InFocus Magazine

 

If you’ve been in Downtown Courtenay lately on a Wednesday night and you’ve taken a walk along England Avenue, decease
you may have noticed something interesting happening through the windows of Café Barrio Fiesta.  The tables and chairs have been stacked behind the counter to clear the floor space, treat
and people are dancing tango.  Not just any kind of tango.  They are dancing close embrace tango, with the partners chest-to-chest and moving to the melodic strains of golden age (circa 1930s) tango music.

The floor space is tight, but the classes mimic the sort of thing you might find in Buenos Aires, Argentina—the birthplace of tango.  There, close embrace tango is the social dance of the community and it is danced by young and old.  Certainly the diversity of people at Café Barrio Fiesta attests to the appeal of the dance.

But how did such a class end up in Downtown Courtenay?  The answer is a small group of instructors determined to share their love of the dance.  One such instructor is Claude Bigler, a Swiss-German hairstylist and owner operator of Claude Bigler and Friends in Courtenay.  For the past few years he has been introducing students to his preferred style of traditional tango de salón and close embrace tango.  He is the instructor at Café Barrio Fiesta, and a passionate enthusiast of all things tango.

“Tango is everywhere in Buenos Aires,” says Bigler.  “The dance halls are packed, and for it to flow you must dance close.  And if you stand above it all and look down, the whole things moves like an open watch.”

Bigler of course would know.  He learned to dance and teach tango in Buenos Aires under the tutelage of renowned tango instructor Nelida Teresa Boyer, and makes annual trips to Argentina for personal instruction and practice.  However it wasn’t the dance that attracted Bigler to tango.

“I heard this beautiful music, and I liked the music,” says Bigler simply of how he came to learn tango.  You quickly realize, however, that’s an understatement.  Bigler regularly breaks out in song during the Wednesday evening classes, singing the lyrics that most of his students don’t understand.  He’ll also clap his hands, and move solo around the edges of the dance floor all in hopes of conveying to his students the emotion behind the song. In fact, musicality is at the heart of Bigler’s tango dancing, and he strives to teach his students how to interpret the sounds of the music through their dance steps.  For Bigler, technique and dance steps are a means to an end, that end being your own individual dance style.

It’s something fellow tango enthusiast and internationally renowned Vancouver Symphony Orchestra pianist Linda Lee Thomas relates to.  Bigler and Thomas are long time tango friends, and on March 8 and 9, Thomas will be playing a tango concert at Studio Live in Cumberland.

“For me, of course the music came first,” says Thomas.  “I first heard Astor Piazzolla in 1988 in Vancouver, and it blew me away.  That night I knew I had to play this wonderful music.  It was many years after that when I heard there was an Argentine dance tango teacher in Vancouver.  So I thought I should go along to a class or two, hoping I could learn something about the dance that would enhance my playing.  Well I got hooked on the dance as well.

“The music definitely informs the dance,” continues Thomas, “or it should, anyway.  A good tanguero will know the music and will lead the lady appropriately to the music. Without music there can be no dance.  The music inspires the dancers, if they are listening to it and it tells them what to do.  The music of tango goes straight to the heart, and it takes the dancers with them.”

For Thomas, playing and dancing tango has been an amazing artistic and personal journey.  And when she had to cancel a private performance for Bigler’s 65th birthday party this past November, she decided to make up for it with another concert.  Bigler decided an event like that needed to be shared, and together they created an evening of live tango music and dance to celebrate their mutual love of the genre.  The event is open to the public, and anyone with an interest in tango dance or music.

For the uninitiated, however, such devotion to a particular musical and dance form on the part of two people—let alone an entire foreign city—might be hard to believe.  Let’s face it, the music is old and the dance is a product of the 19th century.  Why would anyone today want to dance tango?  Bigler has a simple answer—intimacy.

“I think today, in this century you date by the internet, you meet by the internet.  Where can you go and meet a strange person and be in their arms and maybe never know their name?” he asks.  “To be able to go to a place and have a strange person in front of you, dancing chest-to-chest… that’s intimate.  Tango is not sexual.  It is sensual but not sexual, and it’s safe.”

In fact, tango, like all social dances, seems to tap into an innate human need for physical movement and contact.  Bigler likes to refer to an Argentine Tango study out of Montreal, where researchers divided elderly study participants into two groups—an exercise group and a tango dance group. The idea was to see which offered more health benefits.  The answer was tango.

“The tango people fell in love with the music so it was easy for them to go back every week,” says Bigler.  “And they gained balance unknowingly.  There were no hip breaks in the tango group.  And problem solving—the tango people won hands down.”

However, social dance is often seen as inaccessible and difficult, especially for men. That’s something Bigler can relate to.  “My first dance in Buenos Aires, I sat and watched.  I picked a woman to ask to dance,” he says.  “What I didn’t know was you asked someone to dance like this!” Bigler tilts his head to one side and raises an eyebrow in something that is a cross between a question and a come-hither look.  A potential dance partner so asked will then either tilt their head and raise their eyebrow in acceptance or shake their head to decline.

Bigler instead walked across the dance floor and asked this woman to dance.  She promptly and emphatically declined him.  In fact, to hear Bigler tell the story, it was something more akin to a public shaming for not following the rules, and he was deeply embarrassed.  He left the dance floor convinced he would never learn tango, and was instead determined to make the best of his trip to Buenos Aires by going fishing in Patagonia.

Instead, fate intervened and the woman who so sharply rejected him on the dance floor ended up introducing him to a dance instructor who would teach him the basics.

“After my experience, I said if I were able to learn this dance I would really want to teach men,” continues Bigler.  “Us guys play soccer.  These guys in North America play football and hockey.  Why would we know how to dance?”

“The man should bring the openness that ideally he has no clue and that skill can be acquired step by step.  If you can snap to a tune and you can walk, you can learn this dance.”

In fact, you may not actually need to know how to walk. A part of Bigler’s training to become a teacher of Argentine dance included instruction on how to teach differently abled dancers. He worked with amputees, people with mobility issues such as injured knees and those who needed mobility aids such as a cane or brace.

“Everyone needed a different approach,” remembers Bigler, yet, everyone could do it. And that’s something he likes to remind his female students who may experience frustration with their male dance partners who aren’t picking up the steps as quickly.

“If you want your guy to dance, give him the opportunity,” says Bigler.  “If the guys stay around long enough to learn to lead, they’ll get hooked.”

