A dozen or more Western Grebes have been hanging around in the waters off the Nelson airport. This group has sometimes been accompanied by other species, but the dominant presence is that of the Western. Here are three pictures of this long-necked bird.
I don’t understand why the Nelson waterfront consistently has a much richer range of waterfowl than can be seen elsewhere along the lakeshore. In the last few days, in addition to the usual mallards and geese, there have been: three species of grebes, wigeons, gadwalls, buffleheads, ring-necked ducks, scaups, and of course, coots. A few from Wednesday are illustrated.
Of the waterfowl shown, all but the grebe feast on aquatic plants. Maybe it is the underwater flora that attracts them to Duck Bay.
A female (front) and male (back) American Wigeon were often seen eating plants.
The Ring-necked Duck is named for a faint ring visible only when its neck is extended. This is the male,
and this is the female Ring-necked Duck. The ring on her neck is seen here.
From a distance, the plumage of Gadwalls looks uniformly greyish brown, but it is actually finely patterned. This is the male,
and this, the female gadwall mallard. See comment, below.
The Pied-billed Grebe did not mix with the other waterfowl—it is not a plant eater—and there was only one of them. At this time of the year, it does not display the patterned bill, for which it is named.
Then, there was a great crowd of American Coots, some of which stood in the shallows,
while others showed their lobed toes as they took flight.
I saw my first American Dipper in Kokanee Creek some years ago. Since then I have seen them there, along the lakeshore, and in alpine lakes. However, these pictures were again taken at Kokanee Creek.
The dipper is an unusual bird: it is a song bird that hunts for invertebrates under the waters of fast flowing cold streams and along the adjacent lakeshore. It peers under the water and even dives and walks along the bottom.
The wing feathers that are edged in white show this to be a juvenile. Also, note the dipper’s feet; they are not webbed, but adapted for walking on the bottom.
The dipper stands in a shallow portion of the stream. Its body casts a shadow on the water which enables one to easily see to the stream bottom and the feet.
The dipper peers into the stream for things to eat. In slightly deeper water, it will dive and forage along the bottom.
The Pine Siskin feeds in trees, feeds on the ground, and travels in flocks. Each of these behaviours is seen in yesterday’s pictures of the bird. The ones with the yellowish markings are male; the ones with the paler, or whitish markings, are female.
In two days, I encountered two birds that hide. One apparently thought it was rather good at camouflage, but was actually comically bad. The other was superb.
The first bird was a Ruffed Grouse. I watched it as it watched me doing yard work. It seemed convinced it couldn’t be seen. Finally, I stopped work, fetched my camera, and took its picture. As I left, it continued to feign invisibility.
Then there is the snipe; I show pictures of two different ones seen at Kokanee Creek Park today. I spotted neither of them on my own—Derek Kite found them. He would say, there it is; I would say, I see nothing but grass.
This is a good time of the year to admire the distribution of frost. When snow covers the ground, any frost on top of it is much more difficult to distinguish.
Frost formed when the surface temperature dropped below 0°C.
Frost forms when water vapour (in the atmosphere) diffuses toward a colder surface and condenses onto it as crystals. In that way it is just like dew, but frost occurs when the surface temperature is low enough for ice to form. Usually, the distribution of either frost or dew is locally uneven: some here, none there. This unevenness results from slight variations in the surface temperature: slightly below 0°C here, slightly above, there.
There are some common situations that result in these small variations in surface temperature: variations in soil (subsurface) conductivity; variations in exposure to sunlight; variations in exposure to the nighttime sky. For now, I will ignore the first two (maybe get some pictures showing them later), and just deal with relative exposure to the nighttime sky.
In this first picture, the frost on the grass avoids the trees, both under and beside them. It is not that the frost fell from the sky, as snow does, but that the tree is warmer than the sky. Everything emits (infrared) radiation: the ground does, the tree does, the sky does—and for that matter, a person does. The amount of radiation being emitted (that is energy being lost) depends upon the object’s temperature: the hotter an object, the greater its radiative output. So, imagine being a bug on the grass well away from those trees. You are both emitting radiation (losing energy), and you are receiving other radiation (gaining energy) from your surroundings—principally from the sky. The sky is much colder than you, so you receive less energy than you lose and your temperature drops below 0°C and frost forms. But, unlike the sky, the tree is roughly the same temperature as the ground. So near the tree, a bug will be receiving nearly as much radiative energy (from the tree) as it loses. The temperature does not drop as much and frost does not form.
