BC Books Online was created for anyone interested in BC-published books, and with librarians especially in mind. We'd like to make it easy for library staff to learn about books from BC publishers - both new releases and backlist titles - so you can inform your patrons and keep your collections up to date.
Our site features print books and ebooks - both new releases and backlist titles - all of which are available to order through regular trade channels. Browse our subject categories to find books of interest or create and export lists by category to cross-reference with your library's current collection.
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In The Private Eye we learn about snow geese through the eyes of Native people, scientists, artists, hunters, and farmers. Yup'ik Eskimo Charles Hunt harvests snow geese along the Yukon River delta each fall, continuing a subsistence way of life that has existed for millennia. Russian, Canadian, and U.S. scientists track the movements of the geese each spring and fall, banding, sexing, counting, and precisely monitoring the activities of these beautiful birds. Robert Bateman provides an artist's view of nature and relates how his curiosity led him to join a camp set up at a remote nesting site.
Mary Burns also talks to hunters, joining a party of them as they wait for their snow geese decoys to lure the real thing into a Westham Island field in the Fraser delta. As well, Burns travels around the Skagit River delta during a population survey and meets a dairy farmer who describes both the wild flocks that converge on his fields each spring and the snow geese he raises in pens.
The Private Eye suggests that by acknowledging our many and varied connections with the natural world, we will have a better understanding of the human place in it.
Mary Burns is the author of two story collections, Suburbs of the Arctic Circle and Shinny's Girls, a trilogy of novellas, Centre/Center, and several radio plays. She teaches in the Language, Literature and Performing Arts department of Douglas College and in the Writing and Publishing Program of Simon Fraser University.
... the passionate story of her involvement with these geese who summer in the remote north of Siberia and winter on the deltas of the Fraser and Skagit rivers, as well as a strong sense of the geese within their environment, and a never-diminished sense of involvement....A wonderful read. (4 stars)
an interesting, sometimes poetic, factual narrative combined with an introduction to some of the natural history of a local species....occasionally Snow Goose behaviour is described in sufficient detail for me to recognize similarities with Konrad Lorenz’s greylag geese in the classic Here am I. Where are You?