Certainly, tango dancers speak of the rich non-verbal communication they experience while dancing.  Tango is about lead and follow, and that requires an understanding not just of the music, but also of one’s dance partner’s mood, abilities and inclinations.  Bigler himself has had more than one experience of traumatized female dance partners pulled around the floor by clueless partners, who have expressed deep appreciation for his ability to shape his dance according to the moment.

As you might guess, trust is a big part of the experience as well.  Each new song and each new dance partner is an opportunity to express oneself, and learn to move in cooperation with another person.

“It’s almost like a drug,” declares Bigler.

“To people interested in tango music or dancing, I would say go for it,” agrees Thomas.  “Chase it.  But it will change your life.  And it is like a virus that you can never get rid of. But why would you want to anyway?  There is a lot of pleasure awaiting you, but it is not easy.  It takes a lifetime to learn, but the journey is awesome.”

To purchase tickets for the Night of Tango with Linda Lee Thomas, call Claude Bigler at 778-992-0029.  Tickets are available for March 8 only.  For more information about close embrace tango dance lessons, drop by Café Barrio Fiesta (on England Avenue between 5th and 6th streets) at 7pm on Wednesdays.

If you’ve been in Downtown Courtenay lately on a Wednesday night and you’ve taken a walk along England Avenue, you may have noticed something interesting happening through the windows of Café Barrio Fiesta.  The tables and chairs have been stacked behind the counter to clear the floor space, and people are dancing tango.  Not just any kind of tango.  They are dancing close embrace tango, with the partners chest-to-chest and moving to the melodic strains of golden age (circa 1930s) tango music.

The floor space is tight, but the classes mimic the sort of thing you might find in Buenos Aires, Argentina—the birthplace of tango.  There, close embrace tango is the social dance of the community and it is danced by young and old.  Certainly the diversity of people at Café Barrio Fiesta attests to the appeal of the dance.

But how did such a class end up in Downtown Courtenay?  The answer is a small group of instructors determined to share their love of the dance.  One such instructor is Claude Bigler, a Swiss-German hairstylist and owner operator of Claude Bigler and Friends in Courtenay.  For the past few years he has been introducing students to his preferred style of traditional tango de salón and close embrace tango.  He is the instructor at Café Barrio Fiesta, and a passionate enthusiast of all things tango.

“Tango is everywhere in Buenos Aires,” says Bigler.  “The dance halls are packed, and for it to flow you must dance close.  And if you stand above it all and look down, the whole things moves like an open watch.”

Bigler of course would know.  He learned to dance and teach tango in Buenos Aires under the tutelage of renowned tango instructor Nelida Teresa Boyer, and makes annual trips to Argentina for personal instruction and practice.  However it wasn’t the dance that attracted Bigler to tango.

“I heard this beautiful music, and I liked the music,” says Bigler simply of how he came to learn tango.  You quickly realize, however, that’s an understatement.  Bigler regularly breaks out in song during the Wednesday evening classes, singing the lyrics that most of his students don’t understand.  He’ll also clap his hands, and move solo around the edges of the dance floor all in hopes of conveying to his students the emotion behind the song. In fact, musicality is at the heart of Bigler’s tango dancing, and he strives to teach his students how to interpret the sounds of the music through their dance steps.  For Bigler, technique and dance steps are a means to an end, that end being your own individual dance style.

It’s something fellow tango enthusiast and internationally renowned Vancouver Symphony Orchestra pianist Linda Lee Thomas relates to.  Bigler and Thomas are long time tango friends, and on March 8 and 9, Thomas will be playing a tango concert at Studio Live in Cumberland.

“For me, of course the music came first,” says Thomas.  “I first heard Astor Piazzolla in 1988 in Vancouver, and it blew me away.  That night I knew I had to play this wonderful music.  It was many years after that when I heard there was an Argentine dance tango teacher in Vancouver.  So I thought I should go along to a class or two, hoping I could learn something about the dance that would enhance my playing.  Well I got hooked on the dance as well.

“The music definitely informs the dance,” continues Thomas, “or it should, anyway.  A good tanguero will know the music and will lead the lady appropriately to the music. Without music there can be no dance.  The music inspires the dancers, if they are listening to it and it tells them what to do.  The music of tango goes straight to the heart, and it takes the dancers with them.”

For Thomas, playing and dancing tango has been an amazing artistic and personal journey.  And when she had to cancel a private performance for Bigler’s 65th birthday party this past November, she decided to make up for it with another concert.  Bigler decided an event like that needed to be shared, and together they created an evening of live tango music and dance to celebrate their mutual love of the genre.  The event is open to the public, and anyone with an interest in tango dance or music.

For the uninitiated, however, such devotion to a particular musical and dance form on the part of two people—let alone an entire foreign city—might be hard to believe.  Let’s face it, the music is old and the dance is a product of the 19th century.  Why would anyone today want to dance tango?  Bigler has a simple answer—intimacy.

“I think today, in this century you date by the internet, you meet by the internet.  Where can you go and meet a strange person and be in their arms and maybe never know their name?” he asks.  “To be able to go to a place and have a strange person in front of you, dancing chest-to-chest… that’s intimate.  Tango is not sexual.  It is sensual but not sexual, and it’s safe.”

In fact, tango, like all social dances, seems to tap into an innate human need for physical movement and contact.  Bigler likes to refer to an Argentine Tango study out of Montreal, where researchers divided elderly study participants into two groups—an exercise group and a tango dance group. The idea was to see which offered more health benefits.  The answer was tango.

“The tango people fell in love with the music so it was easy for them to go back every week,” says Bigler.  “And they gained balance unknowingly.  There were no hip breaks in the tango group.  And problem solving—the tango people won hands down.”

However, social dance is often seen as inaccessible and difficult, especially for men. That’s something Bigler can relate to.  “My first dance in Buenos Aires, I sat and watched.  I picked a woman to ask to dance,” he says.  “What I didn’t know was you asked someone to dance like this!” Bigler tilts his head to one side and raises an eyebrow in something that is a cross between a question and a come-hither look.  A potential dance partner so asked will then either tilt their head and raise their eyebrow in acceptance or shake their head to decline.

Bigler instead walked across the dance floor and asked this woman to dance.  She promptly and emphatically declined him.  In fact, to hear Bigler tell the story, it was something more akin to a public shaming for not following the rules, and he was deeply embarrassed.  He left the dance floor convinced he would never learn tango, and was instead determined to make the best of his trip to Buenos Aires by going fishing in Patagonia.

Instead, fate intervened and the woman who so sharply rejected him on the dance floor ended up introducing him to a dance instructor who would teach him the basics.

“After my experience, I said if I were able to learn this dance I would really want to teach men,” continues Bigler.  “Us guys play soccer.  These guys in North America play football and hockey.  Why would we know how to dance?”

