I find it difficult to photograph insects in flight—birds are not easy either, but they are not as difficult as insects. Insects are small and usually too fast for my camera’s auto focus to capture. So, my occasional modest success with flying insects owes more to persistence than skill.
Here is a honey bee approaching a wild rose. You can see the ball of pollen attached to its hind legs.
A hover fly approaches a flower of the same plant.
For all its parasitic behaviour, a cuckoo bee is beautiful to look at.
A cuckoo bee looks something like a wasp—but it isn’t a wasp; it’s a bee. There are quite a few different apian species that have earned the name, cuckoo bee: a bee that has the habit of laying its eggs in the nests of other bees (and so behaves in a manner reminiscent of cuckoo birds). Cuckoo bee females are best recognized by the fact that they lack pollen-collecting structures. Further, they neither construct their own nests, nor have much body hair.
Most cuckoo bees are in the sub-family, nomandinae, but there are many different species, a number of which I have seen in my garden. I don’t know which species today’s cuckoo bee is.
The loveliest looking species of cuckoo bee I have seen in my garden is this one from three years ago.
The Black-billed Magpie certainly has been seen at a number of places around the Lake—but, it has been seen only occasionally. As efauna.bc.ca says: it is a rare year-round visitor. Truth be told, the one I present here was seen just west of this region in the Monashees, but a magpie it is. It has perched in the rain on great mullieins.
The magpie is a member of the crow family, i.e., it is a corvid. The region offers other more frequently seen corvids: crow, raven, Stellar’s Jay, Clark’s Nutcracker, and now and then, a magpie.
A few days on the road have revealed patterns among cervids that were not readily apparent from the smaller sample that could be seen around my home.
First, all that I saw were moulting from their winter coat into their summer coat.
Second, the tails provided an indelible way to distinguish species.
White-tailed Deer show off both their strikingly large tail along with some patchy moulting on the hip.
A Mule Deer shows some patchy moulting and its rope-like tail with a black tip.
An elk shows a short white tail on a white butt, and a bit of moulting on its hip.
Finally, a male Mule Deer with tiny antler buds on its crown looks at me and asks the perennial question posed by other local animals: “Why are you pointing that camera at me?”
Windows are a potential hazard for birds.
Many birds hang around my home: hunting, feeding, nesting, and squabbling. Yet, collisions with my windows are remarkably rare. When it happens, the window usually displays an indistinguishable smudge.
The smudge was not indistinguishable from the collision shown below. Fortunately, the bird, itself, survived, but I cannot say whether it had a headache.
Normally, the only moths I spot in the daytime are those that are sleeping in conspicuous places such as on a window, wall or carpet. In their natural habitat, they are a great deal more difficult to find because their cryptic patterns allow them to blend with their chosen resting spot. I just don’t see them; presumably hungry birds miss many of them also.
In the early summer, the alfalfa looper (Autographa californica) drifts into our region on the south wind. In previous years, I had occasionally wondered about the hook-shaped pattern on its wings—why might these markings have evolved? My answer might lie in the picture, below, where one is sleeping on a fallen tree branch. Could this moth’s wings mimic lichen-covered bark?
I have visited a patch of lupines along the lakeshore many times over the years. Whether these flowers are some of the various local wild species or are domestic escapees is unclear, but they have been there on their own for about a half century. Whatever they were in the past, they are now wild.
First are three pictures of some flowers themselves, then three pictures of their visitors.
On the leaves there were a number of jumping spiders. This one had captured a fly.
A golden dung fly was on the grass below the flowers.
Many pollinators were visiting the flowers, but the prize sighting was of the (nearly extirpated) Western Bumble Bee—undoubtedly a queen. This sighting is within metres of where I saw my first western three years ago.
Haloes are not all that common around Kootenay Lake—at least when it is compared with other places I have lived. Further, of all the many haloes that can be seen, the paranthelion is sufficiently uncommon that I cannot recall having seen one here before.
halo: rings, arcs or spots of light in the sky caused by ice crystals.
22° halo: circle centred on Sun having an angular radius of 22°.
parhelion: [lit. beside sun] coloured spots adjacent to a halo at the solar elevation.
paranthelion: [lit. beside the point opposite the Sun] a colourless spot 120° degrees from the Sun.
parhelic circle: white line around the sky at the solar elevation.
