I recently left my job with the Army Corps of Engineers in California, and I’m once again in the position of trying to come up with a new plan for my life after the old one fell apart. I’m looking at immigration to Canada and I’ve already started pursuing a few different avenues. This thread is not meant to be about the intricacies of the immigration process or a discussion of whether I should or shouldn’t leave the US (I understand living in Canada has its own set of challenges, just like anywhere else). However, I am still unsure where I may end up exactly, and it’s important to me to be somewhere that I can continue exploring and observing for iNat, so I would be happiest to live somewhere with a wide variety of habitats and species. I know we’ve got some Canadian forum members and others who have spent time in the country. I’m hoping you might share your opinions and stories on your favorite places in Canada. Do you have any favorite spots or have recommendations on the best provinces/cities for nature lovers to live in? Are there any biomes or particular habitats that strike you as particularly iconic elements of the country?
Right now, if I had my pick, I think Calgary would be at the top of my list. Most of my job prospects are in the Ottawa, Vancouver, or Calgary areas, and of the three, Calgary seems to be comparatively less expensive (or comparable with Ottawa, depending on who you ask, but definitely less than Vancouver). It’s close to mountains, forests, and prairie habitats. It’s also relatively close to Banff and Jasper National Parks. I’ve never been to any of the Canadian National Parks, but the National and State Parks in California have been a big part of my life since I moved here, so it’d be nice to have something similar close to my new home.
Calgary is a solid pick, especially for an iNatter. Calgary puts you at the intersection of prairie ecosystems, foothills, and alpine habitats, and it’s not too far from Aspen Parkland and stuff like that. You also have some wetland habitats nearby.
The iNat community in Calgary is also quite active, with lots of bioblitzes, hikes, birding walks, bat nights, pollinator walks, redd counts, etc. Calgary also has a lot of urban parks that contain biodiversity — even right downtown.
Although, if you’re looking for pure biodiversity, Southern Ontario wins, especially when you consider things like:
Herps
Carolinian forest: tulip trees, sassafras, black gum, etc.
Arthropods
Bird migration – Point Pelee and other places are world-class
But Southern Ontario has its own quality of life issues.
Calgary has a lot going for it. It comes down to what you value more.
Aspen Parkland would be a new biome for me, so that would be exciting to explore. And I’m a sucker for a nice wetland. The wetland ecology courses I took through the Corps were probably some of my favorite professional development activities.
I was thinking Ontario. Never been there, but I hear it has tons of spring ephemerals, awesome lakes, and, because it is a small province and travel is super-duper-easy and not, for example, more difficult, polar bears in the north.
Not just Ontario, but Toronto itself involves giant highways and endless sprawl. Golden Horseshoe. Calgary locals say that Calgary is huge, but you can drive from south Calgary to north Calgary in 45 minutes. You can walk across downtown Calgary in basically a few minutes.
If you’re driving from Oshawa to Burlington, you’re basically in the city the whole time, for HOURS. 16 lanes on the 401. Inexplicable traffic jams at 3 AM on a Wednesday night. That is part of life in the GTA!
As I said, the biodiversity in SotOn is amazing, and Toronto also has a lot of magical inner-city neighbourhoods, but WRT quality of life, these are some of the things that should be considered.
So many questions. You have named some larger cities to live in. Is this because you are seeking somewhere with a reasonably large population so that you have a greater range of employment options? There are plenty of smaller places to live that may centre you within better reach of ranges of biodiversity. BC may give you a closer vibe of California than Ontario would. My thought is to consider somewhere like Kelowna or that corridor and you have Canadian desert to the south and grassands, reasonable access to the west coast, coastal mountain ranges to the west, reasonable access to the Canadian Rockies and the Alberta foothills and on into the prairies, boreal forests to the north. I noticed with your observations that you have an interest in plants which all these different biomes including coastal lowland and mountain alpine would provide plenty of diversity. BC is thought to have more than 500 species of bees with the greatest diversity in this Kelowna to Osoyoos corridor - the most diverse of all of Canada - this will reflect in other diversities too. You will have to adjust to different temperature ranges. You can check out some of the biodiversity of BC’s semi arid plateau (area around Kelowna) here https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/western-interior-basin-semi-arid-plateau-of-british-columbia?tab=species
Essentially, yes. While I think I would actually quite enjoy living somewhere outside of a Metropolitan area, I am a chemist. Any laboratory-based positions are almost certainly going to be located in the city. My work with the Army Corps was focused on environmental remediation, so I may have some options in slightly smaller cities with an environmental services contractor, but while those jobs do a lot of work in the field, they don’t stay in one place, so the main offices are typically centrally located in their region of service, which means big cities again. There’s also just more places looking to hire overall in the city. I can make sure to put in applications in areas that I think I would like, but ultimately, it’s my job that will determine where I go. If I wind up with multiple options, I’ll pick one in the place I like the best, but I may not have a wide range of choices.
That’s pretty much the case where I live now, though. I live in a big city, but I don’t mind driving even several hours to visit places outside the city to get my nature fix. California is nice because I can drive two hours and be at the coast, or two hours the other way and be in the Sierra Nevada. I’m mostly hoping for something similar where I am within proximity to a variety of different habitats, even if I have to drive a little to visit them.
Perhaps to an extent. Although I find BC much more like Washington and Oregon in terms of the vegetation types. But depending on what you mean by “vibe,” yes, I get your point. The West Coast is almost a world unto itself.
Of the “big” cities in Canada, Vancouver is hard to beat in terms of year-round nature opportunities. It is very easy to access nature on short day or half-day trips (just a bus ride away from anywhere in the city to get to some great hiking spots). You have the ocean, the temperate rainforest, and a gradient up into the coastal mountains. The mild winters mean there is a lot of nature to observe year-round. I live in Toronto now and find it more difficult to access natural areas (no car) compared to Vancouver. There are nice urban parks for sure, but not comparable to the vast tracts you can access so easily from Vancouver. That said, spring is awesome here - the bird migration and spring flowers in the greater Toronto area are breathtaking. Winter is frustratingly long, and while there are still of course awesome species to see in the winter, the diversity that is visible is much much lower and the freezing cold makes it a bit less pleasant (for me, some love it). Depending on your tastes the Toronto winter offerings (birds, woody plants that are mostly lacking leaves) may be less exciting than what you can find during Vancouver winter (more arthropods active earlier and later in the season than Toronto, flowers earlier in the year, etc). Many other major Canadian cities also have very snowy winters but I don’t have personal experience living there. Vancouver is hard to beat, too bad about the housing prices!
Slightly unrelated, but I found some nice nature documentaries on Paramount+ that feature different regions of Canada. I’m currently watching ‘Wild Wild East’ which features habitats in the Eastern provinces (e.g. Cape Breton Highlands, Kejimkujik Nat’l Park, etc.). The same studio also produced ‘Great Lakes Wild’ and a few others. They’re worth the watch
Thanks for sharing this!
I think there is a desert (with cacti and tumbleweeds) somewhere not too far from this gem (western Canada, I think British Columbia).
