It is not just grizzlies, eagles, and ravens that enjoy a Kokanee for lunch in the fall. This California Gull swooped down and plucked a fish from the mouth of a creek flowing into Kootenay Lake. Two seconds later, and while still on the wing, the gull had swallowed the whole fish.
Recondite names are used for various types of photographic projection: rectilinear (the conventional type), fisheye, equirectangular, stereographic, mollweide—the list is long. Most come from the world of cartography and represent some of the many solutions for mapping a spherical surface (such as the Earth) onto a flat surface.
One of these projections—a nearly full-sphere stereographic view centred on the nadir—has become quite popular among those who take extreme panoramas. Indeed, it has gained a catchy name: the little planet.
Last August, when I took a 360° panorama from the centre of the Main Lake, I wanted to transform it into a little-planet view, but a software upgrade had disabled the routine I normally used for this transformation. That functionality having been restored, here it is.
August’s panorama is presented in the style known as the little planet. The location is Kootenay Lake just off the Pilot Bay Peninsula. The image is oriented as the globe of the Earth: north at top, west to left. The view shows the greenery of the peninsula on the right, South Arm at the bottom, West Arm on the left, and North Arm at the top.
I take pictures to better understand things seen. I post discussions to website and blog as a personal memory aid. That my notes are available publicly is incidental.
Yet, the public is not incidental when one gives an illustrated talk; the audience is now the raison d’être.
I rarely have call to speak before a group, so it was unexpected to receive two invitations to give a presentation during the last week of this month (Oct. 24th, 28th). The talks are entitled: Nature through my lens.
This is a foretaste: below are seven of the many scenes I will discuss.
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I have long enjoyed meteorological optics: rainbows, haloes, twilights, and the corona, illustrated here. The corona’s colours are explained by the diffraction of sunlight by cloud droplets. The best coronae are seen when the droplets are nearly uniform in size, such as those found in wave clouds. That a corona is not usually noticed is a consequence of its great brightness—it forms close to the Sun. Yet when seen through sunglasses, the rewards are obvious. (Even here, the central region of the picture is over exposed).
For perhaps half the year, we live within a world rich in insects. Certainly a tiny fraction of them are worth swatting, but most are innocuous, inconspicuous, and interesting. This lovely looking lassie is a cuckoo bee—she tricks others into raising her young.
Going hand in hand with the pollinating insects of spring and summer are the wildflowers. They carpet lakeside, forest floor, and alpine meadow. Among this diversity of plants, we have quite a few species of wild orchids. Here is one that was difficult to locate: it took me four years to discover where it grows. It is the Giant Helleborine.
For the half of the year without bugs and flowers, we have ice: snow, frozen ponds, frost, even hail. Unexpectedly, some of this ice also looks floral. Indeed, these rather uncommon frost formations are known as an ice flowers.
We have a rich array of mammals that wander our forests, lakes, and even our yards: bears, deer, skunks and more. Here is one that I don’t see often enough: the River Otter. Otters are in the Lake, but they only haul themselves out of the water to play, preen and defecate. This one spent about five minutes frolicking on a dock and then was gone.
Birds abound and present a truly amazing range of species. They may live here year round, only breed here in the summer, or merely migrate through the region in the spring and fall. Who can play favourites with such a bounty? Yet, among the handful of species I will always try to photograph when seen, is the Great Blue Heron. This picture has been described as: dances on water.
Clouds, like birds, present themselves in rich varieties: Some are common; Some are rare; Some change with the season. As with the heron, mammatus is a cloud I will take every opportunity to photograph. These gigantic pendulous pockets of precipitation form on the underside of thunderstorm anvils. They normally pass unnoticed in the darkness under the thick cloud. Yet now and then, when illuminated by the low Sun, they become downright spectacular.
(But, why turn this information into a blog posting? It struck me that when organizers send out an e-mail reminder to potential attendees, they could merely link to this page.)
On a beautiful sunny day, a walk along the beach at Kokanee Creek Park revealed old friends and a new delight. Three are illustrated below in the order seen.
The view over the waters of Kootenay Lake often shows rather nice mirages. Most of them are inferior mirages, such as in this picture, but sometimes I see a superior mirage. The term, inferior, is not an editorial comment, but a literal statement of fact. Consider the Harrop ferry seen at a distance of about four kilometres. Both the erect and inverted images are actually displaced downward from where they would have appeared if the temperature over the Lake’s surface had no variation with height. Although the ferry looks as if it has been lifted above the water surface (foreground), actually, both the ferry and the water have been shifted downwards with the water being displaced more.
Just as mirages are a staple of the Lake, so are mallards—they are with us throughout the year. They are very easy to photograph. So, who needs yet another picture of this familiar friend? Well, I couldn’t resist recording this scene of four of them upended as they dabbled in the shallows along the shore.
It is mid-October and who would expect to see dragonflies? Actually, quite a few species remain around until this time. While I did see a Cherry-faced Meadowhawk, the great delight was to see a species new to me: the Western Meadowhawk. One of the things that makes this dragonfly easily recognizable is the broad yellowish tint on its wings. Here the colour is visible both on the wings and and in their shadows on the sand.