“The man should bring the openness that ideally he has no clue and that skill can be acquired step by step.  If you can snap to a tune and you can walk, you can learn this dance.”

In fact, you may not actually need to know how to walk. A part of Bigler’s training to become a teacher of Argentine dance included instruction on how to teach differently abled dancers. He worked with amputees, people with mobility issues such as injured knees and those who needed mobility aids such as a cane or brace.

“Everyone needed a different approach,” remembers Bigler, yet, everyone could do it. And that’s something he likes to remind his female students who may experience frustration with their male dance partners who aren’t picking up the steps as quickly.

“If you want your guy to dance, give him the opportunity,” says Bigler.  “If the guys stay around long enough to learn to lead, they’ll get hooked.”

Certainly, tango dancers speak of the rich non-verbal communication they experience while dancing.  Tango is about lead and follow, and that requires an understanding not just of the music, but also of one’s dance partner’s mood, abilities and inclinations.  Bigler himself has had more than one experience of traumatized female dance partners pulled around the floor by clueless partners, who have expressed deep appreciation for his ability to shape his dance according to the moment.

As you might guess, trust is a big part of the experience as well.  Each new song and each new dance partner is an opportunity to express oneself, and learn to move in cooperation with another person.

“It’s almost like a drug,” declares Bigler.

“To people interested in tango music or dancing, I would say go for it,” agrees Thomas.  “Chase it.  But it will change your life.  And it is like a virus that you can never get rid of. But why would you want to anyway?  There is a lot of pleasure awaiting you, but it is not easy.  It takes a lifetime to learn, but the journey is awesome.”

To purchase tickets for the Night of Tango with Linda Lee Thomas, call Claude Bigler at 778-992-0029.  Tickets are available for March 8 only.  For more information about close embrace tango dance lessons, drop by Café Barrio Fiesta (on England Avenue between 5th and 6th streets) at 7pm on Wednesdays.

Every Tuesday morning at 10 o’clock, from the last week of October to the last week of March, a group of dedicated volunteers travel to 21 different locations throughout the Comox Valley to count swans.  Steph Nathan is one of them.

“We are a dedicated bunch and we go out rain or shine, but not snow,” Nathan says with a laugh. “It’s pretty hard to count white swans against a backdrop of white snow!  And we have to consider the safety of our volunteers, too.”

Nathan has been counting swans since this program began in 1991.  “Like me, many of the members of the Comox Valley Naturalists Society who come out each week have been volunteering to do this for 10 or 20 years or more as well.  After we have visited our designated sites and counted the swans and geese in the fields, we all meet at Plates Restaurant to record the numbers.  It is then my job to tally the results and email them to a network of different people.”

Nathan and her naturalist friends don’t just count these giant white birds for the fun of it.  Their efforts to track Trumpeter swan populations have been instrumental in helping to create a highly successful swan management program in cooperation with Ducks Unlimited, Canadian Wildlife Service, the Ministry of Agriculture, and the Comox Valley Farmers’ Institute.  The program not only protects this once-endangered species, it also respects the rights of local farmers.  Despite the fact that they look so spectacular grazing on lush green fields, these magnificent birds can cause massive destruction to farmland.  They are, after all, really big birds.

With a wingspan of 2.5 metres (eight feet) and weighing a whopping 11 to 13 kilograms (25 to 30 pounds) the Trumpeter swan is the largest native North American bird.  They are powerful flyers, capable of speeds up to 80 kilometres per hour in flight.

They are also voracious eaters.  One swan will consume about 4.5 kilograms (10 pounds) of grass in a single day.  A flock of 10 swans consumes as much as a single cow.  Multiply that by 2,100—which is the average number of swans that winter here each year—and you can imagine how their eating habits damage crops.

From an historic perspective, the Trumpeter swan has not always been a cause for concern.  According to First Nation’s history, long before local European settlers began farming this ‘land of plenty,’ Trumpeter swans were not seen on Vancouver Island.  They were, however, quite prolific in other parts of North America.  They migrated from their summer breeding grounds in Alaska and the Arctic to various regions of North America for the winter.

As far back as the 1600s through to the early 1900s, European settlers hunted Trumpeter swans indiscriminately for their meat and skin, as well as their snowy white down and feathers.  The largest flight feathers were particularly prized as quill pens.  Hunting, combined with habitat destruction, eventually decimated the swan population and it was thought to be near extinction.

In 1917, the Trumpeter swan was declared a legally protected species in Canada and the USA and hunting was banned.  The population slowly grew and today Trumpeter swans are seen as a ‘vulnerable species’ instead of an endangered species.  Yet they remain on the protected list.

Although illegal hunting undoubtedly still occurs in some regions, the risk of decline from over-hunting remains minimal and the elegant Trumpeter swan can be considered a restoration success story, particularly on Vancouver Island and most notably in the Comox Valley.  Such a success story is rarely found in conservation.

Of the more than 33,000 Trumpeter swans in North America today, an estimated 6,000 now winter on Vancouver Island.  Some venture farther north, to Haida Gwaii; others winter in Port Alberni or the Cowichan Valley region.  The majority, however, flock to the Comox Valley.  If it snows here, and the ponds and fields freeze over, the swans simply take a vacation and move on to Great Central, Comox and Nimpkish Lakes.  They return to the Comox Valley a few days later, once the ice has melted.

Trumpeter swans were first recorded in the Comox Valley in 1963 and, by 1978, 250 were present.  An abundance of grasses, roots, and tubers from the intertidal and shallow ocean zone in the Courtenay River Estuary and wide expanses of farmers’ fields, rich with lush grasses, were the main attraction.

“Trumpeter swans no longer feed in large numbers in the estuary due, in part, to human actions,” says Art Martell, a retired wildlife biologist.  “There used to be extensive eel grass and other underwater food sources in the K’omoks Estuary and it was a popular feeding area for swans and Brant geese.  Unfortunately, we have lost much of this natural habitat, so the swans have moved on to the fields.  While they don’t spend a great deal of time in the estuary, some still rest there overnight and in the early morning.”

While considered to be a beautiful and peaceful bird, as the population continued to grow, farmers began experiencing significant economic losses as a result of the birds stripping well-established perennial grasses from their fields.

By the early ‘90s, while some people heralded the annual return of the Trumpeter swans, bringing with them a barrage of tourists and economic benefits for the community, farmers were completely fed up.  Not only were swans consuming massive amounts of vegetation, often overgrazing perennial grass, pulling it out by its roots and compacting the soil with their large webbed feet, in flooded fields they created bathtub-size craters while searching for unharvested potatoes and carrots.  They had become a veritable nightmare for local landowners.

