Exploring Kootenay Lake

One of this winter’s sweet delights has been how many Trumpeter Swan families and larger groupings are frequenting the shallows, shores and creek mouths of Kootenay Lake. A week ago Saturday, I spent two hours quietly watching about 20 such swans feeding, swimming, preening, socializing and resting. For most of this time, their activity was leisurely, only occasionally punctuated by vocalizations or a brief, gorgeous wing stretch. (No dogs or other perceived predators came along the beach so the swans remained relaxed.)

Sometimes, families would swim slowly past one another, parents keeping their cygnets nearby or in tow. While observing two parents swimming with a single grey juvenile, I noticed them begin to do a different behaviour: repetitive synchronized head bobs, where they mirrored each other in an oscillating up down up down motion. 

Here, both adults are mid-bob, but one’s head is curved lower than the other.

A second later, the low one has bobbed up and the other has bobbed down. This continued for several minutes as they swam.

This was the first time I’d seen synchronized head-bobbing courting at Kootenay Lake. Now, swans often pair for life and express clear affection towards one another. These two are obviously already parents.  But, it’s what they did next that really surprised me. And why we’d see swans doing this here is a story unto itself about changing migration habits. 

There are two indigenous species of swans that visit this area: Tundras and Trumpeters.  Around the beginning of the millennium, my father and others observed that Tundra Swans dominated Kootenay Lake and Trumpeter Swans were less common. Over the years, there’s been a shift. Increasingly we now see families of Trumpeter Swans and rarely see Tundras. (Although we saw a Tundra cygnet last November).

Historically, the swans of either species only visited twice a year: on their way north to breed, and on their way south to winter. Yet the visits of Trumpeters to Kootenay Lake have been getting longer and longer. This year there have been Trumpeter Swans alongside Kokanee Creek Park for most of the winter.

Still, we’ve been expecting them to leave soon and head towards breeding grounds where, as pheromones surge, the swans will court, breed, nest and raise new young.

Yet, the head-bobbing couple is a sign that pheromones are already beginning to surge and some swan courtship has begun here. 

As this pair neared the shore, this couple had a significant burst of activity, and I was astonished to observe a series of gorgeous new activities that also appear to be courting behaviours.

During the end of their swim the couple became momentarily separated. Here, one swan is vocalizing with arched wings and neck pulled backwards and breast forward.

It then raised up out of the water and rushed over to meet its partner who also raised up, as they simultaneously spread their wings and trumpeted.

Joyous vocalizations and paired choreographed wing activity followed. They kept their bills pointed down and wings curled like this as they raised and lowered them. I don’t know if this was what some refer to as wing quivering. I did not see them bump breasts.

All of this seemed like courting behaviour. Then their juvenile showed up between them, joining in the vocalizations and all three eventually settled down. 

Yet, about 10 minutes later, one suddenly flew a short distance away.

Then turned back around to face towards its partner and again sat in the water with wings outspread and head tucked back for about 15 seconds. 

It then gathered speed and ran across the water to sort of fly back to its partner where they met in the water and did a second complex activity that involved choreographed synchronized wing motions and joyful calls.

Has anyone else seen Trumpeter Swans begin courting like this on Kootenay Lake?

I rarely see wildlife that is either injured or deformed. It may be that they are rare, or it may be that predators quickly dispatch them (or both). For the animal with an injury to persist, the injury would likely be minor so the animal could go on feeding and living. I have seen a deformity, but only once (see below).

The injury I saw distorted the shape of the swan’s neck. It was not seen when looking at the swans on the water, presumably because there the necks are held in many different positions and a deviation would not be easily spotted.

However when flying, the necks are all held in the same position: straight out. This is done to minimize air drag when flying (a heron adopts a different solution). This position is illustrated by two swans which took off from far up the beach. They spooked all the other swans which also took to the air.

When the others flew, the swan on the left swans showed a clear neck injury. This awkward position was kept throughout the flight.

I don’t often seen damaged wildlife. In 2018, I observed a male Northern Flicker with a strange bill. This rare condition is known as an avian keratin disorder. It is likely to make eating very difficult.

The Green-winged Teal is a rather small dabbler that is neither rare nor common around here. It spends its winters to our south and its summers to our north. Twice a year it courses through here as it goes one way or the other. 

One male has been hanging out with twenty or thirty mallards for the last couple of days. The mallards will stay, and the teal will head north. But, it typically expects to arrive at the breeding grounds with a mate, and this seems to be much on its mind, for it did not bring a mate when it arrived here. So, it has chosen to keep close company with a female mallard.

Now although the female Mallard is big and female Green-winged Teal is small, their plumage is much the same, so it may be easy to confuse the one with the other. In addition to following the female mallard, he also has regularly attacked male mallards, his presumed rivals, and has done courtship displays by frequently rearing up in the Lake and flapping.

The male Green-winged Teal has a dark beak, and a chestnut-coloured head with a green eye patch.

The teal followed the female mallard wherever she went on water or…

…on land. She seemed to tolerate this, but largely ignored the activity. 

The teal regularly chased any male mallard he thought had eyes for her. They just got out of his way. Photo by Cynthia Fraser.

When in the Lake, the male Green-winged Teal would frequently do a courtship display by rearing up out the water and flapping its wings. This provided a good chance to see the green feathers on its wings.

It is likely that he will migrate and she will stay put. However, hybrid animals have been reported.

