WOLVERINE!

You can now "hear" this story on CBC Radio at: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/close-encounter-with-wolverine-stuns-manitoba-biologist-1.2757107

Many of you will know how much I have poured my heart and soul into coordinating the Manitoba Breeding Bird Atlas over the past six years.  Some of you will also know how much emphasis I have placed on point counting (an extremely useful method of surveying birds where one stands still for a fixed period of time and counts all birds seen and heard), having completed approx 2800 for this project. After five years of summer point counts, on July 18, 2014, I prepared to do what I knew would be my last point counts for the atlas. I was feeling a little nostalgic as I headed out at 2:30 am for a 16 km hike across the dimly lit tundra to get into the last reachable square from the cabin we were staying in. I wasn’t quite expecting the grand finale that my last morning counting would turn out to be.  Early on, I got a brief look at a cream coloured wolf and then near the end of one point count I noticed some odd behaviour from a female Black Scoter – calling agitatedly and flying in a circle before disappearing behind a sedge meadow… then I noticed two little fuzz balls swimming quickly in the grassy edges towards the sound of her voice – this was the first confirmed breeding Black Scoter for the project!  As if that wasn’t enough, just seconds after I finished my final point count, put my notebook in my pocket, and reached down for my day pack, I noticed a movement ahead of me… incredibly, I was looking at my lifer WOLVERINE, a mammal I have dreamt of seeing for the better part of my life! I quickly and quietly took out my camera and the wolverine continued moving in my direction, busily searching the edges of the little ponds for food and scaring the phalaropes and other birds. I got a series of photos of the wolverine running and jumping across little water channels including the one below.  I still can’t quite believe it! Not a bird oddly enough but a truly magic moment (more tales and photos from the season to follow when the final field season completely wraps up for good in a few weeks). Here is a series of shots of this incredible animal:

My first view was something like this - light coloured fur moving through the low vegetation

It only took a second to realise I was looking at a Wolverine!

The wolverine was foraging, apparently looking for birds nests by digging and sniffing along the edge of the many pools and streams. Fortunately, the animal looked up and even showed me their tongue.

 Here is a series of the wolverine running and jumping across the streams and around the edge of the ponds and scaring the phalaropes

Eventually the animal kept on going (completely ignored me the whole time) and disappeared, leaving me shaking at the knees!

Mammals of the Summer of 2013

While out birding or atlassing in Manitoba, I am often treated to exciting sightings of mammals and other fauna. This is half the fun of being in the wilderness! This post shares just a few of those encounters from this past summer, part of what made the summer so special.

We start with the obligatory Black Bear. I photographed this individual near Nanuk Lodge on Hudson Bay coast east of York Factory as they walked nonchalantly towards me.

 

In the very same area as that Black Bear was this beautiful young black Timber Wolf. I encountered this animal three times while atlassing in that area. 

 

Here are two photos of a black Timber Wolf hunting Canada Goose goslings in the same area. I first spotted their ears sticking up in a slight ravine along the coast so I crept ahead and got into position and waited for the wolf to race out. I didn't manage to get photos of the kill; however, once the wolf had captured a gosling they walked right in front of my hiding spot on a beach ridge allowing me these photos.

Who's looking  at you? (this wolf sneaks around to get a look at me)

Moving a little further north, this Arctic Hare put on a fabulous show for the crew and I near the Churchill Northern Studies Centre (just outside of Churchill, Manitoba).

A little further north yet again, I photographed this Arctic Ground Squirrel just north of the Seal River, the southernmost limit of their distribution.

 

This young Polar Bear was over-enthusiastically trying to pounce on an Arctic Ground Squirrel without success.

 

Photographing Polar Bears is one of the great thrills of being in northern Manitoba. Here, a mother and cub stroll across the mudflat near the Seal River Heritage Lodge. 

This male wandered through the fireweed as I was surveying - I obviously had to keep a close eye on him as he strolled by!

