Big snowflakes were slowly drifting down. Read More
Big snowflakes were slowly drifting down. Some were the size of dimes and they were bouncing off the willows at the side of the road as they fell. Even though I was only a kilometre or so from the big highway the snow was falling heavily enough that it dampened the sound of the traffic.
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Big snowflakes were slowly drifting down.
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Some were the size of dimes and they were bouncing off the willows at the side of the road as they fell. Even though I was only a kilometre or so from the big highway the snow was falling heavily enough that it dampened the sound of the traffic. In the quiet of the morning I could hear a soft hiss as the snowflakes hit the truck.
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I’d checked the weather forecast before I’d left the house and saw it called for snow through most of the morning, especially to the west in the foothills. The flurries were supposed to ease off in the afternoon but the morning would be snowy. It was going to be pretty out there and so far, the forecast was holding up.
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But snow, lovely as it was, wasn’t the main reason I’d come out this way. What I was actually looking for was willow catkins — pussy willows.
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These guys start poking their fuzzy little heads out pretty early in the year. Some over-enthusiastic ones will pop out even in January but most start appearing once the hours of daylight begin to get noticeably longer in mid-February. By March, they are usually well along.
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There are many species of willows here in southern Alberta and all of them have catkins but the ones I was looking for are red willows. Not only are they the earliest bloomers, they are, in my opinion, the prettiest. And the easiest place to find an abundance of them is in the foothills.
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So here I sat with my biggest lens perched on the window ledge, listening to the flakes drifting past the tiny, silvery, soft and pretty first flowers of spring.
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The snow backed off after a few minutes and I drove on looking for more willows and hoping for more snow. Up the road I found another burst of snow falling around a quintet of geese wandering around on a still-frozen slough and a rough-legged hawk perched on an aspen. Missed that picture because my camera strap got snagged on the shifter and I couldn’t get the camera aimed quickly enough.
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Heading for the higher country I passed several willow patches but there were very few catkins on these ones. At the top of the hill, though, there was a stand of balsam poplars. These guys are cousins to the willows and they put out catkins, too, though not for a while yet.
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In the meantime, their leaf buds are beginning to swell. I could see a hint of green under the amber surface of several of them and one even had a tiny brown leaf. It was a bit of an anomaly but interesting to see.
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The snow didn’t get heavy again until further along into the Jumpingpound Creek valley. And here it looked like it had been falling for quite a while. Heading up toward the rifle range I was driving on untracked snow and just after crossing the creek I found a little group of whitetails foraging in a willow-filled meadow.
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They started to drift away as I stopped for pictures, as whitetails often do, but one of them didn’t. Uncharacteristically, it actually walked a few steps toward me, stopped and stared and stood there for a good 30 seconds before following its friends. Nice!
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But then a kinda funny thing happened.
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Within maybe five minutes, the clouds parted and the sun started to shine through. A few minutes later, the snow stopped.
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And I mean stopped. It was like a switch had been thrown. In the space of 10 minutes it had gone from snowing so hard I could barely see the whitetails to sunshine. Normally I would have celebrated this but today I was actually looking forward to soft light and softer snow.
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Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. And the willows were still there, snow or not.
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Searching for more catkins I came across a pileated woodpecker that had just excavated a huge hole in the bottom of a spruce tree and watched as it climbed up and down the trunk searching for bugs under the bark. But I drove right on by the willow flats along Sibbald Creek.
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They were nice, brilliantly red and orange, but I had hoped to take pictures of them through falling snow. In the now-bright sunshine, they were just, I dunno, fine.
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OK, so where to go now. With the sudden weather change, it was a bit of a quandary.
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I didn’t really want to keep going up the Kananaskis valley because I wanted to stay more in the foothills. But I also didn’t want to just turn around and retrace my steps. So I headed for the nearby Bow River valley to see what I could find over there.
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Turned out to be a pretty good idea.
