Mid-career, Dyar was charged with bigamy having been married to a second person under an assumed name and fathering three sons. His first wife divorced him and he was dismissed from the USDA ”for conduct unbecoming a government employee”.  He later legally remarried and adopted the three boys.   

In 1924 a truck’s back wheels broke through some pavement in Washington D.C.. Upon investigation it was discovered that it had broken through the roof of a tile-lined tunnel. After some speculation in the press, Dyar admitted that he had yet another hobby building tunnels and had developed extensive labyrinths around at least two of the places he had lived. Some were up to 24 feet deep and equipped with electric lighting.
 
For more information on the life of Harrison Gray Dyar Jr. click here and here.

And if Stephen Heard is looking for material for a second volume on ”Adventurers, Heroes and Even a Few Scoundrels” that have lent their names to species, he may want to look at the person behind the name on Gabriola dayri, he appears to fall into all three categories. 

The Canada Goose (Branta canadensis) on the Saanich Peninsula has an interesting history that is documented in a paper by Neil Dawe and Andy Stewart. Prior to the 1970’s the Canada Goose was mostly a migrant and winter visitor to our part of the island, although small numbers of the “Vancouver” subspecies of Canada Goose nest on the northern part of the island.   There were several small introductions of Canada Geese to the southwest coast of the British Columbia in the late 1920s and early 1930s and then again in the 1970s when larger numbers of Canada Geese were introduced to the lower mainland and S.E. Vancouver Island. These geese came from a variety of places and did not include the subspecies that was breeding on the island.

The earliest documented release of Canada Geese on Vancouver Island was in 1929 when 16 Canada Geese were let loose from a game farm operated by the province at Elk Lake on the Saanich Peninsula.  These introduced birds were augmented by other introductions and reproduced rapidly. By 1958 there were 200 Canada Geese on Elk Lake and were seen moving between Elk and Quamichan Lake in the Cowichan Valley.  

The earliest breeding record I have found for the Victoria area away from Elk-Beaver Lakes was in the notes from the naturalist Tom Briggs that I have entered into eBird.  On May 16, 1960 he wrote, “Met Dave, Ruth [Stirling] and Diedre; they had seen a goose on a nest ....on top of an old snag" ( https://ebird.org/checklist/S27964036) and for the next few days Tom made repeated trips to the Highlands to show others this nest, an exciting find in 1960! 

In the fall and winter our resident birds are augmented by migrant and wintering geese that breed further north.  Many northern hemisphere geese (Canada, Snow, Ross’s, Cackling, Greater White-fronted, Red-breasted, Barnacle, Brant and Pink-footed) are on the increase. It is estimated that there are three times as many geese in North American as there were 30 years ago. (For a review of trends in northern hemisphere geese click here).  The increase in the combination of resident geese and overwintering migrants can be seen below in the graph for Canada Goose for the Christmas Bird Count for the Victoria area.

Here at Leaning Oaks, we have records of Canada Geese for most of the year, except for the first three weeks of July.  This is the period of the year where our resident Canada Geese moult their flight feathers and cannot fly.  Since there are numerous records from nearby Prospect Lake during this period, and that lake is within earshot, they are clearly quieter during this period as well.

As large as a crow, Dryocopus pileatus is Canada’s largest woodpecker and a year-round resident here at Leaning Oaks.  Few days go by when we don’t see one or more of these spectacular birds at our suet feeder, or hear the high pitched and nasal “cuk, cuk, cuk, cuk, cuk” call of this woodpecker.  Masters of wood processing their presence can be detected by the large feeding holes they create in trunks of trees.  These can be rectangular in shape, particularly when they are searching for ants in Western Red Cedar trunks. In fact, they can be so rectangular I have encountered people that refuse to believe they aren’t human made.  It isn’t the only type of feeding hole they make and here our largest Douglas-fir trees have large irregular holes in the bark in the lower trunks where Pileated Woodpeckers have been searching for the grubs of wood boring beetles.  They also feed heavily on Carpenter Ants and Dampwood Termites .
Pileated, by the way,  means having a crest covering the pileum (top of a birds head from the base of the bill to the nape).