Baby coyotes! Read More
Baby coyotes! OK, I gotta stop. They were on the wrong side of the highway, traffic was roaring by and I was on my way a lot further east but, I mean, baby coyotes! I made a legal U-turn as soon as I could and headed back to see if I could get some pictures.
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Baby coyotes!
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OK, I gotta stop. They were on the wrong side of the highway, traffic was roaring by and I was on my way a lot further east but, I mean, baby coyotes! I made a legal U-turn as soon as I could and headed back to see if I could get some pictures.
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They were chasing around among a bunch of caraganas, jumping on each other and doing all those crazy things that canine babies do but suddenly they all bolted for the nearly hidden den entrance. Well, dang, I thought.
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But as quickly as they disappeared, they returned and started playing again. I wish they had been a bit closer but, hey, baby coyotes! I’ll take whatever I can get.
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Noon News Roundup
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I was on my way to find some cactus blossoms. It’s that time of year when the prickly pears are blooming so I was heading over to the Red Deer River valley around Dorothy where I knew I’d find plenty of them.
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The morning was warm and sunny, barely a cloud in the sky. Green fields stretched in every direction, drifts of cottonwood fluff lined the roads by the farm windbreaks, ponds were like mirrors in the still air.
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At one of them I found a dozen or so phalaropes hunting for bugs on bright yellow-green patches of algae. Shovelers and mallards and a pair of teal swam in the open water. At another pond close by there were black-necked stilts striding along on their ludicrously long, pink legs. There might have been baby stilts there, too. One of the birds was looking around nervously as I took my pictures.
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But it was cactus I was after so, tempting though they were, I left the ponds behind and crossed the Wintering Hills to the river valley at Dorothy.
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I began seeing patches of cactus almost as soon as I started down the north side of the hills. Coulee edges were studded with them, patches of them stood out amid the grassy pastures. A big clump of them were on the edge of the river. Nearly all of them were covered with big, papery, yellow blossoms.
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But the thing that caught my eye the most wasn’t the cactus. It was the Dorothy grain elevator.
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This old AP grain hub had been eroding away for years, gradually settling in on itself as time and weather gnawed away at the wood it was built from. But now, at least externally, it looks like new again.
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I had heard it was being renewed but this was the first time I’d seen the finished project. Interesting.
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The cactus was in full bloom. Yellow blossoms were everywhere in the river valley, sharing the pastures with sagebrush and speargrass and dominating the eroded, south-facing slopes. I’d timed my arrival to midday so the blossoms would be fully opened and they absolutely were, their yellow faces aimed straight up at the sun.
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I tried my best to be careful as I crawled among them, avoiding the spiky pads, and for once, I was pretty successful. I did manage to have my pant leg nailed to my shin by an old dry pad that I hadn’t noticed but my elbows remained blessedly free of spines.
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But after half an hour in the bentonite dust and, much as I hate to say it, mosquitoes, I headed out of the valley and onto the open prairie. I was sure I would find more cactus out there but I also wanted to poke around that vast expanse of native grassland.
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I saw the first antelope on a hillside not far from Dorothy. It was a big, healthy buck with long, curved horns and he shared the horizon with a redtail hawk perched on a fencepost close by. The sky behind was filled with billowy clouds that had been building up as the morning turned to afternoon.
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But it was still sunny as I got to Little Fish Lake just northeast of Dorothy. And I was very surprised to see it was nearly full.
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It has been a while since I’ve been here but the last few times the lake was low and the gravelly bottom was revealed out a hundred metres or so. Today, though, the water was nearly up to the sandy shoreline. There were pelicans paddling along with cormorants following in their wake and the rocky islands were covered with gulls.
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Quite fearless gulls. Walking along the shore, they pretty much ignored me as I approached and went on with their business of splashing in the water and pecking at things washed up on the sand. Laying down to shoot some feathers, I was surprised to watch a gull circle overhead and then splash down in the water barely 10 metres in front of me. Gulls are bold but they aren’t usually that bold.
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I went around the corner of the lake from there, over to where the little creek comes in, and was surprised to find it flowing. The Hand Hills must have either had a lot of snow melt that had soaked into the ground or more rain than I would have suspected but the countryside was lush and green. The cattle and the mule deer I saw sure seemed to be enjoying it.
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Back on the south side of the lake I stopped to crawl around in the dirt once more to get a low angle on some gaillardia blossoms. Nearly as pretty as the prickly pears, these guys are just hitting their stride. More commonly called blanket flowers, it’s easy to see where the name came from with their vibrant orange and yellow faces.
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The sky was still mostly clear above the flowers but I could see dark clouds building to the southwest as I crossed the prairie headed westward. The Wintering Hills on the far side of the Red Deer River were in alternating sun and shade while, even though the sky was clear overhead, the occasional cloud shadow made it to where I was driving.
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It was still warm and the air mostly calm and the mosquitoes that had pestered me both by the lake and the cactus patch were annoying the antelope I came across, too. I found a pair of them nibbling on some roadside volunteer clover and they kept bouncing around and shaking their heads as they tried to snack and avoid the bites. I felt for them.
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The still, humid air felt much warmer than the 26 C that the dash thermometer read and it was easy to see why. Coming out onto the flats above Drumheller, I was greeted by a nearly black sky. The 30 per cent chance of thunderstorms the forecast had predicted was obviously now 100 per cent.
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But dropping down into the valley by Rosebud, the air was still and calm. Stopping to photograph the bright red farm buildings in a coulee just south of town, I could hear the rumble of thunder and see the shelf of dark cloud overhead but there was no wind, no rain. But the sky over the Rosebud River valley looked mean.
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I found another antelope, this one a dainty little female, casually walking up the road that led to Redland. She walked up in front of me, paused at the intersection as if deciding which direction to go and then trotted off across a field where she paused under that dramatic sky as if she were posing. Another antelope trotted up to join her.
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Ten minutes later, the storm hit. Or maybe I should say, I hit the storm.
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I’d rolled south from Redland over to Severn Dam, north of Standard, hoping to maybe find some more birds — or the few patches of cactus that grow there — but the front and I both hit the dam at the same time. Waves were hammering the dam face, pushed by gusts that had to be hitting around 80 km/h and lightning was banging down on the surrounding hills. I could see white blobs far down the reservoir that must have been pelicans but they were hunkered into whatever cover they could find.
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I tried to get some pictures of the lightning but the gusts were shaking the truck too hard and rain was starting to blow in. But I could see a bright spot off on the far horizon so I aimed the truck that direction.
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The wind was crazy and the rainfall was intense but neither lasted very long. After about 10 minutes I was through the worst of it and by the time I stopped on a hillside in the Chimney Hills south of Rockyford, all that was left of the storm was the bubbly mammatus underside of the receding clouds and a much lighter following wind.
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OK, well, that had been a day. Gorgeous green grasslands, a prairie lake full of birds, acres of gorgeous cactus blossoms, antelope, a raging storm.
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And baby coyotes!
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Southern Alberta, I love you!
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