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Vancouver Island
I can't claim to have even scratched the surface of British Columbia. But I can claim to have visited Vancouver Island twice. I spent 3 nights there in late May 2006, primarily to try to see a Grey (or Gray in the local vernacular) Whale, and went back in August 2010 for a couple of nights. Grey Whale's aside, Vancouver Island has some good mammal watching, and Kim Goldberg's book Where to see Wildlife on Vancouver Island (Harbour Publishing) has lots of good information on what you can see and where to see it.

Mount Washington
Mount Washington is a large ski resort near Courtenay, about 4 hours north of Victoria and at the edge of the Vancouver Island wilderness. Coke Smith visited here in spring 2010 and saw Vancouver Island Marmots (see his report) easily so I went for a look in August 2010.

The hotels at the top were largely empty mid-week and so it felt like a ghost town in the evening. Most day visitors were mountain bikers. The ski lifts keep running taking tourists to the top on one lift, and mountain bikers to the top on the other (though they don't start running until 11am). The summit is only 20 minutes from the town of Courtenay and if I went back I would stay in town in cheaper accommodation. I expect the food is better in town too. Three of us got food poisoning, presumably from dinner at Fat Teddy's Grill on the summit. Still, after a week in the USA I needed to lose some weight.

Black Bears and Black-tailed Deer are quite common. We saw one bear while spotlighting along the road up the mountain (at the base of the mountain) and another in the day time distantly from the top of the ski lift. Cougars had been seen recently too.

Unfortunately the Marmots were elusive. Coke had seen a group at the bottom of one of the skiu lifts but it seems that they had come down unusually low because of heavy snow. The Marmots live mainly on the ski runs and seem to be seen most often by people riding the chair lifts. One girl operating the lift said she often saw them about half way up the mountain and we saw several burrows. Other people said they had worked there for years and never saw them (though they had not gone looking). My guess is that the best way would be to ride the lift up and down on a sunny day. Cold weather and my food poisoning didn't help my few hours looking but I think I heard one or two whistling, though could not find any.

Spot the bear, Mount Washington

Nanaimo
Nanaimo is quite a good base for checking out some of the better sites in south VI. It is near Green Mountain, which appears to have been home to one of the last colonies of the Vancouver Island Marmot (from what I can gather they went extinct in the wild in the early 2000s but by 2010 had been reintroduced to several sites such the Mount Washington Ski Resort, see above) and is also a good spot to go looking for Cougars. Unfortunately, Timber West, the forestry company that owns the logging roads that lead to Green Mountain don't allow the public access to the site during the week, so I didn't get up the mountain. But I did see a Red Squirrel and some Black-tailed Deer along the bit of the road that was open to the public.

Buttertubs Marsh, just a couple of kilometres from downtown Nanaimo, is a popular spot for local birdwatchers, and is an excellent place to see Muskrats, Beavers and River Otters (I went there twice and saw all three species both times in the late evening). There are also some feral (introduced) Eastern Cottontails running around. Mink are regular here, though I didn't see any.

Newcastle Island is a few hundred metres off of Nanaimo harbour, and a good spot for a few hours walk. There's a coastal trail the runs around the island, and in 4 hours one afternoon I saw a River Otter and lots of Raccoons on the beach, and Harbor Seals offshore.

River Otter and Racoon, Newcastle Island, Nanaimo

Tofino
Grey Whales pass by Vancouver Island each spring (late February through May) and December and January on their northwards and southwards journeys between the Sea of Cortez and Alaska. A few individuals can't be bothered to go further north and spend the summer off the west coast of VI, around Tofino.

Tofino is a top spot. It reminded me a lot of Australia: the scenery, the coastal rainforest, the surfers, the laid back people, even the menu at the sandwich bar, were all very reminiscent of a small Australian coastal resort. Grey Whales are pretty easy to find in the summer if you take one of the whale watching charters. We saw three individuals, though none particularly well. All three animals were less than 100m from shore.

Grey Whale and California & Northern (Steller) Sealions

We also saw a mixed group of California and Northern (Steller) Sealions, and some Harbour Seals. Dall's Porpoise, Humpbacks and Orcas are also around though we didn't see any the day I went out on the ocean.

Long Beach, near Tofino and a Keen's Mouse

I set a few elliott traps just outside the Pacific Rim National Park (near the Tofino cemetery) in the rainforest and caught four Deer Mice species. All four looked similar, and were almost exactly the same body size, but one, with its much longer tail and larger hind foot, was a Keen's Mouse (Northwest Deer Mouse) .

The drive from Nanaimo to Tofino is a pretty one, and I saw a couple of Black Bears along the road in the early evening including this youngster.

Black Bear

Victoria
I flew into Victoria when I got to Vancouver Island, hired a car and headed straight to the ferry to Sydney Spit, which is a good spot for River Otters. Twenty minutes after reaching the island I was looking at a group of Otters lolling around on a sand dune, near the old pier at low tide (the pier that's a few hundred metres from the jetty that the ferry pulls into). Feral Fallow Deer are common on the island. There were Harbour Seals in the ocean on the way to the island and Killer Whales (Orcas) (and the tour boats to see them) are in the area too.

I took an Orca watching trip in 2010 which was a lot of fun, with the Orcas just outside the harbour. Northern Fur Seals are occasionally reported from Vancouver Island and the skipper said in 6 years he had never seen one, but one had been spotted in the bay the day before. Unfortunately we couldn't find it. Harbour Seals were common but we didn't see any Harbour or Dall's Porppoises which are also regular on these trips.

Orca

Other People's Trip Reports
Knight's Inlet, Johnstone Strait and Vancouver Island 2010: Coke Smith, 9 days & 13 mammals including Vancouver Island Marmots and Martens.

British Columbia 2008: Michal Polanski, 3 weeks & 16 mammals including a Marten.

Pacific Northwest 2006: Mark Hows, 2 weeks & 27 species of mammals including a Marten.