Recognizing that something had to be done so that the Trumpeter swans and the farmers could co-exist, Graeme Fowler, a fish and wildlife technologist and consultant with Ducks Unlimited and the Ministry of Agriculture entered the picture.

“Ducks Unlimited, together with the Canadian Wildlife Service and other organizations, launched the Comox Valley Waterfowl Management Program in 1991, to address the swan/agricultural industry concerns,” explains Fowler.  “The swan counting that Steph Nathan participates in today is part of this program.

“For the first few years we worked with local farmers on various deterrent strategies to scare swans off certain fields, using everything from scarecrow type devises, to noise makers and specially trained dogs,” adds Fowler.  “At the same time, we experimented with planting different types of winter cover crops, with the hope of luring swans from ‘off limits’ fields to managed ones.  Italian rye grass turned out to be the swans’ perennial favorite.  In the spring, the cover crops are ploughed under, which is good for the soil.  Over the next 10 years we continued to work closely with the agricultural community and we continued our research and development of the swan management program. Eventually, funding was put in place to compensate farmers for some of their costs and losses related to swan feeding. ”

McClintocks Farms owner Jerry McClintock, a member of the Farmers’ Institute, doesn’t have any problems with the swans himself, but he knows many people that do.

“Our fields are fairly narrow and swans need plenty of space to land and take flight, so they don’t generally come to my farm,” says McClintock.  “They tend to gather on the larger fields, often those where corn or grain has been knocked down.  They are also picky eaters and they know where the highest nutrient value grasses grow.  What happens when they forage on these fields is that, if it is not pulled up by the roots, it is close clipped to ground level where the grass stores the sugars that help it grow. It takes the grass in these fields a couple of weeks longer to get growing in the spring. The government assistance program was well received by the agricultural community.  Swans are still a nuisance to many farmers but, financially, they are no longer such a burden.”

In addition to monitoring the swans’ feeding habits, effort is also put in to protecting them from the ‘unnatural’ hazard of electrocution.  BC Hydro assists by hanging short pieces of pipe from string on power lines where birds—not just swans—frequently fly.  Not only can a bird/hydro line encounter be deadly for the bird, it can result in power outages.  If you drive along Comox Road you can see these pipes hanging from the power lines.

By 1994, the Comox Valley was caught up in a sort of ‘Swan Fever.’  To celebrate the swans and support local farmers, local business owners rallied together with Ducks Unlimited and the now defunct Trumpeter Swan Sentinel Society to launch the First Annual Trumpeter Swan Festival.  The Coast Westerly Hotel was home base for special educational events, exhibits and contests.  Other corporate sponsors included HiTec Screen Printing, Kingfisher Inn, Siefferts’ Farm, Thrifty Foods, and Canadian Tire, to name a few.  The local newspapers published weekly swan counts and trivia in effort to educate and enlighten locals and visitors alike about the big white birds.  The Chamber of Commerce even adopted a new logo that featured a swan in flight, created by First Nation’s artist Richard Krentz.  (A slightly modified version of the logo is still in use today.)

The Swan Festival continued for a number of years until a lack of volunteers willing to orchestrate the event ultimately brought about its demise in the early 2000s.  Also, the ‘novelty’ of the annual Trumpeter swan migration had simply lost some of its appeal for tourists. Thousands of Trumpeter swans were now also wintering in other parts of Vancouver Island, the lower mainland, and the state of Washington, so nature lovers didn’t need to travel this far up island to see them.

Much to the relief of the agricultural community, what was feared to blossom to a population of more than 10,000 swans has naturally capped out at about 1,800 to 2,500 for the past 10 years.  We know this is statistically correct because of the many years of volunteer efforts of people like Steph Nathan.  The swans, it seemed, had adopted a bit of a self-management program all on their own and this is just the right number to ensure a healthy and disease-free swan population.

It was considered a pivotal year in both Comox Valley and Ducks Unlimited history when, in 1998, the vast expanse of farmland on Comox Road—formerly called Farquharson Farms—was jointly purchased by Ducks Unlimited and other partners in the Pacific Estuary Conservation Program.  Now called Comox Bay Farm, the 192-acre property is a productive farm in spring and summer and a winter refuge for Trumpeter and Mute swans; Brandt, Canada, White-fronted and Cackling geese; several types of ducks and a myriad of other birds.  Comox Bay Farm is designated as a wildlife refuge in perpetuity.  Other conservation properties have been added since then.

“Comox Bay Farm is not just a sanctuary for swans,” says Martell, “it is an important part of the internationally recognized ‘K’omoks Important Bird Area,’ with one of the key species being the Trumpeter swan.”

Adds Nathan:  “If you stop by the side of the road to check out the swans at the Comox Bay Farm, you may notice some unusual contraptions placed in the fields.  Constructed of plastic PVC pipe and netting, the mounds are placed in the field to ensure that there are patches of grass that the swan can’t eat.  This helps us monitor how much the rest of the grass has been eaten or damaged in the field.”

You may also notice large mounds of potatoes—a favorite food of swans.  These culled potatoes are dumped on Comox Bay Farm as part of the management program.

Since 2000, Ducks Unlimited has carried the program on its own while, at the same time, continued to engage other industry and community stakeholders, including the Comox Valley Farmers’ Institute.

“By now we had minimized the swan scaring tactics and were focusing on habitat development,” notes Fowler.  “We continue to work with farmers to ensure they planted winter cover crops and on various ways to manage drainage problems on certain farms, with the goal of mitigating damage to fields.  While still supporting the swans, we make a real effort not to do anything that would falsely support the swan population.

“Personally, I am very pleased with the development of the swan management program,” Fowler adds.  “Supporting these big white birds was a hard pill for the farmers to swallow but we worked together to find solutions that were sustainable over time, which eventually lead to this provincial compensation program.  What we learned about swans in the Comox Valley is being applied in other regions in Canada and the USA.”

Many years of collaboration, dedication and ingenuity has gone into ensuring that swans and people can live in harmony in the Comox Valley.  Swan festival or not, this truly is a conservation success story worth celebrating.
For three days Isobel Springett had been hearing the cries coming from the dense forest behind her Dove Creek farm.  The wailing sounded eerily like a human baby in distress, drugstore
but Springett knew it was a young fawn.  For three days and three nights the calls had played like a heartrending soundtrack in the background of Springett’s daily life.

