Sources suggest that the Yellow-bellied Marmot emerges from hibernation some time between mid April and early May depending on climatic conditions and snowpack.
What can one conclude about this marmot photographed at noon on March 23rd? It was seen somewhat west of Nelson at a spot where I saw a marmot last August. There may be a colony nearby.
This Yellow-bellied Marmot blends in well with the dried grass of its surroundings.
If I weren’t still groggy, I wouldn’t let you get this close. 
On March 3, Derek Kite reported a leucistic goose on the Lake. Today, I also saw it, but now with its mate.
Leucism describes a defect in cells where patches on the body’s surface lack pigment. The Canada Goose we each saw showed white on its crown and a portion of the neck.
Will this mating produce leucistic goslings? It is not possible to tell at this time.
This female leucistic goose seems posed to mate with a normal male.
A half-dozen or more Tundra Swans have arrived at Robert’s Bay.
Almost all Tundra Swans can be identified by their yellow lores (lore: the region between the eye and the bill). Not all Tundras show this spot, and when seen the spot is variable in size, yet it is a good indicator of the species.
Robert’s Bay (the bay in front of Blaylock’s Mansion) is quite shallow. Swans appear to be able to spot shallow feeding areas as they fly over the Lake, and so Robert’s Bay is a perennial springtime favourite of swans (as are the shallows at Kokanee Creek Park).
Late March and early April is the time to see Tundras at Robert’s Bay as they stop to feed on their way to the high arctic. If they stick around for a few days, I may be able to get some better shots.
Both members of this pair of Tundra Swans show yellow lores, but the male (bigger, foreground) displays a much larger yellow lore than does the female.
Many animals put aside preserves for winter: humans do, squirrels do. Do finches?
Over a period of a few days this January, Pine Grosbeaks cleaned the berries off a mountain ash in my yard. The first picture, below, shows a male working at it.
As the mountain ash was now bare, the grosbeaks moved on and were subsequently seen eating (the somewhat less palatable) snowberries and then those of the black hawthorn.
Today, they were back at the same (empty) mountain ash for the first time in two months. Why?
This time the feeding was under the tree. In January, many of the berries had been dropped onto the snow and subsequently covered with fresh snow. Now the snow has melted and the birds have returned to eat the berries preserved in the snow for two months.
Were the berries dropped purposefully for later consumption, or was this result inadvertent? It was probably inadvertent, but isn’t it fun to see these birds now getting to eat the food they had caused to be preserved two months earlier?
In January, a male Pine Grosbeak eats (and drops) berries from a mountain ash.
In March, a male Pine Grosbeak came to the same tree and is eating the now exposed berries that had been dropped and preserved in the snow under the tree.
For over a week now, there has been a family of migrating swans feeding in the shallows south of the Kokanee Creek Park—swans and their entourage of ducks. As the lake level has been dropping, the swans have been squeezed between the expanding shore and the fixed location of the deeper channel. The result is that it is easier now to get close enough for pictures. Here are four from midday Sunday.
(When posted this morning, the title read: Kokanee’s Tundras. It now turns out that these swans are all Trumpeters.)
Inadvertently, I ran an intelligence test on birds.
I have a two-sided bird feeder that sits halfway between a window (for observing) and some trees (for perching). Of course, the birds regularly go to the side of the feeder facing the trees which means that the feeder itself obscures my view of them from the window.
The solution to this problem was to block the entrance to the feeder on the one side. Surely this would force the birds to come around where I could see them.
The first bird to arrive after I blocked one opening was a Black-capped Chickadee. It tried the blocked side, flew back to the tree, and then promptly flew around to the open side and fed. Thereafter it came only to the open side.
The second bird to try it was a Steller’s Jay. Five times it flew in and tried to get seeds from the blocked entrance and always failed. Finally, it gave up and flew to the floor of the deck where it picked up a few seeds that had been dropped earlier. Later in the day it was still trying to get seeds from the blocked side and never did figure out that the other side was open.
The Pine Siskins figured it out quickly also. The jay remains stymied. So much for corvid smarts.
The Black-capped Chickadee quickly came to the open side of the feeder.
The Stellar’s Jay has yet to figure it out after a few hours of failure.
The Red-tailed Hawk has a remarkably variable appearance. Plans today had been to try to find a reported dark-phase hawk—the markedly less common form. Alas, that expedition was postponed. So, I went for a drive and, unexpectedly, saw a Red-tailed Hawk, but the somewhat more common light phase.