A large male, previously hidden in tall grasses, stands up to investigate a noise... can you spell "adrenalin rush?"

... well?

Sorry, time's up!

Usually a good rule of thumb is... let sleeping bears lie!

Damn, you smell good! (female and male interacting)

On second thoughts....

That's a little tastes of some of the summer's magic moments!

Hudson Bay Coast

We finish this series with a few images from the Hudson Bay coast – an area of exceptional interest and beauty and a place of stark contrasts, especially from winter to summer…  compare, for example, these two photos of ice in the bay in late June and then a Whimbrel on lichen-covered rocks in mid July! The landscape changes from black and white to colour and back, seemingly in the blink of an eye!

It is not often I get to see a species of mammal in Manitoba that I have never seen before but this “sik sik”, a.k.a Arctic Ground Squirrel was a first for me. This species reaches the southern limit of their distribution at the north bank of the Seal River and are hence not found in Churchill. They were easy to see around the Seal River Heritage Lodge.

Although always a treat, this year the Beluga put on a particularly excellent show, swimming close to shore on a near daily basis. The following series of four photos shows some of their antics near the surface (the darker animal in the last photo is a youngster) 

Along the coast, one sees lots of Parasitic Jaeger. I found it intriguing that I would see only Long-tailed Jaeger at inland tundra sites, whereas the larger and more robust Parasitic Jaegers dominated the coastal strip. It will be very interesting to see how the distribution of these species falls out when we complete the Manitoba Breeding Bird Atlas (Www.birdatlas.mb.ca). You can study the differences between these two species by comparing these photos below with the Long-tailed Jaeger photos in my previous post.

Many waterfowl utilize the coastal strip too – here are a handful: a flock of White-winged Scoters, a female Black Scoter, Long-tailed Duck, Greater Scaup, Common Eider with young and a young Northern Pintail. 

Hope you enjoyed this brief addition to the previous posts of Manitoba’s northern birds!

Canyons and Monuments

Youn-Young and I didn’t get to see each other very much over the summer as I was away doing fieldwork, so we took a little over a week to spend some time together and visit some of the places she had always wanted to see – the famous canyon and monument national parks in the southwestern U.S.A.

Driving southwest into eastern Colorado we spent a few hours in arid habitats where I enjoyed sightings of species like Scaled Quail and others that I have not seen many times in my life. In a rather comical moment, this Sage Thrasher and Lark Bunting posed side by side on a wire, permitting an unexpected size comparison.

Another surprise was a pair of Mississippi Kites, which the range maps in my field guides did not show in Colorado… just goes to show how quickly field guides become out of date!


We then planned a drive westward across Colorado with a stop or two in the Gunnison Valley where I wanted to seek out a potential lifer in Gunnison's Sage-Grouse. The scenery here was much more mountainous but also still somewhat dry. Youn-Young’s photo of the canyon rim at Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, Colorado gives a sense of the shrubby habitat broken by coniferous forest in places that we encountered here.

As it was August, my search for Gunnison's Sage-Grouse consisted of cruising along creeks in dry sage brush habitat (exactly the strategy that had found me my lifer Greater Sage-Grouse in Oregon many years ago) at recommended sites. Sure enough, just south of the town of Gunnison, I spotted a hen with her brood. Amazingly, they were not skittish and allowed us to park on the roadside and photograph them (without getting out of the vehicle). Note the very prominent white tail bands (one of the features that differs from Greater Sage-Grouse).

Higher up we took a short hike in Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, where an obliging brood of Dusky Grouse appeared magically on the trail in front of us. The speckled dusky (current name) bluish (recall their former name “Blue Grouse” before the split) plumage of this individual exhibited remarkable camouflage against the mottled rocks.

From here we drove west into eastern Utah to Arches National Park, an extremely arid landscape of red stone and patchy juniper… you get a sense of the grandeur of this place in this photo Youn-Young snuck in of me birding...

