spinnaker executes
an easier jump. That first jump (two photos ago) was about two or
three times this high. |
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| His show
was pretty neat (although short), and it included batting a basketball
around. I had fun trying to get good action shots of him. |
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After the dolphin show,
we wondered back inside, and found a hot, steamy section with
reptiles and other warm-climate species. They even had a few proper
birds in there, so Spinnaker didn't have to be my only flying
beast. In a big central room I found these two beauties. They're
ibises of some sort, probably Scarlet Ibises.
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And nearby, pattering
around on the ground, there was this little lady, who one of my
nieces pointed out to me. She's a game bird of some sort, like
a partridge or a quail, but I haven't been able to figure out
the species.
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She was my last interesting
subject of that day.
In my next entry, my
family and I will take a trip over to Vancouver Island.
Wondering if there's
a way to get a sea lion to floss,
Tom
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