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Throat singers Melody Kuneluk and Evik Ayalik at Yellowknife’s Folks On the Rocks festival. Chances are good Richard Davis will [...]

Showy Lady’s Slipper orchids add light and beauty to the Purdon Conservation Area near Ottawa. You have to wonder what Joe Purdon would have thought as a hot pink tour bus comes crunching in off Concession Road 8 in Lanark, Ont., shattering the morning quiet of the old woodlot. The emerging visitors–some two dozen garden club members toting cameras, hats and bug spray–chat enthusiastically as they head for the wooden hut that houses a humble one-seater.

Welcome to Purdon Conservation Area, 25 hectares of former farmland [...]

Probably every Canadian has heard, maybe even hummed, the 1956 Woody Guthrie folk classic “This Land is Your Land”–preferably the Canadian version. As a child, I had a vivid image of the phrase: “As I was walking that ribbon of highway/I saw above me that endless skyway…” I could picture a vast land mass, like the pink-toned map of Canada that used to hang at the front of my school classroom, brought to life by a shiny satin ribbon constantly changing color as it snaked across the country. Azure sky flapped above and rivers flashed below, accentuated by dark evergreen forests. [...]

A solitary red-winged blackbird hops expectantly around a gravel parking lot next to the takeout lunch trailer. The small bird isn’t at all shy, or wary of humans milling nearby. Pausing in front of a sign that warns “Please do not feed the fish,” our guide notices the bird and a quick frown crosses his face. “That’s not something we like to see,” he mutters, then shakes his head and moves on. Such scrounging is troubling, he explains, because this is Point Pelee National Park–a place that is meant to remain wild, and feeding of creatures in the wild is discouraged. [...]