There were relatively few birds to be seen in the desert heat although Western Scrub-Jays were an almost constant campground companion…

Black-throated Sparrows also seemed relatively easy to see here, at least in the early morning,

But my real interest was to search any juniper patches for another species I had never seen before - Gray Vireo. At first, I found little else in the juniper but Juniper Titmice and Blue-gray Gnatcatchers; however, after a morning walk I noticed a ravine with a lot of juniper and suggested to Youn-Young that we go over and sit down in the shade there. When we got there, I tried playing the Gray Vireo song, a little speculatively, once on my mp3 player. Lo and behold, with a few minutes, a Gray Vireo flew in and landed above Youn-Young’s head and started scolding her... Oops! Sorry! Before long, I had located what appeared to be a family party and got a few photographic souvenirs of a long-awaited lifer!

Next stop was the spectacular Bryce Canyon! We came for the scenery of course but I was delighted with how birdy this place was – at a higher and cooler elevation with tall coniferous forests (considering the aridity of most of the surrounding landscape).

Mixed species flocks here produced many exciting western species like the handsome Grace's Warbler,

The common and curious Mountain Chickadee,

And three species of nuthatch including the fascinating Pygmy Nuthatch (I was delighted to see them low down on the trunks where I could get quality photos like this one), and many others.

From Bryce, we formulated a plan to go down to the Grand Canyon, which Youn-Young naturally wanted to see, before coming back up through Zion National Park and then homeward via Yellowstone. I insisted that we postpone ur lunch stop until we got to Vermillion Cliffs, Arizona, where I could look for California Condor. We arrived in the early afternoon at it was an unbearable 38°C and Young-Young thought I was crazy! Worse, there was no sign of anything alive except for an inquisitive Say’s Phoebe. I had almost finished lunch when I spotted three specs high above the cliff and nervously found them in my scope… immediately the large white windows on their wings indicated that I was viewing none other than the living phantom, the California Condor. Vermillion cliffs is of course one of the earliest release sites (1996) of the famous reintroduction effort that has kept this species alive… at least for now!

In the sweltering heat it was a relief to climb up to higher elevations at the rim of the Grand Canyon. One certainly learns to appreciate the staggering force of water in a place like this! The Colorado River, with its mighty erosive power, seemed to be miles below us…

Birding in the Grand Canyon area was surprisingly good with treats like Northern Pygmy-Owl, Pinyon Jay and the beautiful Acorn Woodpecker shown here.

Back up into Utah on the return leg, we stopped in at Zion National Park as planned, a landscape of more monumentous red rock and coniferous trees. This beautiful place nonetheless stirred sadness in me when I learnt of its inappropriate renaming to Zion National Park from the former Mukuntuweap National Monument (this word “apparently means “Straight Canyon” in Southern Paiute)… felt like the sad modern history of a continent wrapped up in a simple word swap! The Freemont Cottonwood trees in the canyon provided much appreciated shade and a variety of birds including species like Wild Turkey and Black-chinned Hummingbird and that I had not seen elsewhere on the trip. A second sighting of California Condor here was not much closer than my first sighting, and came only an hour after I had watched a Golden Eagle gracing the cliffs.

In the early morning, while Youn-Young slept in, I went up towards Kolob Reservoir, stopping on the sage brush slopes before dawn in the hopes of a third lifer. I only had to wait until a few minutes after dawn to hear the beautiful song of the Black-chinned Sparrow, though it took many more agonizing minutes until I got good views. In the end I saw quite a few birds, nearly all of them juveniles, as shown here, which lack the black chin that gives this species their common name.

Higher up in the forested areas near the reservoir I found more trip birds like Western Tanager and Virginia Warbler but I wanted to spend more prime time down in the arid scrubland where I could see species like this Phainopepla that I have only seen a few times in my life.

We left Zion and traveled north on the Interstate with a short stop at Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge on the edge of Great Salt Lake. The gates were closed but we found a few waterbirds and shorebirds like this Snowy Plover (recently split from the Old World Kentish Plover).

