Boy bear

Posted on August 16, 2012 by Alistair

 

Bears continue to hang out where I previously saw the valley bears—sometimes in trees, sometimes on the ground.

This male is displaying his impressive paw, but it wasn’t a threat—he is merely turning to leave.

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Valley bears

Posted on August 14, 2012 by Alistair

 

This is the season in which bears come down from the mountains and rummage around in the valleys for fruit. There are a great many fruit trees around the Lake—they are a legacy of bygone orchards. It is likely that now only the animals know the location of many of those trees.

While on a walk yesterday afternoon, I noticed two trees that were shaking even though there was no wind. Each held a Black Bear high in its branches. I watched for a while as the bears first ate cherries and then moved on to serviceberries. We exchanged pleasantries; they graciously posed for pictures; I wandered on my way.

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Two kings feasting

Posted on August 7, 2012 by Alistair

 

Two kings were feasting in a park: a kingfisher and a kingbird.

The high water has left the grassy area on the southwest side of Kokanee Creek Park closer to being a marsh than a meadow. The water has attracted mosquitoes, gnats, dragonflies and fish (we watched a heron catch one). The kingfisher was probably after fish, but the kingbird was feasting on dragonflies.

A female Belted Kingfisher sits in a tree from which it would regularly fly off and catch something.
An Eastern Kingbird (it’s found here in the West, too) also hunts from a tree.
It spots something and heads out.

The kingbird returns with a golden-looking dragonfly in its bill. It was soon eaten.

There were meadowhawks (a type of dragonfly) all over the marsh. This one looks to be a female cherry-faced meadowhawk. Possibly this is what the kingbird caught.

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Osprey, fish, crow

Posted on August 5, 2012 by Alistair

 

An osprey cannot eat a fish when it is flying; the bird must first land. Even if it is taking the fish back to its chicks in a nest, the osprey will often stop off for a snack first. That seems to be what this morning’s osprey was doing when it brought a fish to an ancient piling.

When the osprey departed with the remaining half of its fish, there was sufficient offal left on the piling that a crow immediately took the opportunity to clean it up.

First, the osprey with fish, and then the crow cleaning up.

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Finn’s spider & fly

Posted on August 3, 2012 by Finn

Finn’s second guest posting Finn is my seven-year-old grandson. I played consultant, but Finn took and edited his own pictures using his own equipment and did the writing. I helped post them.
Alistair

 

Crab spiders can change colour from white to yellow. Granddad and I looked for a white crab spider on a daisy, but we found a yellow one instead.

This is a crab spider waiting on a yellow cinquefoil for its lunch.

This crab spider finally got its lunch!

As I left the crab spider, I spotted a bee-mimic beetle on a daisy.

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Bow on drumly water

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Alistair

 

The waters were drumly. Ok, you won’t find the word, drumly, in most dictionaries. It is an old Scots word meaning turbid or murky. Drumly is not how one would normally describe Kootenay Lake—a remarkably transparent, indeed potable, body of water. Yet, biological debris does settle on the Lake, and now and then it becomes locally concentrated.

I encountered such a concentration when kayaking yesterday morning. This enabled one uncommon sighting (well, uncommon around here), and one distinctly rare sighting (apparently, for anywhere).

First, a bit of background on why debris will sometimes collect in a small area.

The West Arm of Kootenay Lake is composed of a series of lakelets—wide regions separated by narrows constricted by the deltas of creeks. These lakelets are rather like pearls on a necklace; when you are in one, you have your own little lake, but a passage connects you to another pearl.

The main flow of the water through any lakelet generally follows a fairly narrow channel. Elsewhere on the lakelet there may be a backflow. Certainly, that is the case on my lakelet where the channel and the backflow forms a large gyre. Now, a gyre is an area of convergence: water drifts towards the centre and sinks. In the absence of wind and waves, all manner of debris—pollen, leaves, bugs, driftwood, lost water skis, escaped boats—collects in the centre of the gyre.

Yesterday morning, I noticed a region of my lakelet where biota seemed to be collecting, so I kayaked away from the pristine waters and into its midst. Normally when one’s shadow is cast onto clear water, it is barely visible. But, in drumly water, the shadow becomes obvious. Further, the shadow is three dimensional and looks as if it sweeps down into the depths. For this picture, I held a camera over my head. This is an uncommon view for the Lake as the waters are normally clear. Such a view is, alas, normal for people of many other places.