The situation on the beach is similar even though the variations in terrain resulting from endless footprints are quite small. Here the frost hugs the ridges and avoids the valleys. Again, imagine being a bug on a ridge. The only radiation you receive to compensate for your own loss comes from the much colder sky, so your temperature drops. If you were a bug in the valleys, a portion of the sky would have been replaced in your view by valley walls—walls that are at about the same temperature as you are and a good deal warmer than the sky. On the ridges, there is a net radiative energy loss, the temperature drops and frost forms; in the valleys, the net radiative loss is smaller and the temperature does not drop low enough for frost. The valleys are just that little bit warmer than the ridges.
While both of the above pictures were taken this morning, I thought it would be fun to add a view of the same thing happening on a summer beach, but this time with dew. Again, the ridges are cold and dew forms; the valleys are warmer and it does not. Of course, another interesting comparison is the fact that the colder ridges, with frost, look lighter, while the colder ridges, with dew, look darker. That is a story for another time.
These are interesting things to watch for during early morning walks.
I have experienced an upsurge in heron visits during the last couple of weeks. The same thing happened at this time a year ago. I wrote about it then in a posting entitled Herons return, and noted that now that the ospreys had left, the herons moved more freely about the region.
I see a heron every couple of days now. Indeed, yesterday, I saw five of them together—a somewhat unusual sight. Four had settled on some pilings and then a fifth flew past. Nice!
Usually these observations are made in the early morning light, a time when pictures of distant birds present technical problems. But, I attach one picture I did manage of a recent heron as it was flying. It serves as a token for all this activity.
Our local sculpin is a small (6-8 cm long) secretive fish that spends most of the daylight hours well camouflaged and motionless on the floor of the Lake, often within rocky hideouts. By such devices, it tries to avoid predatory fish such as the trout. For one sculpin at the Nelson waterfront, this approach was insufficient to avoid a grebe.
Yesterday afternoon, I watched a Horned Grebe diving for fish in the water alongside the playing fields. I concentrated on the moment the grebe surfaced hoping it would display the result of a successful hunt. The grebe dived and surfaced many times before surfacing with a Slimy Sculpin in its bill. The sculpin fought and even escaped, but the grebe caught it again and down the gullet it went. Bye-bye sculpin.
Proclaiming the observation of any species as being the last of the season is fraught with problems—you just might see another a few days later. Yet, a butterfly on November 1st has to be close to the last.
Posting updated on November 4th: The butterfly, below, has now been identified by Jon Shepard, an author of, Butterflies of British Columbia, Guppy & Shepard (2001). He wrote me to say:
The anglewing is Zephyr or Polygonia zephyrus. The submarginal row of light spots on the upper side of the hind wing are larger and more diffuse than for either P. satyrus or P. faunus.
It is certainly a good, late record!
Indeed, according to his book the latest observation for this species in BC is the second week in October—and that was probably at the Coast. Yet, this Zephyr Anglewing (its common name) was observed flitting about a marshy region of Kokanee Creek Park in the first week of November.
It was a pleasant if unexpected sight.
Meta posting
This is a posting about postings—which is to say, it is a meta posting.
So, this is not a posting about the Lake, but about the approach adopted when presenting the Lake. It was prompted by a recent discussion about the motivations behind blogging and the way the resulting blogs are implemented. The codification applies to both portions of the site: the website, organized topically, and the blog, organized temporally.
Raison d’être
The Kootenay Lake website and its blog are personal journals of local discovery—merely notes to myself. That they can be viewed by others is the happenstance of how they were created. Certainly, I am happy for others to view them. Yet, the fact that they are available publicly does not mean that the motivation is promotional—a suggestion sometimes made. As the home page of the website states, this site “is not here to make a profit, promote a cause, build a reputation, encourage a tourist, or educate a soul—as with the Lake itself, the site merely is.”
Writing
Being a journal of discovery, its writing is expository. Avoided are commands and exhortations—the imperative mood is not used. There is no presumption to tell visitors what to do or think. Absent is the pressure applied by many sites to: buy, join, volunteer, vote, donate, visit, travel, play, pray, register, conserve, or click. No advice is offered and no activity is encouraged.
Images
The pictures are local; most are taken by me, but a few by acquaintances. The latter are always used with permission and acknowledement. There are no images copied or linked from afar: no clip art, no pictures lifted from Flicker or Wikipedia, no videos from YouTube and its kin.
Design
The design is simple. Eschewed are: ads, invitations from Facebook or Twitter to like or link to what you see, share buttons, tag clouds, weather widgets, calendars, lists of related blogs, and pictures of followers. Not only would these add clutter, they deliver nothing I seek.
If I were to reduce the essence of the Kootenay Lake site to one image, it would be this one of Trumpeter Swans taken three kilometres from my home.
I observe, photograph, learn, write, post. That is all.