It’s a good thing that the closest I get to Dall’s sheep in Kluane National Park and Reserve is the one carved into a stone slab outside the Thechàl Dhâl' Visitor Centre. Then, to satisfy my urge to see a real white sheep with curled horns, I squint at tiny white dots grazing on Thechàl Dhâl' (Sheep Mountain) and try a spotting scope for a closer look.

Oh, the stories that Beausoleil Island can tell to those willing to listen. Some from the thousands of years that Indigenous Peoples gathered, traded, farmed and lived on what the Anishinaabeg called Baamidoonegog, “rocky place floating about the mouth of a river.” Others that begin in 1929 when Ottawa answered calls to protect the Ontario island from cottage country development and it formed the core of Georgian Bay Islands National Park.

The hunt for Greater Short-Horned Lizards in the bearpaw shale of Grasslands National Park gets off to an inauspicious start on a cool September day as the sun fights to break through the clouds.

“Fish are hard — they’re not as exciting as bear and bison and some of the rare birds we’re trying to save,” admits Parks Canada aquatic specialist Shelley Humphries. But she has a conservation success story to tell about westslope cutthroat trout in Banff National Park that she hopes people will listen to.