Now for the truly unusual: a rainbow formed by the bodies of tiny insects floating on the surface of the water. A likely insect, Peter Wood tells me, is the clear larva of a midge. Truth be told, a rainbow formed by a millimeter’s depth of this biota does not produce as striking a pattern as does a kilometre’s worth of raindrops. Nevertheless, a rainbow it is.

I had heard about the phenomenon of multitudinous transparent insect bodies producing a rainbow. I had even seen a picture of it taken elsewhere. Before this morning, I had not seen such a thing myself.

Alas, my picture is not nearly as good as the one of my memory, yet, the bow across the water is evident. It is the bright band sloping diagonally from the centre bottom to the upper right. To its left is a darker region; in the argot of rainbows, this is Alexander’s dark band. To the left of the Alexander’s band is another bright region: the secondary bow. Is this bow formed by midge larvae? At this stage, we just don’t know. I went out again this morning. I could still find the drumly water, but whatever had caused the bow had come and gone.

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Pump it up

Posted on July 30, 2012 by Alistair

 

First, a dragonfly larva—it’s called a nymph—climbs out of the water. Second, the dragonfly adult climbs out of its the larval exoskeleton—it’s called an exuvia. Doing this is quite a trick, for once it emerges, the adult will become much larger: longer abdomen and expansive wings. All of this content was initially scrunched up inside the exuvia.

The exuvia splits open, the adult pulls itself out and then begins to pump fluid into its collapsed wings and abdomen causing them to gradually expand to full size.

This Pale Snaketail had already pulled its abdomen out of the exuvia by the time my grandson, Finn, pointed it out to me: “Granddad, do dragonflies moult?” The wings are still collapsed and the abdomen is not yet fully extended. The exuvia is the dark shape to the lower right of the dragonfly, and a few minutes before, it fitted inside this.
Gradually the wings and the abdomen expanded as fluid was pumped into them.

Expansion continued and now the wings extended beyond the end of the abdomen.

Suddenly, the wings swung out to the sides. Even so, they have creases in them and haven’t hardened.

Nevertheless, the dragonfly tries a short flight. It is still weak and quickly lands again to continue the expansion and hardening of its wings. An hour later it will be off on its way.

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Bat’s back

Posted on July 29, 2012 by Alistair

 

The bat’s back. Mind you, there is no way I can be sure that it is the same one as was discussed under sleepy bat earlier in the month. Yesterday’s bat arrived in the afternoon and hung from a bargeboard of my roof. Today, twenty hours later, it is still sleeping there.

An interesting thing about watching nature is that often one sees the unanticipated. In this case, it was a bat (apparently) sleeping with its eyes open. So, I searched on the Web for insights into this. Most sites that discuss bats do not mention it one way or the other. Yet, some people have posed the question as to whether bats can do this. The answers vary: some categorically say that a bat can sleep with its eyes open; others assure me that it cannot. When it comes to information on the Web, the rule is clearly caveat emptor.

A sleeping bat hangs from the bargeboard of my roof. Its fur is brown, but its flesh looks bluish.

It was difficult to find a view that revealed the bat’s face. This one seems to show it sleeping with its eyes open; this morning it was still sleeping with its eyes open.

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Flycatcher family

Posted on July 24, 2012 by Alistair

 

Human parents easily relate to the frenetic activity of bird parents as they attend to their chicks. The next generation is relentlessly demanding. Recently, I showed family pictures of White-breasted Nuthatches, Killdeer and Robin, Common Loons, Canada Geese, Bank Swallows, Northern Flickers. Today it is the Pacific-slope Flycatcher.

Last year, I visited a flycatcher family at the home of the Welwoods. A couple of days ago, the flycatchers were back and I visited again.

Although the birds are called flycatchers, they don’t restrict themselves to flies. This one seems to be ferrying a crab spider to its chicks.

And this one has an indeterminate winged creature.
Either way, the chicks are very appreciative.

 

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Hitchhiking fish

Posted on July 23, 2012 by Alistair

 

Fish:
Oh, oh…, the view is sooo lovely from up here.
Thank you for showing it to me.
Now, if you will kindly just drop me off in the Lake.
Right down there will do just fine.
No, no, not in that nest; in the Lake, the LAKE. 

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