• The Kootenay Lake website offers more pictures of haloes.
The first thing I noticed as the radiation fog was clearing Sunday morning was an unusually bright parhelion (also called a sundog because it dogs the Sun). The parhelion is the coloured spot near the center of this picture. The parhelion and the 22° halo (the nearly vertical line on the left) are both explained by the refraction of sunlight through plate-like hexagonal ice crystals. The difference is that the halo results from smaller tumbling crystals, while the parhelion is from larger horizontally oriented ones. These larger crystals will fall almost like (hexagonal) dinner plates spread out on a table. As the Sun rises above the horizon (here its elevation is 34°), sunlight passing through the horizontally oriented plates takes a skewed path. This shifts the parhelion outside the halo. Also seen in the picture is the parhelic circle—the white horizontal line.
The scene kept changing as cirrus drifted across the sky. This wider-angle view was taken a short time after the first picture. It shows parhelia on either side of the Sun, a portion of an upper tangential arc above the Sun and bits and pieces of the parhelic circle. The departing fog can be seen over the Lake in the lower right.
Finally, here is a nearly half-sky panorama. The 22° halo and its two parhelia are on the left, the parhelic circle extends across much of the sky, and the paranthelion is near the right edge of the picture. As this diffuse bright spot sits 120° from the Sun, it is also known as the 120° parhelion. The parhelic circle is explained by a single reflection of sunlight off the vertical sides of the hexagonal ice crystals. The paranthelion has a slightly more complex explanation. Sunlight enters the top of the crystal, is internally reflected in succession off adjacent sides of the crystal and exits the crystal bottom. The adjacent vertical sides of the crystal form a corner reflector with an internal angle of 120° and this deviates the light by the observed 120°. When parhelia are particularly bright, it is a good time to look for a paranthelion.
I always welcome the return of the rainbow season.
While a rainbow might appear on any occasion, the best of them usually arrive in late May or early June with the arrival of convective showers. The timing of this also corresponds to the spring freshet, so pictures of rainbows over the Lake at this time usually show high water: last year’s late-June rainbow panorama presented a rather satisfactory view of a rainbow reflected in the Lake. This observation shows many nice features of the rainbow, but the Lake was too ruffled to show a good reflection.
The rainbow on June 2nd shows many of the features of a well developed rainbow that forms in a summer shower.
1) The first feature to notice is that rainbow is a circle whose centre is the head of one’s own shadow. This means that the rainbow is a remarkably personal thing: each person sees his own rainbow—what you see is YOUR rainbow, not someone else’s.
2) The second thing to notice is that there are two rainbows: the primary (inner) bow, and the secondary (outer bow). The primary bow is explained by a single reflection of sunlight within a raindrop and has red on the outside; the secondary bow is explained by two reflections within the raindrop and has red on the inside.
3) The darkest region of the sky lies between the bows. This region is known as Alexander’s Dark Band.
4) Then there are the supernumerary bows, but more of that below with the next picture.
5) Well…, a rainbow aficionado will spot other nice features in this picture, but this will do for now.
I enhanced a small portion of the above scene to show the supernumerary bows. These are the bands that appear inside the primary (inner) rainbow. As I watched the bow, I could see three supernumerary bows. Certainly there is one (and maybe two) apparent in this photograph.
Some birds protest vigorously if a human (or other perceived predator) passes anywhere near their eggs. The odd thing is that often this noise serves to reveal the presence of a nest that would otherwise be missed.
Emily Graeme sent me this picture of a killdeer near Nelson. It is standing over its eggs and vigorously protesting the presence of people in the area. Just as some people will buy a house near an airport and then complain about the noise, this killdeer had laid eggs around humans and then complained when they passed by.
Similarly, it was protestations of this robin that had built a nest within a meter of my home that alerted me to the fact that it was there.
Without the protests, I would have walked right past without noticing the eggs.
Meanwhile, on another side of the house, a robin chick has already left the nest. At the point the chick is mobile, the parents become more relaxed.
Emily Graeme’s picture is used with permission.
