Respite from the fall rains

Fall rains have begun in earnest but not with heavy winds yet.  Lats night it poured straight down and this morning a northwesterly cleared the air and brought a chill to things.  Snow on Mount Brunswick today and a definite chill in the air.  The salmon should be home very soon, if they survived running the gauntlet of fish farms in the Broughton Archipelago two years ago when they went to sea.  Most of the salmon runs who pass by those farms have been decimated in the past few years.  Sea lice kill the young ones.  Our chum and coho both swim through there on their way to the sea.

So we'll start to keep a vigil for the chum that return in November when the conditions are right.  In the meantime, enjoying this beautiful day before the rains come for good.

The foest returns to reclaim

In the front of our house, which has been transformed from a dusty cliff top to a beautiful food garden, we have a small Douglas-fir that broke a few years ago and started to die. We had it removed, all but a spar standing about 15 feet high. Part of the reason the spar remains is that there is a tree house attached to it.

But the forest has been working it's magic on this tree and slowly has been converting this spar into a snag. IN the temerate rainsforests of our region, snags are the islands of life in the woods. They hold a huge amount of anuimal and vegetable biomass, and are the primary locations for small organisms that eat things and break them down to create the rich forest soils that make possible the extreme growth of our trees.

Last week a pair of pilleated woodpeckers began visiting the spar to dine on the small bugs that are making it a home. One was back this morning, and it aroused me from sleep with its pecking and calling. I had a sudden realization that the tree has transformed from spar to snag. It is now crawling with enough small creatures, that woodpeckers are beginning to accelerate the deconstructions of the tree. This morning around the base, there are small piece of bark that the woodpeckers have removed and already there are woodbugs on the underside of some of that.

In the middle of the garden, with an apple tree espaliered to it, our Douglas-fir has become a soil factory, a buffet, and a home to a thriving community of industrial little forest creatures.

Summer and seals

The North Pacific high is well established bringing calm, hot and clear weather to the south coast of BC. This is turning out to be a massively dry summer, fuelling forest fires in the interior and creating drought conditions all over the place. It reminds me of 2003, when the salal in the forest margin behind our house dried up and died. The huckleberries are thin and mealy and the cedars are drying out.

Most significant of all, Bill Newport wrote yesterday that Terminal Creek has dried up for the first time in recent memory. Terminal Creek feeds the fish hatchery, and disaster could have struck the coho and the chum fingerlings, but the hatchery stewards got water pumped through in time. The note of alarm in Bill's voice is distinctive though, and I'm surprised we haven't yet heard of water restrictions on the Cove Bay system.

IN another note, the ocean has been stunningly warm and the swimming is excellent. Yesterday Finn and I went over to Bowen Bay and I swam out to the float to relax. While I was lying there with my legs dangling in the water, I felt a kid bump my foot and when I looked down I saw that it wasn't a kid at all but a seal pup bobbing in the water. I said hello, it looked at me for a few minutes, and bumped my foot with it's flipper again before slowly swimming away. It kept coming back to the float though, playing around with kids and adults who were swimming out there.

Cute and all, but remember that if you go out there, try not to initiatie contact with it. If this little seal grows to be curious about humans, it could create problems later in life if it approaches boats. So as with all seal pup events at Bowen Bay, give it it's distance.

What birds are singing?

Here is a great link to a chart done by a Vancouver Island birder who is tracking the evolution of the dawn chorus.

Perfectly afloat

My mother in law owns a 16' Clipper canoe that has a semi-permanent home at our place. This spring I have been taking it out on the lake and, more recently, the ocean.

Last night, we took it down to Bowen Bay to spend the evening at the beach, relishing the heat wave that is hitting us with 30 degree heat and setting new records for June high temperatures. In the evening, there was nary a whisper of wind and so I took the canoe out for a solo paddle heading well out of Bowen Bay and out into the Collingwood Channel. There were no boats around and only the very gentlest of swells. My boat drifted on the ebb tide, being watched by a seal that popped up at various intervals off my stern with a little puff of rancid breath. I lolled around out there until the sun set behind the gentle low slopes of Mount Elphonstone and then headed back in, paddling towards the waxing moon, which is now skirting low on the southern horizon.

Perfectly afloat.

The rhythm of the morning

Another beautiful morning here: clear and still.  In the dawn chorus, there are a pair of chickadees nesting across the road from us that are the champion singers.  They are doing their little call which is a two note descending tweet-tweet.  One chickadee does it and the other follows on with the same song, but sung a note lower.  Their rhythm is steady, and when they get out of synch, they stop and start again.  

In the meantime, the crows and ravens are cawing, the flickers are drumming, towhees wheezing in the undergrowth.  The nature of spring means that everyone is repeating their various sounds on a regular interval, and the forest is full of rhythm.  Once in a while, warblers and wrens let loose with solos over top of the whole thing.  It's as if someone has sampled all of these birds and put them into a bed track.  You could rhyme over top of it easily.  The rhythm shifts and changes subtly but it is so engaging that I lay in my sleeping bag for a full hour listening raptly to the chorus, and feeling all of these beats beneath it.

New birds, quiet beaches and coffeehouses.

Yesterday was sweet. Warm again in the afternoon after a cool and rainy start to the day. I was in town yesterday and I walked back through Deep Bay and along Pebbly Beach and then up to Miller Road. I stopped for a while on Pebbly Beach to stand by the ocean and drink it in. Standing right on the place where Wolfgang Duntz, one of our neighbours wants to put a big concrete and steel pier for the docking of his boat. Resolved more than ever that that is a bad idea.

