VICTORIA -- Zia is standing on a dock at Fisherman's Wharf searching for seals. "They're not as easy to find as they used to be," she says, before smiling. "But I do see these little heads pop up."

Zia does this regularly and takes photos when she finds them. But to really appreciate why she's doing this around her birthday, we need to go back a couple years (cue the rewinding tape sound-effect).

We need to go back to when she was visiting a Saanich park and a young starling suddenly landed in front of her.

Zia says the bird seemed to be asking for help, so she showed it how to search for food around the base of a nearby tree. "Within a few minutes it started foraging [by itself]," she says with a smile. "We had a great time hanging out."

Zia started visiting the starling daily. "[It] would come and greet me every time."

She took pictures and video of their time together, showing how the bird would jump up on her bike helmet and cuddle up against her shoes.

But this was not the first time Zia connected with a wild animal. If we play the rewind sound-effect again – and go back to when she lived on Prince Edward Island – we'll find Zia running a little late to feed a crow she'd befriended.

"All of a sudden I heard 'Hello,'" Zia says, mimicking a high-pitched voice. 

She assumed at first it was one of the neighbourhood kids. But the voice kept calling.

"So I grabbed my bathrobe and went outside with a handful of peanuts," Zia says she saw the crow was calling her. "[Then] every morning after the sun would come up. 'Hello. Hello. Hello.'"

Zia says these experiences of taking the time to communicate with animals have made her life feel richer and almost magical.

"We hear these stories when we're kids – the fairy tales about the animals speaking to us – and we kind of grow out of it," Zia explains. "Our parents say, 'No, that’s not possible.'"

But perhaps when Zia was little, her parents didn't says that.

If we rewind back to just hours before Zia was born, when her dad was about to drive her mom to the hospital, they experienced something her mom called 'magical.'

"My mom noticed there was this dark shape on the lawn," Zia says. "When she took a closer look, she saw it was a seal!"

Zia's mom took a picture of the animal between contractions – before calling animal rescue – because she didn't think anybody would believe it happened. "The nearest water was still two or three kilometres away," Zia says. "So it's still a mystery as to how the seal got there"

While nobody knows if – or what – the seal was trying to say, there's no mystery to why Zia is visiting Fisherman's Wharf. When a seal inevitably appears – if you listen closely – you just might hear it wishing her a very happy birthday.

"They may not speak the same language," Zia says with a smile. "But they're definitely speaking."