Deas Island Regional Park

About a 40-minute drive from downtown Vancouver is this lovely park on a small island in the Fraser Delta — good place to view boat traffic on the Fraser River.

Metro Vancouver Parks have carried the torch for local nature programs for families for some years; Deas Island has a heritage farmhouse on site with a large bat colony in the attic, and during the summer park naturalists host lectures and guided walks on bats which culminate in watching the colony fly out of the house eaves en mass to hunt insects at dusk.

The park is also the site of the cannery run in the 1800s by John Sullivan Deas, one of the early black American settlers in the province (Go Do Some Great Thing by Crawford Killian is a fascinating account of this history.)

For more info: Deas Island Regional Park webpage.