As someone who had spent her life caring for, training, and observing animals, Springett was fully aware of the advice given by wildlife experts: never touch an apparently abandoned fawn. But during that third day, the fawn’s cries were becoming weaker by the hour.  As the early June afternoon waned, the temperature started dropping.  Springett fully agreed with the wildlife experts, but she also knew that this fawn was in real danger.

As Springett wondered whether or not to intervene, she knew that sentiment should have no place in her decision.  Of course, the idea of saving a baby deer was heart-warming, but the real questions were pragmatic.  What were the chances that the mother would return?  How much longer could the fawn last?  And did Springett have the knowledge and expertise to provide the appropriate care, so that the fawn could return to the wild successfully?

As the shadows lengthened on that third day, Springett made her choice.  She walked into the forest and scooped the fawn up.  It was surprisingly light, and alarmingly bony, and hardly struggled at all.

The fawn felt like a bag of bones in Springett’s arms as she carried it back to her house and lay it down beside her pet Great Dane, Kate, on Kate’s bed.

Thus began an extraordinary cross-species friendship that continues to this day, and has inspired people all over the world.  It has also changed Springett’s life, putting her and her 35-acre hobby farm in the international media spotlight and connecting her to people from just about every country on the globe.

None of this was in Springett’s mind that June afternoon when she unceremoniously introduced the two animals.  She was thinking the fawn needed to warm up, and she wanted to do that in a way that was as close to nature as possible.

“I knew I had to treat her like a deer, not a pet,” Springett says now, five years later.  “I never cuddled her, never put her on my lap, never invited her onto my bed.  I provided the basics but otherwise I was simply a chaperone.”  The only concession she made to the human urge to turn animals into pets was to give the fawn a name, Pippin.

Springett brought a lifetime of experience with animals to her “chaperone” role.  She was born with Asperger’s Syndrome, a condition on the autism spectrum.  Like many others with Asperger’s, Springett often felt distanced from people, but found she had an unusual ability to understand and work with animals.

As well as being an accomplished equestrian and trainer of horses, Springett has worked for feed and farm outlets, held positions as a veterinary technician and animal control officer, been involved with animal rescue, and made numerous trips to the Brazilian rain forest to observe and photograph the wildlife there.

“I’d say I’m better with animals than with people,” says Springett.

But of course it is Kate, the dog, who deserves credit for the relationship with the deer, Springett hastens to point out. A sleek black Great Dane who stands three feet tall at the withers, weighs in at 112 pounds, and radiates calm dignity, Kate has a “100 per cent reliable” disposition, says Springett.

“She is an extraordinary dog and I knew she would not hurt the fawn.”

Instead, she began to nurture it, and the fawn responded.  Kate began grooming Pippin, and staying close by, keeping a motherly eye on the orphan.  She even let the fawn nurse on her milk-less teats, providing emotional nourishment (Springett provided the physical nourishment by bottle).  The two animals slept in a cozy heap.  And once Pippin gained strength, the two animals started playing—chasing games, hide and seek, and all kinds of goofy, bouncy fun.

It wasn’t purely dog play and wasn’t purely fawn play, explains Springett.  “It was like they worked out their very own language—Kate-and-Pippin language.”

At first Pippin slept in the house, but one evening about two weeks after she’d been brought in, she headed back out to the forest to sleep.  She returned the next morning for food and companionship, but from then on she slept in the forest every night.

“Animals’ instincts are so strong,” says Springett.  “They know what to do.  Pip knew she needed to be in the forest.  She knew how to hide there—boy, did she know how to hide!”

Watching Kate and Pippin reunite every morning was the highlight of Springett’s days—an ecstatic frenzy of bounding, leaping, running, face-licking, tail-wagging and nuzzling that clearly proclaimed “I love you” in Kate and Pippin language.

Over the next few months, Springett watched with satisfaction as Pippin connected with other wild deer and became part of a herd.  Her goal had always been for Pippin to return to the wild and live with her own kind.  At the same time, she and Kate still enjoyed Pip’s daily visits.  And the next spring, they were thrilled when Pip showed up with a fawn of her own, to introduce it to the extended family.

Springett felt deeply grateful for the opportunity to be a chaperone of, and a witness to, such a unique and beautiful relationship.  But she was soon to find that the Kate and Pippin relationship held yet more gifts for her—and for many others.

Springett, a professional photographer, had been documenting the evolving friendship from the beginning in stills and videos.  Rather like a proud grandparent, she shyly but enthusiastically shared these with friends and family, many of whom urged her to put the videos out on YouTube, undoubtedly the world’s best medium for cute animal footage.

“And then of course people urged me to create a Facebook page.  I basically gave myself a crash course in social media,” says Springett.

It didn’t take long for the internet exposure to take effect.  Soon the videos were getting thousands of views and long threads of positive comments, and Springett began to feel that she, Kate and Pippin were connected to, well… a worldwide web.

Then US talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres found the videos, and played some of them on her show.   “At that point everything just took off,” says Springett.  Thousands of hits turned to tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands and then millions (currently 2.5 million).  Emails poured in from around the world.

Newspapers and TV networks from all over featured the story.  “It’s out there in Arabic and Swedish, and a bunch of other languages.  It’s in Africa and Australia,” says Springett.

National Geographic devoted an episode of their series, Unlikely Animal Friends to Kate and Pippin.  PBS sent out a television crew who spent a week on Springett’s farm, with the resulting footage becoming part of a one-hour documentary, Animal Odd Couples, part of the PBS Nature series.

In that documentary, Kate and Pippin’s story is the final instalment in a series of vignettes that include a giant tortoise and a protective goose, a coyote and a lion, and a goat who voluntarily becomes a seeing-eye guide for an elderly horse losing its vision.

“It was a great experience working with the PBS crew,” says Springett.  “I actually became great friends with the camera woman and we are still in touch.”

Indeed, Springett has made many connections thanks to Kate and Pippin’s friendship.  Some of these are people she has never and will never meet, but nonetheless they have a meaningful bond.

“I get emails from shut-ins, from people with chronic illness, from caregivers telling me how this story has touched their patients, from children and the elderly.  They all say that hearing about this friendship and watching these videos makes them feel better.  It keeps people going.  I feel like I have a huge extended family.  This story clearly hit a chord,” she says.

It’s not just Kate and Pippin hitting that chord.  Over the past few years, cross-species relationships have become a popular cultural theme, says Springett.  As well as countless touching/funny/cute YouTube videos, the National Geographic Unlikely Friendships series, and the PBS documentary, a number of books have been published for both kids and adults.

“The popularity of these stories is a sign of the times,” she says.  “People are worried about the future.  The news is all bad, but this is good news.

