On the Road: Along the Bow

There was frost along the river right where I’d hoped it would be.

It wasn’t quite as thick as I had anticipated but it was there, coating the bare branches and grass close to the steaming water and catching the thin glow of the morning sun. The river itself was running full of slushy ice that was forming shelves along the banks where geese sat, some preening, others sleeping with their feathers nearly as frosty as the branches along the shore.

The last time I’d been down to this spot it had still been autumn. The yellow leaves had been fading toward brown but the river was flowing ice-free. There were birds there, too, robins that hadn’t yet flown south, even a couple of tiny warblers. The usual ducks and geese were on the water but they were roosting in different places.

Now, with the ice giving them more places to park, they were mostly staying put. Mallards and goldeneyes flew up and down the river, buzzing the geese on the water as they blasted by, but they were short flights. The goldeneyes, especially, flew just a couple of hundred metres before dropping onto the slushy flow and letting the current take them back downstream again as they dove to the bottom to forage.

The Bow River never really freezes over, at least here where the water runs fast and is warmed by the city’s needs. It does get slushy, like it is today, but its velocity and volume keep it flowing. And that open water makes it a haven for all kinds of wildlife.

Like the bald eagle I found just downstream of the city.

There are a surprising number of eagles that spend the winter here, mostly because of easy access to prey. With all those ducks and geese living year-round on the water, the eagles don’t have to work very hard for a meal. They just pick a perch where they can watch for birds in distress — or just not being cautious — and swoop down to help themselves. Yeah, they’ve got it pretty easy.

Coyotes do, too. They are so well adapted to both city life and the pieces of the wild world that persist along the river that they don’t have to do much either. I found one very healthy-looking guy wandering along the far riverbank and poking its nose into the willows and grass. Looking for mice and voles, I assume. It pretty much ignored the ducks and geese swimming nearby.

Speaking of taking it easy, high up in a cottonwood on the same side of the river as the coyote, I spotted a big, brown blob which, when I looked at it through my long lens, turned out to be a porcupine. It was busy stripping the branches of tasty bark, gnawing for a minute or two before taking a rest and then moving on up the tree. No rush, buddy.

The river was alive with ducks and geese, mallards bobbing in the eddies with their butts in the air as they snacked on river-bottom vegetation, goldeneyes and a few mergansers zipping back and forth above the flow. Geese everywhere, of course.

And a little ways back from the river’s edge, a flock of Bohemian waxwings.

I love these guys, by far the prettiest winter birds we have. Their soft brown bodies, yellow-tipped tails, black masks and crested topknots give them an almost tropical look. Just gorgeous.

These ones were feeding on buffaloberries along a little tributary creek, two groups of them working on different patches. I wish they had come just a bit closer so I could really get the detail in those glorious feathers but I’m sure I’ll have more chances as winter rolls along.

And besides, there were other feathers that I could get closer to. These ones, though, were made of frost.

These frost feathers were on the stable ice closer to the river’s flow, formed, I assume, by the mist floating off the water and settling into low-lying areas. They were anywhere from thumbnail-sized on upwards and they were scattered across the ice like a goose had exploded. Rings of them had formed around rocks that were poking through and enclosing leaves that were lying around.

Naturally, I got cold and wet as I crawled around photographing them so I walked back to the truck to warm up and continue further on down the Bow.

Unfortunately, there aren’t all that many place to get down to the river even in the warm months and one of the closest ones, McKinnon Flats, is closed until mid-April. But that’s okay. There were interesting things to see up on the flats as well.

Though it might seem like we’ve had a lot of snow, once you get just a little ways east it becomes clear that there really isn’t all that much. Grain stubble in the fields still shows through pretty much everywhere and grass is visible in the pastures. The roads, though icy and snow-packed in spots, are mostly bare gravel.

The ditches, though, are different.

They, especially the ones on the north side of the east-west trails, are pretty much full of snow, snow that the wind has sculpted into some pretty lovely shapes. Their sweeps and curves were sparkling in the sun and the shadows were shades of blue. Amber grass poked through in a few places to add a bit of warmth.

Further on where a side road dips down to the river valley I found a section of drifts next to a fallow field that had not only been wind-sculpted but blasted by dirt blowing off the bare land. It left the drifts layered like the badlands.

Back down at the river, a different kind of erosion and sculpting was going on. At this particular point the river runs through a series of small islands and bends that catch and hold the slush flowing in the open stream. Parked on a steep hillside so I could look down on it, I could see the ice moving and shifting. I could hear it, too, a kind of low grinding sound.

The temperature was slowly dropping as I continued east and mist was filling the valley. From up on the benchland, it nearly obscured the river valley below but down by the river, the low sun cast shadows from trees on the ridge that formed long, dark streaks in the blue.

The trail that leads to the Legacy Island boat launch was flooded out by ice in the river redirecting part of the flow into an old channel so I couldn’t get to the river itself. But the kind folks that live nearby had put out grain and seeds for the birds that winter there. Chickadees, sparrows, magpies, woodpeckers, even a couple of pheasants were hanging out among the berry bushes and spruce trees, each taking their turn to pop down from their perches to grab a beakful. A bluejay came along and mostly chased off the other birds while it gorged itself.

There were deer here, too. I spotted two mulie does lying by an old bench as I started back up out of the valley but suddenly there was a commotion and 15 more of them came bouncing out of the trees and into the open. Once there, they stopped and looked back the direction they had come. No idea what spooked them but they were concerned.

The mist continued to fill the river valley as I pulled onto the steep road heading down to the Carseland weir but at 3 in the afternoon, the lowering sun shone brightly through it. Here above the weir the river was entirely frozen over, a solid sheet of ice that extended around the last bend to the west. But there was open water down below.

The speed of the water coming over that concrete block that sends part of the Bow into the canal that feeds the downstream irrigation system keeps the flow immediately below pretty much ice-free. There was some floating slush in the eddies that formed into roundish islets that spun in the current and slabs of ice above the submerged rocks and along the shore but other than that, clear, blue water.

There were geese everywhere, of course, along with mallards and goldeneyes. Pretty sure I saw a little hooded merganser among them, too. Flocks of geese coming back from the nearby fields where they had fed flew overhead, noisy as always, but I heard another call coming from further down the river.

Could that be a swan I hear? I couldn’t see any but that low-pitched honk sounded an awful lot like a trumpeter. Could be. They’ve wintered here before.

By now the sun was getting pretty low and clouds were forming on the western horizon. True, the days are, thankfully, getting longer but those few extra minutes a day of sunshine still haven’t amounted to much yet. Time to start heading back to town.

But as I drove up out of the valley I looked back down at the frozen river, the cottonwood-studded islands and the saskatoon, willow and chokecherry thickets and thought, once again, how lucky we are to have something like this so close to where we all live.

We are truly blessed.

Friends, I hope you all had a wonderful celebration this week.

See you again next year!