For the Georgia Straight’s 16th annual Best of Vancouver issue, our editorial team has spent months on the lookout for good deeds, weird urban details, and various howlers to highlight. Here’s our contributors’ picks for Best of Vancouver 2011.

Best tourist (and resident) sucker punch

For a family to ride the 47-year-old miniature railway in Stanley Park, it’s normally $3.13 per person. But this summer, Klahowya Village is charging a whopping $10 per adult and $8 per child (which includes entrance to the village)—turning a pleasant $12.52 event into a $36 affair. Ouch! Way to sock it to them and us, park board.

Best place to meet a bat

Stanley Park Nature House

If the crowds and general consumer chaos at the Vancouver Aquarium are putting you off your Stanley Park experience, head down to this free, totally noncommercial hut on the shore of Lost Lagoon just below where the old Chilco bus loop used to be, at the south end of the pedestrian tunnel below the causeway/Georgia Street. Dead bats are available for your viewing pleasure, as are bird wings, insects, and pelts. Multiple rubber scat models educate. Guides from the Stanley Park Ecology Society, which runs the nature house with the support of the park board, offer bat walks and other authentic forest experiences throughout the fall. If the aquarium is the Disneyland of the environmental movement, this place is its campfire.

Best righting of an atrocity

Take a bow, Douglas Coupland, for something that British Columbia has been waiting nearly three decades for: a truly fitting monument to iconic Canadian Terry Fox. The brilliance of B.C. Place’s recently unveiled bronze Fox statues is that, like all good art, they get you thinking about things on a number of levels. Consider, for instance, that Fox—who started his one-legged run for cancer in relative obscurity and ended up a modern legend—goes from life-size to larger-than-life in the four sculptures. More importantly, the statues actually look like Terry Fox, which is more than anyone could say for the stadium’s previous “monument”, an obnoxious pink-pagoda atrocity that sat outside the downtown football complex from 1984 until this year. Somewhere up in heaven, a national treasure is looking down with a smile.

Best argument in favour of renaming a park

John Hendry Park

Look, we know it’s officially named John Hendry Park, but good luck getting anyone in the city to call it that. Instead, everyone refers to East Vancouver’s crown jewel (and leading source of fecal coliforms) as “Trout Lake”, in reference to its defining feature. The city hasn’t helped matters by naming the park’s community centre and ice rink after the pond. We are sure that Hendry—a forestry pioneer and one-time mayor of New Westminster who died in 1916—was a great guy, but if he has any present-day defenders, they’re fighting a losing battle.

Best birdwatching hot spot

George C. Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary

The Lower Mainland has no shortage of places to see birds. Indeed, Metro Vancouver is home to four designated “important bird areas”. One of these, the Fraser River estuary, includes the George C. Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary. Located on Westham Island in Delta, the sanctuary is truly a birders’ paradise. Using the dike trails, bird blinds, and observation tower, you can gawk at lesser snow geese migrating to and from Russia’s Wrangel Island and other species, such as western sandpipers and long-billed dowitchers.

Best place to really practise your 100-metre sprint

If you have any aversion at all to bird shit (and who doesn’t?), for God’s sake avoid the stretch of lonely unnamed road that connects the pedestrian underpass at New Brighton Pool to McGill Street, a short but extremely stressful sprint away. For some reason, probably because it’s remote and threaded with power lines, this area is ground zero for diarrhetic avian hordes sharty-partying away in numbers approaching thousands, if not millions. You can actually hear the constant wet slap of poo hitting pavement as you approach, and there’s usually at least one poor terrified lady barrelling at top speed through the white-shite blizzard with a stroller. Alfred Hitchcock would have been inspired by the view.