We don’t see her fly in. She is just there, floating serenely on the pond. Who is she? A soft-looking crest of light brown feathers crowns her.

Had I not wished to name her, know her, had I not looked her up on the internet, I could have watched her to my heart’s content. I could have photographed her. I could have gradually learned, by observation, what birding websites taught me vicariously.

She is a female hooded merganser. Her slender serrated pointed bill is designed for catching fish; mergansers are the only North American ducks which specialize in eating fish.

Our forty x fifty foot pond, where she is floating, has several large and many tiny fish drowsing under a rock in its middle. They are in torpor for the winter. She senses this. She has come for a meal.

Mergansers are strong swimmers and have excellent underwater vision. They change their eyes to improve their underwater refractive vision, and have an extra eyelid, a transparent nictitating membrane, which helps protect their eyes during swimming. Our wee fish won’t stand a chance.

As we watch I describe this to my husband, who is very fond of “our fish”, and to my daughter, who is visiting. I muse that if this were a natural pond we would be delighted by her presence. If we lived on a lake-shore we would cheer her on. But our pond is a large constructed pond with a rubber liner. We are in the privileged position of enjoying this environment, which we have created and which is indeed beautiful, but is not wild. We feel obliged to chase away racoons, close gates against deer and bear, and chase off predatory birds to protect ‘our’ flowering plants. And the pears in autumn. And the fish we inherited from a previous owner.

My daughter comments, “This is the whole situation, right here.” She is right. We are privileged humans living in a constructed oasis. We interact with other creatures who live in the wild. We live on their territory

The pond was built with the house in 1993. When we moved here, in 2020, the liner was ruined: full of holes and leaking. The shrubs around the pond were overgrown and competed for light. Three years ago, in the midst of a summer drought, we redid the pond.

First, we removed mature shrubs from its perimeter leaving a barren landscape backed by cedar trees. The pond-water was pumped into two inflatable wading pools. Garden assistants in waders netted the fish and put them in the pools. We counted twenty-eight full grown fish: koi and koi-goldfish hybrids, goldfish, a trout. They had likely lived there since 1993. No doubt there were originally many more fish.

A layer of silt was removed from the liner with wheel barrows and dumped in the yard to become compost. The liner was cut into pieces and removed. Nine workers—eight men and one woman, rolled the new liner into place, draping it around the edges of the pond then the water and fish were returned to the pond. Over time the edges of the liner were secured with boulders and new plantings were established.

We lost some fish the first year. Beautiful white and gold creatures floated on the surface of the water the next spring. The trout died next. Then I watched a kingfisher dive from a branch in the Japanese snowbell tree and capture one of our two mature goldfish. Racoons also captured fish. The one remaining large koi, who my husband named Stripe for the gold stripe running down their back, surprised us by laying eggs.

Now the population of the pond is a very few large fish and many grey or black minnows with odd flashes of gold. Perfect food for this merganser who is the most serious threat our small fish have yet faced.

My friend, who lives on Saltspring Island, tells me of a bay on that island, Xwaaqw’um, in the Hul’q’umi’num’ language, meaning “female merganser duck place”. Hul’q’umi’num’ speaking people accessed this area for food, including merganser ducks, which were netted and speared, with other waterfowl, during summer and autumn months. Merganser duck feathers are important in indigenous ceremonial dance regalia. (Salt Springs Archives, Indigenous Place Names of Salt Spring Island ).

I have only had that initial sighting of her, as my husband has been determinedly defending our fish ever since. He tosses pebbles in her proximity to scare her off. “I don’t throw then at her”, he says. She has become so wary of humans she flies off as soon as one moves in her vicinity. He sets up his phone as a security camara, its screen visible even in the darkness of early evening. “I think she is sneaky”, he says.

The first floater we find is our last surviving goldfish. Like with the kingfisher, this fish is too large for her to swallow but not too large to attack.

She is remarkably persistent, which makes me wonder if she is planning to nest nearby. Mergansers nest in tree cavities. We are surrounded by trees: cedar, fir, alder, pine, and more. Hooded mergansers lay from six to thirteen eggs, sometimes in the nests of other birds. They climb trees. Their babies are independent within one day of hatching and can run, to escape predators, on the surface of the water.

Why is she alone? Mergansers usually flock, floating serenely on water for much of the day. Is she alone because she is not part of a flock, doesn’t have a secure place to fish, other than our pond? Has she lost her mate?

Why is she alone?

What will we do if she finds a mate, hatches thirteen ducklings and leads them to our pond?

My husband says, “we’ll have to put a curse upon her feathers”, but I know he doesn’t mean it.

Will we continue to protect our fenced world or will we open our arms to them? Will we become wilder?

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I thought I had sent this out a month ago, came to do a new post, and discovered it was never sent!

Albertans take note! New York photographer, Alison Rossiter and Edmonton sculptor, Catherine Burgess have a wonderful collaborative exhibition titled Temporal on until February 22, 2026 at the Art Gallery of Alberta. I intend to fly out to see it after Christmas.

Years and years ago I studied photography at the Banff Centre with Alison Rossiter and Ross Colquhoun, among others. Both Alison and Ross helped me with my original foray into “saving” the photographs of my grandfather, Byron Harmon, while living in Toronto in the 1970’s.

Both Alison and Ross helped me build darkrooms, first on Spruce Street, (Alison). This one didn’t work out with room-mates, I had to move.

