Thursday evening, Aug. 18
We fly out from Norman Wells on the afternoon scheduled jet flight to Yellowknife. The man sitting next to me is friendly and we chat throughout the flight. He works for a global business that helps the oil company to find more oil and gas in their existing wells. An Indonesian, he [...]

Thursday, Aug. 18, Norman Wells
A peek through the window shades when the alarm beeps at six confirms yesterday’s forecast–rain, wind, and a low, gray cloud ceiling that hides the mountains. At least its not snowing though you can bet that it is up on the high slopes.
After breakfast, Jason, our guide from Ducks Unlimited, drives [...]

My father-in-law picked up the phone when I called home to my wife from the Mackenzie Hotel in Norman Wells. “What does it look like?” he asked before handing the phone over to my wife. Trying to give him a sense of the immensity of this land in a sound bite I replied, “Imagine a [...]

A single Orange-crowned Warbler landed on a telephone wire …

We arrived in Deline–a community of 600 mainly Dene people along the shores of Great Bear Lake–late yesterday afternoon after a 90 minute flight north from Yellowknife. For about an hour we flew over open spruce forests, bogs, and lakes where there were no roads, no towns, no development. As we got closer to Deline [...]

The day dawns cloudy and rainy but by 7 it has begun to lighten and I feel the need to get out before our 8 AM breakfast meeting. In a little scrubby patch across from the high school I find my first Blackpoll Warbler of the day–yet another scruffy bird, apparently a bird of the [...]

Canadian North–a medium size white jet with a yellow sun and polar bear painted on its blue tail–boards from the rear via a stairway. The rear boarding reminds me of some flights to and from small islands in the Caribbean. Once aboard I see there are three seats on each side and an unusual abbreviation [...]

3:00 PM Edmonton, Alberta
This morning (8/14) I left my home in Maine at 6 AM, the sound of one of the last singing American Robins echoing around the neighborhood. Eleven hours and several bouts of cramped legs, spilled tea, and bobbing head nod-offs later, I find myself in the lobby of the Edmonton airport. I’ve [...]

Map of area Dr. Jeff Wells is visiting

On Sunday (8/14), I leave for a five-day fact-finding exploration of the Northwest Territory’s Mackenzie Valley. The Mackenzie River, Canada’s longest, flows 1,800 kilometers from Great Slave Lake north to the Beaufort Sea. Its watershed, which covers 20% of Canada, is located in the heart of the Boreal [...]

We sometimes think of the Boreal as a vast forest and, in part, it is. But the Boreal also contains vast wetlands – over a million lakes, rivers, streams, ponds, and bogs. The Boreal is home to Canada’s longest river, the Mackenzie, that drains a watershed covering 20% of the country. The Boreal also contains [...]