A Wood Duck has iridescent feathers on its head.
Most colours in nature result from selective absorption: a pigment absorbs a range of wavelengths and leaves others to be reflected. The green of leaves and the red of someone’s sweater come about from absorption. The colours produced by iridescence result from a very different process: wave interference.
Or, at least, that is what the guide books and the many websites tell me. Yet, these sources then proceed to show a picture of a wood duck such as that in the first picture below: a black and white feathered head without any apparent colours.
Huh? They tell me, but they don’t show me.
Today, I visited the Wood Duck seen at Kokanee Creek Park a week ago. It was quickly apparent that the beautiful facial colours seen at that time depended critically upon the lighting—a distinctive characteristic of iridescence. Usually the feathers appeared black, but sometimes—well, look for yourself.
A Wood Duck as it might appear in most publications—black feathers on the head.
The iridescent feathers on the head as seen when the light is right.
With each osprey I have seen of late, I say: this has to be the last one of the year. Yet, today I saw another. Mind you, it was sitting in the rain under low skies which would have prevented its departure for the last week. Thursday is forecast to be somewhat better; maybe it will finally get on its way.
In contrast to the osprey, the eagle I saw earlier in the day is likely here for the long haul—eagles live here year round.
This October 11th osprey on the West Arm of Kootenay Lake will surely migrate as soon as the clouds rise.
This eagle at Grohman Narrows will likely stay with us through the winter.
Four Horned Grebes visited me yesterday. It really was a visit: they came within maybe ten meters and seemed unconcerned by my presence and the incessant clicking of my camera.
A few postings ago, I noted that a grebe is not a duck. With this visit, one of the grebes underscored that point by prominently showing its toes. The birds in the Anatidae family (ducks, geese and swans) all have webbed feet (the toes are joined by webbing), a feature that facilitates using the feet for propulsion. Grebes (and coots) solved the problem of having a broad surface for propulsion somewhat differently: each of their toes developed broad lobes. Curiously, this solution has some advantages as the grebes are able to use these lobes as multi-slotted hydrofoils.
Below are pictures of the grebes, with the final image being the bird showing off its toes.
The four Horned Grebes spent a good deal of time near me merely floating.
Although, sometimes there was a bit of chattering,
preening,
stretching,
and, of course, the prominent display of those marvellous lobed toes.
Derek Kite's picture of the Wood Duck on Sept. 22.
Stunning!
I had thought Harlequin Ducks were colourful. Yet, the Wood Duck (the woody) is, if anything, more so, even though the one, below, has yet to complete its moult to breeding plumage.
For the past couple of weeks Derek Kite has been watching a male Wood Duck in Kokanee Creek Park. It was still in its non-breeding plumage when he found it (right).
By yesterday, when I went with him to see it, the duck’s moult to breeding plumage was well under way and it was already really spectacular.
The Wood Duck as seen on October 7th. It will only become grander as it completes its moult.
With its wings partially raised, the lovely blues on the flight feathers are more evident.
Those of you who read my account of the Castlegar hawk watch may have assumed that all raptors left the area in the fall. No, I was describing raptors from the north of here that flew over our area.
Yet, some raptors have left the area. I probably saw my last Osprey this morning, and Turkey Vultures are gone. Some, however, stay year round. Two of those are the Bald Eagle and the Merlin—both of which I saw yesterday. The pictures below are of a Merlin seen in Kokanee Creek Park.
A Merlin is a falcon which feasts on small birds. It perches on snags, such as the one below, and when it spots a delectable, swoops down and takes it.
There is a whimsical assessment of whether something is what it appears to be. Known as the duck test, it asserts:
If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.
Possibly the test imagined the mallard as the only type of duck. However, there are over two dozen duck species seen locally and they just don’t all sound the same: mergansers don’t sound like mallards and buffleheads don’t sound like goldeneyes. Yet, all of these ducks have a somewhat similar body shape and manner of swimming. But, do the first two criteria—looks like, swims like—serve to establish a swimming bird as being a duck?
Alas, no. Below are three birds seen in the last few days, each of which one might be tempted to call a duck, but which definitely are not: coot, grebe, loon. That these birds are not even closely related to ducks is old news to birders, but it is interesting that of my recently seen waterfowl, most were not ducks.
(Would the test work if thinking were confined to mallards? Even that has been satarized that with: If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck but it needs batteries, you probably have the wrong abstraction.)
Rafts of American Coots are seen along the Nelson waterfront each winter—these ones are at Duck Bay. Not only is this odd-looking swimming bird not a duck, it is more closely related to cranes and rails than it is to ducks.
It is not uncommon to see four or more different species of grebes on Kootenay Lake. This is a pair of Horned Grebes, but as the month is October, they are in their non-breeding plumage and aren’t as spectacular as in the summer.
And then there are loons—a favourite of this blog. Not only are loons unrelated to ducks, they are not even closely related to grebes or coots. This couple of Common Loons swam by in the rain as I was taking the pictures of the Horned Grebes.