When I say it is the somewhat more common form, I don’t mean to imply that this is an every-day sighting—it isn’t. Yet, this is the time of year that I begin to see Red-tailed Hawks along the North Shore of the West Arm of Kootenay Lake. Here is today’s hawk soaring as it looks for prey. (This picture does show the reason it has earned its name.)
Swans are already flooding into the Creston Valley on their way north. I normally think of April as the month to view swans migrating along the West Arm, but everything seems to be early this year. For the last few days, there has been a family of seven Tundra Trumpeter Swans in shallows off the mouth of Kokanee Creek. Mind you, they are a fair way offshore, so are a bit difficult to photograph.
The family of seven Tundra Trumpeter Swans, with two adults (whitish) and five cygnets (greyish), languidly paddles upstream in the shallows south of Kokanee Creek Park.
These four cygnets have just lifted their heads out of the water after dabbling. Their long necks enable them to feed on the bottom in the shallows. The mallard accompanying them is also a dabbler, but the Lake is too deep here for its short neck to enable it to reach the bottom.
The swans quickly attracted other waterfowl: mallards, geese, and even buffleheads. Why? This small portion of the Lake may be sufficiently shallow for the swans to feed on the bottom, but it is not shallow enough for the smaller geese and mallards. It seems that the swans stir up the bottom with their bills and feet. Edible debris floats to the surface where the other waterfowl take advantage of it. So, when swans feed, other waterfowl gather.
As spring is approaching, the geese are squabbling over mates amidst considerable clamor and flapping. The swans and mallards just seem to ignore the ruckus—oh well, those factious geese are at it again.
The tops of pilings are fairly inaccessible places for anything but a bird. But, birds really like them. A piling provides a good perch for hunting, and a spot inaccessible to land predators. Atop pilings I have seen: kingfishers, eagles, ospreys, flickers, gulls (ring-billed and herring), tree swallows, violet-green swallows, herons, geese, mergansers, ravens, starlings and merlins.
What I hadn’t seen before last month was a bone. On February 20th, a bone appeared atop a rather tall piling in the Lake (first picture); a day later, it vanished.
Today (March 8th) another bone appeared atop the same piling (second picture). Will it also leave soon?
The bone on the piling offers a whodunit?
I think that the best guess so far was offered by Ralph Ritcey of Kamloops when the first one appeared:
I would agree that the object is a piece of bone – most probably a section of long bone from a beef cut by a butcher and sold as dog food. You don’t mention ravens visiting the pilings but they, along with eagles, are the most likely suspects to carry a remnant from butchering and deposit it there.
My vote goes to ravens.
But, why would ravens do this?
The piling bone of February 20th.
That bone vanished within a day and then a different bone appeared atop the same piling on March 8th.
Pictographic seachange
Pictographs are at once art and narrative.
Pictographs—rock paintings—were created by Aboriginal people over millennia. Alas, many have become obscured by time, suffering fading, erosion, lichen, and sometimes vandalism. There is now often difficulty in discerning many of the shapes depicted.
There are over two-dozen ancient pictographic sites around Kootenay Lake. Most have been known only to locals and archaeologists. However, the use of clever image-enhancement software on site photographs has resulted in publicity from Parks Canada and the Globe and Mail. These articles tell how pictographs, two of which are adjacent to the Main Lake, have started to yield their secrets.
The pictographic seachange started with an image-enhancement technique developed by NASA for use on planetary missions. It was then adapted for pictographs by Jon Harman, an American mathematician and amateur archaeologist. Harman’s software was adopted by Brad Himour, an archaeologist at Parks Canada. Mr. Himour has been working cooperatively with Aboriginal Elders to protect, preserve and interpret rock-art sites in the Kootenay region. This cooperation resulted in a the article in the Globe and Mail.
I thought: if Parks can do this with its pictures of pictographs, why can’t I do it with mine? I acquired the software and tried it on a picture of a local pictograph. It works.
The picture, below, shows my original photograph. When the cursor rolls over it, the picture changes to show the enhanced image (you might have to wait a moment for it to be loaded the first time). Many virtually unnoticeable features in the original picture become striking in the second. Consider the smudge in the lower left that turns into a swimming lizard (or canoe) with a bow wave.
While I have my own guess as to the story being told at this site, for now I merely note that such enhanced images allow the welcome possibility of rediscovering both the art and narrative enshrined on cliffs around the Lake.
Before and after enhancement: move cursor over image; wait; move cursor off image; repeat. As I cannot get the image swap to work on an ipad, I have attached a copy of the enhanced image below this one.