“We are getting so crowded here on earth, we need to learn to co-exist.  Animals can be great teachers of tolerance and acceptance.  Animals don’t murder each other; they only fight for food and territory.  On the other hand, we shouldn’t be too idealistic.  Animals can be vicious, too.”

The interest in cross-species friendships isn’t just a pop-culture phenomenon.  Scientists also are taking note, as they seek to understand the emotional life of animals.  The PBS nature documentary includes a number of animal behavior experts, one of whom points out that until about a decade ago, scientists wouldn’t even use the term “friendship” in talking about animals.  That is changing as more and more scientists accept that animals have deep and meaningful emotional lives.

“People say animals don’t have feelings,” says Springett.   “But they do. After all, we do.”

Now in its fifth year, the Kate and Pippin friendship remains strong.  Pippin still visits every day, bringing her fawns and other members of her herd.  And Springett continues to document the relationship.  Last year she collaborated with her brother, a writer, to create a children’s book called Kate and Pippin: An Unlikely Love Story, which was published by Penguin.  This year she published a wall calendar, which sold out two days after being posted on Facebook.  All this activity has boosted her photography career, she points out gratefully.

But her deepest satisfaction comes from Kate and Pippin—from watching their dance of greeting each day, from seeing Pippin successfully moving into the matriarch role in her herd, from watching her fawns grow up and have babies of their own.

“Our relationships with animals can be very, very meaningful,” she says.  “They speak to that communication instinct we all have.  I’ve seen it with therapeutic riding.  There is this different level of communication going on where no words are needed.”

---

For more information about the story of Kate and Pippin go to: www.kateandpippin.com

Springett’s story may be heart-warming, but if you see a fawn lying alone, don’t intervene! 

Fawns are taught to lie very still, usually in the forest or in tall grass.  The mother will leave her fawn for up to 24 hours to go feed, but will usually stay close by.  The fawn’s stillness, which people can misinterpret as weakness, is a defence mechanism to protect it from detection by predators. 

“The best thing we can do is leave it alone,” says Maj Birch, manager and founder of Mountainaire Avian Rescue Society (MARS).  “People may not realize that they are moving the fawn away from its mother.”

Like Springett, Birch warns against making a pet out of a deer.  “There was a recent case where some people took in a fawn and raised it.  When it got older it became a pest.  It wouldn’t go away.  It would jump up on people and knock them over.  It didn’t seem to know it was an animal.  We have to let wild animals be wild.

“If you are worried about a baby deer, call us before you do anything!” 

For more info contact MARS at 250-337-2021 or www.wingtips.orgFor more information on how to respond to a fawn in distress, see the North Island Wildlife Recovery Association website at www.niwra.com

If you’ve been in Downtown Courtenay lately on a Wednesday night and you’ve taken a walk along England Avenue, you may have noticed something interesting happening through the windows of Café Barrio Fiesta.  The tables and chairs have been stacked behind the counter to clear the floor space, and people are dancing tango.  Not just any kind of tango.  They are dancing close embrace tango, with the partners chest-to-chest and moving to the melodic strains of golden age (circa 1930s) tango music.

The floor space is tight, but the classes mimic the sort of thing you might find in Buenos Aires, Argentina—the birthplace of tango.  There, close embrace tango is the social dance of the community and it is danced by young and old.  Certainly the diversity of people at Café Barrio Fiesta attests to the appeal of the dance.

But how did such a class end up in Downtown Courtenay?  The answer is a small group of instructors determined to share their love of the dance.  One such instructor is Claude Bigler, a Swiss-German hairstylist and owner operator of Claude Bigler and Friends in Courtenay.  For the past few years he has been introducing students to his preferred style of traditional tango de salón and close embrace tango.  He is the instructor at Café Barrio Fiesta, and a passionate enthusiast of all things tango.

“Tango is everywhere in Buenos Aires,” says Bigler.  “The dance halls are packed, and for it to flow you must dance close.  And if you stand above it all and look down, the whole things moves like an open watch.”

Bigler of course would know.  He learned to dance and teach tango in Buenos Aires under the tutelage of renowned tango instructor Nelida Teresa Boyer, and makes annual trips to Argentina for personal instruction and practice.  However it wasn’t the dance that attracted Bigler to tango.

“I heard this beautiful music, and I liked the music,” says Bigler simply of how he came to learn tango.  You quickly realize, however, that’s an understatement.  Bigler regularly breaks out in song during the Wednesday evening classes, singing the lyrics that most of his students don’t understand.  He’ll also clap his hands, and move solo around the edges of the dance floor all in hopes of conveying to his students the emotion behind the song. In fact, musicality is at the heart of Bigler’s tango dancing, and he strives to teach his students how to interpret the sounds of the music through their dance steps.  For Bigler, technique and dance steps are a means to an end, that end being your own individual dance style.

It’s something fellow tango enthusiast and internationally renowned Vancouver Symphony Orchestra pianist Linda Lee Thomas relates to.  Bigler and Thomas are long time tango friends, and on March 8 and 9, Thomas will be playing a tango concert at Studio Live in Cumberland.

“For me, of course the music came first,” says Thomas.  “I first heard Astor Piazzolla in 1988 in Vancouver, and it blew me away.  That night I knew I had to play this wonderful music.  It was many years after that when I heard there was an Argentine dance tango teacher in Vancouver.  So I thought I should go along to a class or two, hoping I could learn something about the dance that would enhance my playing.  Well I got hooked on the dance as well.

“The music definitely informs the dance,” continues Thomas, “or it should, anyway.  A good tanguero will know the music and will lead the lady appropriately to the music. Without music there can be no dance.  The music inspires the dancers, if they are listening to it and it tells them what to do.  The music of tango goes straight to the heart, and it takes the dancers with them.”

For Thomas, playing and dancing tango has been an amazing artistic and personal journey.  And when she had to cancel a private performance for Bigler’s 65th birthday party this past November, she decided to make up for it with another concert.  Bigler decided an event like that needed to be shared, and together they created an evening of live tango music and dance to celebrate their mutual love of the genre.  The event is open to the public, and anyone with an interest in tango dance or music.

For the uninitiated, however, such devotion to a particular musical and dance form on the part of two people—let alone an entire foreign city—might be hard to believe.  Let’s face it, the music is old and the dance is a product of the 19th century.  Why would anyone today want to dance tango?  Bigler has a simple answer—intimacy.

“I think today, in this century you date by the internet, you meet by the internet.  Where can you go and meet a strange person and be in their arms and maybe never know their name?” he asks.  “To be able to go to a place and have a strange person in front of you, dancing chest-to-chest… that’s intimate.  Tango is not sexual.  It is sensual but not sexual, and it’s safe.”