Whilst standing in a state of rapt meditation, a loon called out from water. Always a surprise to hear these birds on the ocean, so strongly are they identified in my mind with my younger years spent on the lakes and rivers of Ontario and Quebec. A common loon warbling in the calm of a spring afternoon was perfect medicine: it made me ache to get our canoe on the water.

After getting home, I wolfed down some dinner and headed out to The Happy Isle Cafe where an open mic night was in progress. A number of musicians and poets had gathered to lay out some good stuff, poems about our place in the cosmos and our place in the family, songs about the soft places inside hard men, and the things we cling to. Aine and I sang together, which is something I love. She has The Gypsy Rover nailed, and she sang beautifully. Then she joined me on a couple of other songs.

A nice way to ease into the long weekend.

Stormy weather

This morning the temperature is dropping and the clouds are building into Howe Sound. A complex of mini lows and a deteriorating front are moving into the coast this morning, and in advance of all of that. the winds have swung southeast and come up. Probably blowing abou 30km/h now, from dead calm an hour ago.

A flock of black scoters just flew by low over the water and there are other birds around too. The last couple of mornings, a yellow warbler has joined the dawn chorus and yesterday, in Horseshoe Bay, I spotted my first violet-green swallow of the year.

Geese have set off

One more sign of spring...the snow geese that travel annually between their Siberian breeding grounds and the Fraser River estuary were seen today heading north.  A couple of flocks over well over 200 birds passed high overhead in a ragged V formation, honking enthusiastically at the prospect of warmer weather and hot times on the tundra.

Signs of spring

The cool and rainy weather is continuing and last night there were high winds blowing cold from the southeast. Today the kids and I went for a walk around the lake, looking at the way that the forest was coming back to life. The ferns are still flat on the ground, and no fiddleheads have started to emerge yet, but the mosses are verdant and the rain forest is the most vivid shade of green. When a little weak sunlight seeps through the clouds, the yellows and greens and blues come alive, maples covered in moss, goats-beard hanging off the hemlocks and sitka spruce.

The mosqutos are out now, swarming around the water, and doing well with no swallows here yet, and no bats around either. There were buffleheads and scaups on the lake, Canada geese padding around on the ice still formed around the edges of the water and flocks of kinglets and chickadees staking out territory.

In the marshes, the skunk cabbage - ch'úukw' in Skwxwu7mesh - is just starting to come up, not flowering yet, but perhaps it will in a few weeks. No horsetails yet either, but you can feel things wanting to burst free. In traditional Skwxwu7mesh culture, this is considered the time when the winter dances draw to a close, and the longhouses close up. All winter, the energy and life that the earth has ceded is available to spirit dancers in the longhouse, but when the earth reawakens for the spring, that energy is no longer available, and the dances stop until the winter again.

The power is returning to the land.

Birds of the midwinter

Even though it is technically midwinter, the spring migrations have started. Yesterday down on Mannion Bay I came across this flock of black turnstones hanging out with the mew gulls stopping off here to feast on crabs and sand fleas. They overwinter here on the south coast. preparing to make their way slowly to their breeding grounds on the Alaskan coast. These ones are all done up in their breeding plumage, ready to return to the breeding grounds, but they have a few more months before things thaw up there.

Also on this little walk, a great blue heron and our resident ornery but beautiful swan. Oh and for good measure, our resident fawn, who hangs out with the feral chicken we look after. We had two chickens, but one succumbed to the red tailed hawk that was hanging around here a few weeks ago. All that is left of poor Huckleberry is a pile of feathers and some well picked over shoulder bones.

It's funny weather right now. Along the beaches and exposed roads down low the smells of summer are wafting around - dry fir needles and dust - while in the forest and the low lying meadow in Crippen Park, there is still several inches of snow. There has been snow on that meadow since December 16, and we have had so little rain - less than 30mm this month - that it shows no signs of washing away anytime soon. Usually snow like that, even in great quantities is gone in a few days, but the extended snow falls of Christmas combined with a thaw/freeze cycle and the generally dry and sunny and cold weather has prolonged winter for an extended spell.

Spring is in the air

The dawn chorus this morning, while not exactly bursting with birdsong, had some minor changes in it. For one thing, on this clear calm morning, the birds were very active: Canada geese in the bay were constant, nuthatches going crazy and the juncos were making all kinds of noise. Ravens, crows, eagles, flickers, robins and mallards all joined in the fun. The towhees have started their trilling. All of this is preludes to things to come.

And another ritual has taken hold too, with the replacement of the Queen of Capilano for six weeks by the Bowen Queen. It used to be that the maintenance refits were an annual thing for the Cap, but it seems that they have become less scheduled over the past couple of years. At any rate, she's out for a spell, and the delightful little Bowen Queen is back in the fold. Commuter hell will follow, but I like her.

A springish walk

Finn and I went for a walk down to the Cove this afternnon, turning over rocks at Mother's Beach finding crabs and gunnels. There were oystercatchers in the Bay, along with the regular flocks of mew gulls and Canada Geese and mallards. On Killarney Creek beneath ther Miller Road bridge there was a weird hybrid or escaped domestic duck. Didn't have my camera.

In the forest the ferns are all flat and emerging from the heavy snow that has squashed them for the past six weeks. The forest looks very strange - usually an undulating floor of hummocked fern piles, it's now all smooth and flat, and ready to green up for spring. Everything still seems to be wating though

A visitor

Awoke to a dusting of snow on the ground with a little more expected, although it's not snowing at the moment. Also awoke to a juvenile red-tailed hawk calling out from a fir tree in front of our place. I saw this bird yesterday for the first time, and this is the first red-tailed hawk I've ever seen on Bowen. Looks like it's hanging around, but who knows for how long. Haven't seen much of our neighbours semi-feral chickens either. Hmmm.