By: Michael Minnick, University of Tennessee, Chattanooga
I’ve been enamored by animals for as long as I can remember. I can recall my first trip to a zoo as a child, and the truly wonderful feeling that I felt seeing all the animals I had only seen on TV standing right in front of me. As a child, this was an almost magical feeling. But such wonder and excitement are far from gone as an adult. So, needless to say, when the opportunity to study abroad with Round River in British Columbia came about, I was itching to go. I could imagine pristine wilderness full of wildlife like bears, moose, caribou, and many more. My imagination became reality on our drive into Atlin, where a black bear and her cub were munching away at vegetation right there on the side of the road. The surrounding mountains and lakes were breathtaking beyond any I had ever seen, and I couldn’t wait to get started exploring and seeing what the land had in store for me.
Over our first few weeks, I was pleased to see that the land was, indeed, packed full of wildlife. Of course, we had many amazing sightings such as a grizzly bear, several moose, a radio-collared Stone’s sheep, and many more. But what struck me as odd was the discrepancy between the volume of tracks, scat, and other signs that we encountered compared to the number of animals we had seen. If the signs were proportional to the sightings, we should have seen animals around every bend in the road or curve in the trail. How do animals like grizzlies and moose disappear so easily into the landscape? It felt as though most of the animals were moving through the landscape like ghosts, leaving only hints of their existence for us to see. I think it was this thought that made me realize something: this land and its ecosystems have been here for so much longer than I could truly comprehend. Its mountains, valleys, rivers and lakes had all been here long before humans settled here and so had the wildlife. They moved through the landscape as part of a system that had been at work for millennia. I realized that our mere hours and days on the land were not enough to truly capture the mystery and vastness of this new world we had stepped into. I came to British Columbia with an expectation of a land filled with amazing creatures, and that is exactly what I discovered, just maybe not in the way that I expected.
Every once in a while, the ghosts would allow us a glimpse into their lives. A grizzly munching on dandelions on a hillside, a moose grazing in a field just after dark, a porcupine walking right through our campsite, and a caribou wandering right up to us on a mountaintop, just to name a few. I began to see each wildlife sighting as a privilege; a chance to glimpse a small yet beautiful part of something so much grander than we could ever know. To this day I still love trips to the zoo and seeing the conservation efforts at work, but witnessing these creatures in their natural world is an unparalleled experience. The “ghosts” of the land go about their lives all around us, leaving behind traces that allow us a small taste of something so ancient and vast beyond our human minds.