Birds mate quickly — in a matter of seconds. And while I had seen a mallard rape, I had not seen mallard consensual sex, at least until this afternoon. 

From the time of rushing to the camera and picking it up, the mallards went through their head bobbing preliminaries. With the first picture mating was happening, and only the male was visible, for the female was now underwater. A fifth of a second later, she was surfacing and he was posturing with his eyes closed.

The female is being penetrated underwater.

The tw0 of them appear only a fifth of a second later.

I was watching a resident family of Northern Flickers flit between their favourite feeding areas, when to my absolute delight, another woodpecker flew over to join them. 

In the West Kootenay, we have a half-dozen or more woodpeckers that either migrate through or live here permanently. Of those, the Hairy and Downy Woodpeckers are the most difficult to tell apart.   (Their similarities probably arise by evolution since these two birds are not even in the same genus.)  It is also relatively uncommon to see either bird around here, but the Hairy is more rare.

Six clues indicated my visitor was a Hairy Woodpecker.

Downy: mass 20 to 33 g; body length 14 to 18 cm.
Hairy: mass 40 to 95 g; body length 18 to 26 cm.

First was size. The Hairy is 2 to 3 times as heavy as the Downy, and about 30% to 40% longer.

The Hairy Woodpecker on the stump seemed closer in size to the nearby Northern Flickers and was significantly larger than the Song Sparrow foraging nearby in the grass. 

After the woodpecker flew off, I measured the stump it pecked at for food. The bird was likely about 24 cm from beak tip to tail end; clearly a somewhat large Hairy. 

To make further comparison easier, here is a photo (right) of a Downy Woodpecker taken previously by Alistair Fraser. The places to look for differences between a Downy and Hairy are marked with four numbers. 

1. The Downy’s bill is much shorter. The Hairy’s bill is noticeably longer and similar to the length of its head.

2. Downy usually have fluffier tufts of feathers above their beaks.

3. The Hairy’s neck has a black downwards spur; the Downy has none.

4. The white-ish lower tail feathers are dotted black only on the Downy. 

This Downy also has a brighter red  head patch than my visiting woodpecker, but that colour difference may be due to my father’s Downy being an older more mature male. 

When my visiting woodpecker flew to a nearby low-lit tree, it had the namesake hair-like or thread-like white back feathers. It also showed white unmarked tail feathers and a reddish-ginger head patch that was split in two.  Apparently a male Hairy’s red patch often splits in two, while the Downy’s does not.

Finally, despite this somewhat ginger-coloured head patch, I am confident my visitor was a Hairy (and not a disguised royal Harry off the grid in Canada!) What do you think?

The cormorant is an interesting bird. It has a long history of interaction with humans, and most of this time the cormorant was presented as surprisingly bad. I encountered one this last weekend, but observations of it are not all that common around here.

The cormorant is perhaps the most vilified of birds, a status that seems to go back many centuries and is offered with various justifications. This vilification can be illustrated by the government of Ontario, where in 2020, licenced hunters were allowed to shoot up to fifteen cormorants a day. This was justified by the claim that cormorants were harming fish stocks and damaging natural habitats with their guano. Yet, many other predator species who do likewise were ignored. Why cormorants? The answer seems to date back centuries, even millennia.

Two somewhat early references to the evilness of cormorants were from the seventeenth century, each of which was redolent of much earlier attitudes. In the 1667 poem, Paradise Lost (Book 4), Milton casts the devil in the guise of a cormorant (4. 196-8), spying on Adam and Eve, and a year later one of La Fontaine’s Fables presents the cormorant as the epitome of greed. Now, it turns out that this later was just a retelling of an Aesop’s fable <https://fablesofaesop.com/cormorant-fishes.html>. So, we have at least 2600 years of writing about the cormorant’s villainy. Hmm…, unlike other early fables (such as the flat earth), it appears that this is one which lives on into the present.

The Audubon society treats the American history of cormorant persecution  <https://www.audubon.org/news/without-solid-science-government-plans-expand-cormorant-killing-efforts>. It concludes by saying, “We’re seeing the birds scapegoated because that’s the easy and convenient thing to do.” 

In 2014, Richard King wrote The Devil’s Cormorant: a Natural History (University of New Hampshire Press. 352 pp.) in which he traces the long history of man’s relationship with the cormorant. Although some oriental societies value it, western societies systematically denounce it as a symbol of gluttony, greed, bad luck, and evil. The cormorant has truly led a troubled existence in human history, myth, and literature. As King romps over centuries, he describes the slaughter of 20,000 Double-crested Cormorants in 1998 by a group calling itself the Concerned Citizens for Cormorant Control. This group of local fishermen merely saw the cormorants as competitors for the fish of Lake Ontario. Well, the list goes on.

Humans have had a two to three thousand year history of vilifying the cormorant although the reasons given have varied over time and the cormorant is hardly alone as a predator. (Indeed, mankind is also a predator.) In the face of natural variation, we have chosen to cast blame on the cormorant and then have taken the easy route and killed many thousands of them.

A Double-crested Cormorant rests on a piling. Of three species of cormorants in BC, this is the only one that is occasionally found in the interior. It is a pleasant observation.

I don’t see a Northern Harrier very often; the last time was five years ago. So when one visited today, I wondered what it was. This one appears to be a female, or perhaps a juvenile.

The harrier was sitting on a piling near me watching some ducks below it, but it did not make a move towards them.