In fact, tango, like all social dances, seems to tap into an innate human need for physical movement and contact.  Bigler likes to refer to an Argentine Tango study out of Montreal, where researchers divided elderly study participants into two groups—an exercise group and a tango dance group. The idea was to see which offered more health benefits.  The answer was tango.

“The tango people fell in love with the music so it was easy for them to go back every week,” says Bigler.  “And they gained balance unknowingly.  There were no hip breaks in the tango group.  And problem solving—the tango people won hands down.”

However, social dance is often seen as inaccessible and difficult, especially for men. That’s something Bigler can relate to.  “My first dance in Buenos Aires, I sat and watched.  I picked a woman to ask to dance,” he says.  “What I didn’t know was you asked someone to dance like this!” Bigler tilts his head to one side and raises an eyebrow in something that is a cross between a question and a come-hither look.  A potential dance partner so asked will then either tilt their head and raise their eyebrow in acceptance or shake their head to decline.

Bigler instead walked across the dance floor and asked this woman to dance.  She promptly and emphatically declined him.  In fact, to hear Bigler tell the story, it was something more akin to a public shaming for not following the rules, and he was deeply embarrassed.  He left the dance floor convinced he would never learn tango, and was instead determined to make the best of his trip to Buenos Aires by going fishing in Patagonia.

Instead, fate intervened and the woman who so sharply rejected him on the dance floor ended up introducing him to a dance instructor who would teach him the basics.

“After my experience, I said if I were able to learn this dance I would really want to teach men,” continues Bigler.  “Us guys play soccer.  These guys in North America play football and hockey.  Why would we know how to dance?”

“The man should bring the openness that ideally he has no clue and that skill can be acquired step by step.  If you can snap to a tune and you can walk, you can learn this dance.”

In fact, you may not actually need to know how to walk. A part of Bigler’s training to become a teacher of Argentine dance included instruction on how to teach differently abled dancers. He worked with amputees, people with mobility issues such as injured knees and those who needed mobility aids such as a cane or brace.

“Everyone needed a different approach,” remembers Bigler, yet, everyone could do it. And that’s something he likes to remind his female students who may experience frustration with their male dance partners who aren’t picking up the steps as quickly.

“If you want your guy to dance, give him the opportunity,” says Bigler.  “If the guys stay around long enough to learn to lead, they’ll get hooked.”

Certainly, tango dancers speak of the rich non-verbal communication they experience while dancing.  Tango is about lead and follow, and that requires an understanding not just of the music, but also of one’s dance partner’s mood, abilities and inclinations.  Bigler himself has had more than one experience of traumatized female dance partners pulled around the floor by clueless partners, who have expressed deep appreciation for his ability to shape his dance according to the moment.

As you might guess, trust is a big part of the experience as well.  Each new song and each new dance partner is an opportunity to express oneself, and learn to move in cooperation with another person.

“It’s almost like a drug,” declares Bigler.

“To people interested in tango music or dancing, I would say go for it,” agrees Thomas.  “Chase it.  But it will change your life.  And it is like a virus that you can never get rid of. But why would you want to anyway?  There is a lot of pleasure awaiting you, but it is not easy.  It takes a lifetime to learn, but the journey is awesome.”

To purchase tickets for the Night of Tango with Linda Lee Thomas, call Claude Bigler at 778-992-0029.  Tickets are available for March 8 only.  For more information about close embrace tango dance lessons, drop by Café Barrio Fiesta (on England Avenue between 5th and 6th streets) at 7pm on Wednesdays.

For three days Isobel Springett had been hearing the cries coming from the dense forest behind her Dove Creek farm.  The wailing sounded eerily like a human baby in distress, but Springett knew it was a young fawn.  For three days and three nights the calls had played like a heartrending soundtrack in the background of Springett’s daily life.

As someone who had spent her life caring for, training, and observing animals, Springett was fully aware of the advice given by wildlife experts: never touch an apparently abandoned fawn. But during that third day, the fawn’s cries were becoming weaker by the hour.  As the early June afternoon waned, the temperature started dropping.  Springett fully agreed with the wildlife experts, but she also knew that this fawn was in real danger.

As Springett wondered whether or not to intervene, she knew that sentiment should have no place in her decision.  Of course, the idea of saving a baby deer was heart-warming, but the real questions were pragmatic.  What were the chances that the mother would return?  How much longer could the fawn last?  And did Springett have the knowledge and expertise to provide the appropriate care, so that the fawn could return to the wild successfully?

As the shadows lengthened on that third day, Springett made her choice.  She walked into the forest and scooped the fawn up.  It was surprisingly light, and alarmingly bony, and hardly struggled at all.

The fawn felt like a bag of bones in Springett’s arms as she carried it back to her house and lay it down beside her pet Great Dane, Kate, on Kate’s bed.

Thus began an extraordinary cross-species friendship that continues to this day, and has inspired people all over the world.  It has also changed Springett’s life, putting her and her 35-acre hobby farm in the international media spotlight and connecting her to people from just about every country on the globe.

None of this was in Springett’s mind that June afternoon when she unceremoniously introduced the two animals.  She was thinking the fawn needed to warm up, and she wanted to do that in a way that was as close to nature as possible.

“I knew I had to treat her like a deer, not a pet,” Springett says now, five years later.  “I never cuddled her, never put her on my lap, never invited her onto my bed.  I provided the basics but otherwise I was simply a chaperone.”  The only concession she made to the human urge to turn animals into pets was to give the fawn a name, Pippin.

Springett brought a lifetime of experience with animals to her “chaperone” role.  She was born with Asperger’s Syndrome, a condition on the autism spectrum.  Like many others with Asperger’s, Springett often felt distanced from people, but found she had an unusual ability to understand and work with animals.

As well as being an accomplished equestrian and trainer of horses, Springett has worked for feed and farm outlets, held positions as a veterinary technician and animal control officer, been involved with animal rescue, and made numerous trips to the Brazilian rain forest to observe and photograph the wildlife there.

“I’d say I’m better with animals than with people,” says Springett.

But of course it is Kate, the dog, who deserves credit for the relationship with the deer, Springett hastens to point out. A sleek black Great Dane who stands three feet tall at the withers, weighs in at 112 pounds, and radiates calm dignity, Kate has a “100 per cent reliable” disposition, says Springett.

“She is an extraordinary dog and I knew she would not hurt the fawn.”