We drove through the night to arrive in the magical world of Grand Teton National Park – since a picture is said to paint 1,000 words, here are three photos (poorly stitched together into one) of the mountain chain that includes Grand Teton (the pointy peak second from left).

On the mountain slope stood lush coniferous forest; however, the flatter valley floor was clad in low shrubs, especially sagebrush, shown here.

And in that sagebrush roamed bison, deer and pronghorn (deer and antelope play). Here is a wide angle photo that tries hopelessly to capture the grandeur of pronghorn feeding in the sagebrush.

And now two with a telephoto lens to show the fine features of those beautiful animals!

Grand Teton was also good for raptors. Swainson's Hawk is not a bird one expects in the mountains (although if you have seen the trailer for the new movie the Big Year you will notice one bizarrely placed in a downhill ski scene) but they are quite at home on the sagebrush flats. This one posed on a fence pole and was unperturbed by my parking the vehicle beside them for a portrait.

Our last stop was to be Yellowstone National Park, famed for its geysers and wildlife viewing opportunities. Indeed Yellowstone was to prove excellent for wildlife watching on this visit (almost as good as the stunning Jasper National Park in Canada to give you a sense of just how good). We enjoyed sightings of mammals such as beaver, coyote, back bear, mule deer, and elk…

I see plenty of black bear in Manitoba so I didn’t spend a lot of time trying to get photos but seeing a total of FIVE Grizzly Bears was an enormous treat! Here is a photo with four of the five (in the Hayden Valley) all at once… a large male is feeding on a bison carcass while a female and two cubs wait their chance…

Another awesome highlight was seeing this timber wolf (grey wolf) in the Lamas Valley. Smaller but even better than the one I had seen in Wapusk National Park, Manitoba this year because I managed to photograph this one. Here are two photos on the wolf walking up a sagebrush slope and then a closer image.

We departed Yellowstone but there was one more order of business – the ascent of the Beartooth Pass and the quest for one more new bird for me – Black Rosy Finch. The Beartooth Pass is just northeast on Yellowstone on the Wyoming – Montana Border, and at 3,337 m ASL (almost 11,000 feet) seemed like the perfect place to look for a high altitude specialist! As we drove up into the rocky alpine zone dotted with snow packs and their pink flushes caused by snow algae (Chamydomonas nivalis) as seen in this photo, I started to feel that I had come to the right place… surely, these dappled browns, greys and pinks would harbour the black and pink gem I was seeking…

Youn-Young wanted us to head back at an appropriate hour and so I only had 90 minutes to search. Walking around the rocks, I saw several American pika, a fascinating, mouse-sized rabbit relative!

However, the only bird I seemed to be able to find was American (Buff-bellied) Pipit. I couldn’t resist trying to get a few photo of the few that were still in breeding plumage as the alpine subspecies are much more colourful than the tundra-breeding subspecies that I usually see.

The clock was ticking and over an hour went by before it happened… I heard a choppy call note from below the summit that I strongly suspected was Black Rosy Finch. Walking quickly across a boulder field I stared down in a wide rocky ravine and far below me caught sight of some small birds on the rocks. No time to waste! I scampered down until finally I caught sight of some all-dark birds feeding amongst the rocks and on the pink snow. I was looking for their pink highlights but the first birds I saw well were all juveniles with yellow bills and very little pink (like the one below) that threw me for a loop for just a few seconds until I realised why they didn’t look quite like what I was expecting…

Maneuvering into position, I watched them feeding and finally saw some adults. The Black Rosy Finch below was particularly obliging, landing close to where I sat, and also interesting in that it showed some yellow at the base of the bill but otherwise adult features… I had good intentions to try to photograph the wing feathers to see if i could find a moult limit but I got distracted by a most unexpected Brewer’s Sparrow and missed the moment when the finch flew.

A whirlwind tour and not nearly long enough to appreciate the American southwest but nonetheless packed with fond memories…