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The sun was shining brightly now, glaring off the fresh snow that had fallen barely an hour before, as I headed over to Bow Valley Park. There were willows there that I wanted to have a look at but as I approached the park entrance I caught a glimpse of the open water above Seebe Dam on the Bow River just a couple hundred metres further on. There were big white things floating on it.
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Chunks of ice from upstream?
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Nope. Swans.
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There were around 30 trumpeter swans paddling on the calm waters, moms, dads and grey-plumed babies. With them were mallards and Canada geese and even a few wigeons just flown in from the south. They were dwarfed — even the geese — by the huge white swans swimming across the blue water and dipping down to reach down to the reservoir bottom to grab things to eat.
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The wind was calm enough that their booming calls echoed off the dam, nearly drowning out the constant nattering of the geese around them. Such magnificent birds, they made me forget all about the willow catkins I’d come over this way for.
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I wondered, though, if they were migratory swans that had just come back or if they were part of the bunch that stays year-round on the Bow River just beyond Exshaw. So after a few minutes with these guys I headed upstream to have a look.
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Yeah, I think they’re local. I saw a couple on the river up by Grotto Pond where I usually see them but nothing like the 50 or so I found there a few weeks ago. I know swans are on the move, though, so they’ll be joined by their cousins returning from their Gulf of Mexico vacation any day now.
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But as I drove along the river I started noticing catkins on the willows again so I headed over to Gap Lake to have a look at the willows there.
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And I wasn’t disappointed. The red willows I’d been photographing through most of the day were bare here but another variety of willow — not sure which — was all catkin-ed out. These ones were fully erupted, as big as the tip of my little finger, and they glistened in the sun.
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That was the only clump of them, though, so I drove on to look for more. But I got distracted by the sheep.
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They were right on the road, as they often are here, standing on the pavement, oblivious to the traffic blasting by, or lazing on the rocky slope beside the road. It was fun watching them scrape at the stones to uncover the soft dirt underneath for a comfortable place to lie down. They were totally relaxed.
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But after watching them I decided to head back east instead of going west. There were willow flats by Yamnuska and all along the road through Stoney-Nakoda so there had to be catkins along the way.
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The Bow was open and mostly ice-free all the way to Morley with geese flying around and a few flocks of ducks but not much for catkins either at Yamnuska or here. So just the other side of Ghost Lake I headed up the willow-filled Beaupre Creek valley. Lots of pretty red willows but, again, not much for catkins.
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Why the lack after all the abundance just 20 km further south, I don’t know. But I had one more place I wanted to check.
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Grand Valley is magnificent, a classic piece of ranchland cutting a wide trench along the Wildcat Hills. There was no snow here at all. In fact, I don’t think any of the morning’s snow had even fallen here. Instead there were gophers and golden grass. And an eagle perched like it was posing on a scraggly poplar.
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But the place I was going was at the head of the valley where the creek that runs through it is impounded by beaver dams and covered in red willows. There had to be catkins there.
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There were. Not many, but there were.
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Earlier in the day I’d shot wide-angle pictures of the willow flats and telephoto pictures of the catkins through the falling snow but now I wanted to get really close. I wanted to show off their fuzziness and the redness of the willow bark. But as soon as I stepped into the ditch to get close to them, I sank past my ankles in icy water that had been hidden by the loose grass.
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Nope, not doing that. So instead I sloshed back to the truck, grabbed my scissors and carefully reached over to snip off a couple of twigs.
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Back in the truck I locked them in a clamp to hold them steady and leaned in to grab my pictures.
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The scent from the cut stems was gorgeous. It was tart and tangy and it filled the truck. No wonder moose love these things. I inhaled it deeply as I shot my pictures and then stuck the stems in my heater vent as I started up the truck and headed back to town. Wonderful.
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Snow and sun, swans and, of course, catkins, the first flowers of the new year. And now the equinox is here.
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Welcome to springtime in southern Alberta.
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