The hardest thing about writing a column for a monthly magazine is trying to make everything relevant to the time period you are going to read it.
The end of February and the beginning of March have been like spring east of Calgary. Oh sure there has been mornings when we woke up to a little snow and some lovely hoar frost. I love the hoar frost we get here with the ice crystals on the branches of the trees and even on the leaves of the grass. You get out into the country and you come across it on the barbed wire, and everything is coated in white until the sun starts to shine and fantastic blue skies emerge then it is like it suddenly starts to snow. The ice crystals that were momentarily on the lines or the branches suddenly melt and fall, sometimes in a great long line of ice.
During the last couple of weeks of February and the first full week of March my travelling companions and I have seen three Snowy e of Highway 9 and past Bruce Lake. A couple of sightings were also made going towards Strathmore to the south. The Snowy Owls we have been seeing have ranged from juveniles with black speckled bellies and black all over the their backs to females with a little black barring to one exceptional male who was almost as pure white as the snow that still lay in the fields. The whitest Snowy I have ever seen in my life. Today (March 6) spring was in the air, three Great Horned Owls spotted on nests, these lovely ladies will be here for the next couple of months waiting for the eggs beneath them to hatch and to keep their young warm and safe. Dad will be busy foraging for food. Good news on the food front, lots of gophers (Richardson’s Ground Squirrels) enjoying the morning sun. On this day, three Snowy Owls, and at Bruce Lake four Hungarian Partridge behaving like I had never seen before. The boys were out there displaying and puffing up at each other and flying up in the air at each other talons at the ready. They would charge towards each other chests puffed out and heads held high stopping mere inches from each other and then start the display all over again. We watched as a Snowy Owl stood in a field eating something hidden from our view as a hundred or so Snow Buntings zigged and zagged overhead in a wondrous choreographed display of flight. I always find it amazing how these birds and others can fly in such uniform precision like being one. There was an article recently that said that Starling do this by following the flight of seven other birds and so each bird is watching seven others and hundreds if not thousands can move as one. We have also been travelling the road just north of Highway 24 from the Trans Canada highway, here you take a dirt road that leads up to Inverlake Road which will eventually take you west to the Trans Canada just west of Chestermere Lake. This can be a fantastic area in the spring and summer. One day as my wife and I were driving we came across a couple of cock pheasants up in the field eyeing each other. When the truck stopped they quickly went into their stooped stance and raced off into the brush around the bare field but not before I manage a couple of quick shots from the camera. Just down the road another couple of cocks out getting grit from the roadside, they quickly melted into the brush and bulrushes at the side of the road.
Even when you get to read this article in April and I and my wife are in Costa Rica checking out the birds and mammals of the tropics, take a drive out these highways and enjoy what nature has to offer. Drive a little slower and check out those trees for Great Horned Owls sitting up in the nests of Red Tail and Swainson’s Hawks, watch also for Coyotes and Pheasants too you never know what you might find around the next corner, the next field or in next tree. Oh and I even spotted that fox you saw in the February issue only this time he didn’t wait for me to photograph him. Keep your camera and your binoculars handy and have a great spring.
