VANOC the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 games announced the mascots three mascots and a sidekick today.
The mascots and sidekick are:
- Miga: A part orca, part Kermode, sea bear
- Quatchi: A sasquatch that wear ear muffs but no pants
- Sumi: A Thunderbird with the legs of a bear
- Mukmuk: An island marmot.
One of the mascots Miga is a “sea bear” and is a mythical critter combination of an orca and a Kermode bear. Some news outlets got the kermode bear all wrong. When I see some place get facts wrong I know about, it makes me wonder what things they get wrong about which I don’t have independent information.
Miga is combination of an orca, or killer whale, which is common along Canada’s Pacific coast, and a “spirit bear” — a name used to describe a white-furred Kermode bear, a normally brown-colored animal found in the coastal wilderness.
Guardian U suggests that a Kermode bear has white fur rather than brown, which is false. Kermode bears are light-furred, including white, brown and beige and other, rather than black. Kermode bears are black bears except for the fur.
Miga is a mythical First Nations sea bear that is part killer whale and part Kermode spirit bear, “who lives in the ocean with her family pod, beyond Vancouver Island, near Tofino, British Columbia,” according to a VANOC press release.
“Kermode spirit” is a weird one. The species is called Kermode and wrongly called “spirit bear.” It should definitely not be called both.
Miga — a snowboarding sea-bear inspired by the First Nations’ legends of the Pacific Northwest. Miga, described as mischievous and outgoing, is part sea-bear and part orca whale.
Xinhua says that this Miga is part sea-bear, but it is part bear, part whale, and all sea bear.
Anyway, here are the mascots:
When I first saw them I thought that they looked liked they belong on a Japanese website, the’r names kind of sound Japanese too, but I like them all right now.