Then, in a warehouse on Ontario Street, (Ross). I rented the 3000 sq. ft. third floor of this warehouse, which had been a peanut factory. It had two offices which we used as bedrooms, and a vast open space with brick walls, windows on two sides, and a hardwood floor with a gigantic mound of peanut oil in the middle. Ross sand blasted the walls and build the darkroom, a bathroom and a rudimentary kitchen. I was manual labour: I tore up the linoleum in the offices, and sanded and refinished the floors. That winter it was freezing cold, except in the offices where the radiators were located, so we hung translucent plastic around the living room area.

Both friends also worked on the conservation project: making copy negatives with the big film processor at Ryerson Polytechnic, (Alison) and contact printing those negatives (Ross). I edited the collection; we made copy negatives of this edit which weeded out duplication, and labelled the archival sleeves which replaced the rotting paper envelopes the originals had been crammed into for years.

While living in Toronto, Ross met and married scientist Mary Brunkow, they now live in Seattle with twin daughters.

On October 27 Alison alerted me that Mary was one of three scientists to be awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance. Their work identified how the immune system regulates itself. Their discoveries have laid the foundation for a new field of research and spurred the development of new treatments, for example for cancer and autoimmune diseases.

The interviews with Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi on the Nobel Prize Website make much better reading than the morning rundown on politics.

I feel proud and lucky to know these remarkable friends. Alison, whose work with expired photographic papers renders poetry from history. Ross for his support of me at an important point in his life, and more importantly, the women in his family.

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I thought it would be a good thing to let you know, dear readers, how I got mixed up with trying to preserve, sometimes resurrect, exhibit, and promote my grandfather’s photographs.

In 1972, the first year of my photo program at the Banff Centre, I researched Man Ray for our assignment on historical photographers; I chose him because I had lived in Paris, so it felt like I was walking those streets again.

My friend Ed Cavell chose Byron Harmon. It felt strange to have someone in my class studying my grandfather. I love his pictures but he isn’t famous like Man Ray or Alfred Stieglitz and he wasn’t an art photographer. Or was he?

The next year, at the opening for our final photo exhibition, my friend poet and fellow Banffite Jon Whyte and I were standing beside my installation piece, Window, when he nonchalantly said, “why don’t you do something with your grandfather’s photographs?” I stammered an inane reply. Jon loved my gullibility and often set me up, so I wasn’t sure if he meant what he said or was pulling my leg.

At the time Jon was writing epic poems about historical Canadian figures, like Henry Kelsey, and these included poems about his aunt and uncle, artists Catherine and Peter Whyte.

I took Jon’s comment more literally.

Byron’s negatives are stored in a three drawer wooden filing cabinet in the storeroom at Byron Harmon Photos. I open the top drawer, cough as must and dust erupt. The drawers are jammed full of his 5X7 black-and-white negatives which have been crammed into rotting brown paper envelopes. The name of the trip is typed in the upper left corner: Bow Movie Trip 1914, Bow Movie Trip 1917, Columbia Icefields 1924. When I remove negatives from the envelopes bits of paper crumble away. Along the Line of the CPR: trains, canyons, city streets, farming on the prairies.

In another drawer are 5X7 glass plates and film negatives of Indigenous portraits.

Under a long counter in the workroom, where postcard orders are packed, the shelves are stacked with black-and-white prints which used to be for sale in Harmony Drugstore on A shaped display stands. Some are hand coloured. Boxes of black-and-white postcards—thousands of them.

Jon’s question sticks to me like a burr.

This was a hunting trip, not because Byron was a hunter himself, but because he wanted to film and photograph that popular sport. In my view, Byron was documenting all aspects of life in the mountains, one photo excursion at a time.

In the left hand image the man operating the movie camera is likely the packer for the trip. Behind him is Jimmy Simpson, the guide. Byron often did set-up shots like this. Either he was filming while someone else clicked the shutter of the still camera or, as in this case, someone else was posing as the cinematographer while he took the still shot.

This blog is associated with the website Harmon Mountain Studios where you can view a large selection of Harmon mountain images and order exhibition quality prints.

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I had a revelation on Tuesday in my Feldenkreis class.

I’ve practiced conscious breathing exercises in many classes: drama speech classes, sufi breathing, yogic breathing, continuum movement breathing. I’ve understood the importance of exhaling, of emptying the body of air and toxins in order to allow the inbreathe to occur naturally. I’ve practiced this without seeing clearly what was implied.

I don’t want to go into a complex description of the diaphragm and how it works. Instead, here’s a breathing exercise I was given in hospital following surgery to help the body recover quickly from anaesthetic. It’s pretty much the same as the exercise in Silke Billig’s Feldenkreis class about the diaphragm.

Lie on the floor or your bed and empty your lungs. Keep breathing out until you feel there is no more air to be expelled. Hold your breath out until your body naturally begins to inhale (not as a gasp, but as a slow and natural replenishment).

There was more to the class—practice in relaxing various parts of the body while continuing with this breath pattern.

THE REASON I wanted to write about this today is that part of the epiphany for me was realizing that the entire world is holding its breath IN as wars, natural disasters, and mis-directed politics unscroll a scenario of doom before us, with our tense bodies in flight fight or freeze.

Exhale those toxins and allow your body to naturally inhale a new perspective. Relax your muscles as healing oxygen flows throughout your body. I can’t guarantee it will change your worldview but I promise your body will thank you.

I conclude with this photograph because I so love the name of this section of beautiful coastline on the south shore of Vancouver Island.

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