Instead, she began to nurture it, and the fawn responded.  Kate began grooming Pippin, and staying close by, keeping a motherly eye on the orphan.  She even let the fawn nurse on her milk-less teats, providing emotional nourishment (Springett provided the physical nourishment by bottle).  The two animals slept in a cozy heap.  And once Pippin gained strength, the two animals started playing—chasing games, hide and seek, and all kinds of goofy, bouncy fun.

It wasn’t purely dog play and wasn’t purely fawn play, explains Springett.  “It was like they worked out their very own language—Kate-and-Pippin language.”

At first Pippin slept in the house, but one evening about two weeks after she’d been brought in, she headed back out to the forest to sleep.  She returned the next morning for food and companionship, but from then on she slept in the forest every night.

“Animals’ instincts are so strong,” says Springett.  “They know what to do.  Pip knew she needed to be in the forest.  She knew how to hide there—boy, did she know how to hide!”

Watching Kate and Pippin reunite every morning was the highlight of Springett’s days—an ecstatic frenzy of bounding, leaping, running, face-licking, tail-wagging and nuzzling that clearly proclaimed “I love you” in Kate and Pippin language.

Over the next few months, Springett watched with satisfaction as Pippin connected with other wild deer and became part of a herd.  Her goal had always been for Pippin to return to the wild and live with her own kind.  At the same time, she and Kate still enjoyed Pip’s daily visits.  And the next spring, they were thrilled when Pip showed up with a fawn of her own, to introduce it to the extended family.

Springett felt deeply grateful for the opportunity to be a chaperone of, and a witness to, such a unique and beautiful relationship.  But she was soon to find that the Kate and Pippin relationship held yet more gifts for her—and for many others.

Springett, a professional photographer, had been documenting the evolving friendship from the beginning in stills and videos.  Rather like a proud grandparent, she shyly but enthusiastically shared these with friends and family, many of whom urged her to put the videos out on YouTube, undoubtedly the world’s best medium for cute animal footage.

“And then of course people urged me to create a Facebook page.  I basically gave myself a crash course in social media,” says Springett.

It didn’t take long for the internet exposure to take effect.  Soon the videos were getting thousands of views and long threads of positive comments, and Springett began to feel that she, Kate and Pippin were connected to, well… a worldwide web.

Then US talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres found the videos, and played some of them on her show.   “At that point everything just took off,” says Springett.  Thousands of hits turned to tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands and then millions (currently 2.5 million).  Emails poured in from around the world.

Newspapers and TV networks from all over featured the story.  “It’s out there in Arabic and Swedish, and a bunch of other languages.  It’s in Africa and Australia,” says Springett.

National Geographic devoted an episode of their series, Unlikely Animal Friends to Kate and Pippin.  PBS sent out a television crew who spent a week on Springett’s farm, with the resulting footage becoming part of a one-hour documentary, Animal Odd Couples, part of the PBS Nature series.

In that documentary, Kate and Pippin’s story is the final instalment in a series of vignettes that include a giant tortoise and a protective goose, a coyote and a lion, and a goat who voluntarily becomes a seeing-eye guide for an elderly horse losing its vision.

“It was a great experience working with the PBS crew,” says Springett.  “I actually became great friends with the camera woman and we are still in touch.”

Indeed, Springett has made many connections thanks to Kate and Pippin’s friendship.  Some of these are people she has never and will never meet, but nonetheless they have a meaningful bond.

“I get emails from shut-ins, from people with chronic illness, from caregivers telling me how this story has touched their patients, from children and the elderly.  They all say that hearing about this friendship and watching these videos makes them feel better.  It keeps people going.  I feel like I have a huge extended family.  This story clearly hit a chord,” she says.

It’s not just Kate and Pippin hitting that chord.  Over the past few years, cross-species relationships have become a popular cultural theme, says Springett.  As well as countless touching/funny/cute YouTube videos, the National Geographic Unlikely Friendships series, and the PBS documentary, a number of books have been published for both kids and adults.

“The popularity of these stories is a sign of the times,” she says.  “People are worried about the future.  The news is all bad, but this is good news.

“We are getting so crowded here on earth, we need to learn to co-exist.  Animals can be great teachers of tolerance and acceptance.  Animals don’t murder each other; they only fight for food and territory.  On the other hand, we shouldn’t be too idealistic.  Animals can be vicious, too.”

The interest in cross-species friendships isn’t just a pop-culture phenomenon.  Scientists also are taking note, as they seek to understand the emotional life of animals.  The PBS nature documentary includes a number of animal behavior experts, one of whom points out that until about a decade ago, scientists wouldn’t even use the term “friendship” in talking about animals.  That is changing as more and more scientists accept that animals have deep and meaningful emotional lives.

“People say animals don’t have feelings,” says Springett.   “But they do. After all, we do.”

Now in its fifth year, the Kate and Pippin friendship remains strong.  Pippin still visits every day, bringing her fawns and other members of her herd.  And Springett continues to document the relationship.  Last year she collaborated with her brother, a writer, to create a children’s book called Kate and Pippin: An Unlikely Love Story, which was published by Penguin.  This year she published a wall calendar, which sold out two days after being posted on Facebook.  All this activity has boosted her photography career, she points out gratefully.

But her deepest satisfaction comes from Kate and Pippin—from watching their dance of greeting each day, from seeing Pippin successfully moving into the matriarch role in her herd, from watching her fawns grow up and have babies of their own.

“Our relationships with animals can be very, very meaningful,” she says.  “They speak to that communication instinct we all have.  I’ve seen it with therapeutic riding.  There is this different level of communication going on where no words are needed.”

For more information about the story of Kate and Pippin go to www.kateandpippin.com.

Springett’s story may be heart-warming, but if you see a fawn lying alone, don’t intervene! 

Fawns are taught to lie very still, usually in the forest or in tall grass.  The mother will leave her fawn for up to 24 hours to go feed, but will usually stay close by.  The fawn’s stillness, which people can misinterpret as weakness, is a defence mechanism to protect it from detection by predators. 

“The best thing we can do is leave it alone,” says Maj Birch, manager and founder of Mountainaire Avian Rescue Society (MARS).  “People may not realize that they are moving the fawn away from its mother.”

Like Springett, Birch warns against making a pet out of a deer.  “There was a recent case where some people took in a fawn and raised it.  When it got older it became a pest.  It wouldn’t go away.  It would jump up on people and knock them over.  It didn’t seem to know it was an animal.  We have to let wild animals be wild.

“If you are worried about a baby deer, call us before you do anything!” 

For more info contact MARS at 250-337-2021 or www.wingtips.org.

For more information on how to respond to a fawn in distress, see the North Island Wildlife Recovery Association website at www.niwra.com.