Exploring Kootenay Lake

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 20^th, a bone appeared atop a rather tall piling in the Lake (first picture); a day later, it vanished.

Today (March 8^th) 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 20^th.

That bone vanished within a day and then a different bone appeared atop the same piling on March 8^th.