The Animal Tracks Revealed

The mystery tracks from last week belonged to... a northern flying squirrel!  This is an animal that definitely “flies under the radar” in the Canadian Rockies, as it is completely nocturnal.  We've seen three in all our years here.  Even the tracks are extremely rare, as flying squirrels spend almost all of their time in the trees.

Flying squirrels can't really fly, but they can glide long distances, using a flap of skin between the front and
back legs as a kind of kite.  On average, a flying squirrel can travel at least three times the distance it drops in height, so if it starts up high, it can glide a long distance.  The maximum glide distance we could find evidence for was 45 metres, or 150 feet, from researchers at Mount Allison University.

Flying squirrels in the Canadian Rockies spend the winters feasting on lichen, especially the brown hair lichen you see in our older forests.  For roosting, they use cavities in trees, using the lichen as a bedding material, which sounds pretty clever to us.  When it gets really cold, they will roost together, as many as a dozen flying squirrels packed into the same hole.

Hair lichen, the favourite food
of flying squirrels during the winter

Believe it or not, in the 1950s, you could mail order a pet flying squirrel from “Greeson's Flying Squirrel Ranch.”  This we gleaned from a superb website about flying squirrels, called – what else? – flyingsquirrels.com

Think You Know Your Animal Tracks?

On yesterday's snowshoeing trip, I saw a set of animal tracks that neither of us have ever seen in over twenty years of skiing and snowshoeing in the Rockies.

What mystery creature left these marks? If you've snowshoed with us, maybe you can figure it out.  Or maybe you just have a brain like Sherlock Holmes.  The first person to get the correct answer will get a major shout out from us (we'll bow down in praise of your tracking skills!).  The tracks started in the middle of a small clearing, then continued for about 10 metres through some brush before ending at a tree trunk. The space between the tracks was about 15 cm, or 6 inches.

If no one gets it by the weekend, we'll leave a revealing clue on our Facebook page.  All will be revealed in one week.

Have fun!

Cone Crop of the Century, Part II – How it Happens and Who's Cashing In

In September, we wrote about the huge cone crop in evergreen trees in the Rockies in 2013, especially in spruce and fir trees. We wanted to follow up.

A forester friend of ours sent us a scientific paper on synchronous crops of cones or nuts across entire forests. Cone crops can be synchronous among many species of trees for as much as 2500 km! This can add up to millions of square kilometres in which trees are all doing the same thing!

The jury is still out on how the trees all do the same thing, but the leading theory is the “Moran Effect.” (Have you noticed that theories sound more impressive when you give them a name that ends in “Effect”?)  Patrick Moran, an Australian bloke, showed that some external factor – for example, above average temperatures in May – could stimulate the some kind of identical effect in millions of organisms spread across huge distances.

Male white-winged crossbill

Does anything benefit from a jumbo cone crop here in the Rockies? Well, the trees probably do, as there are more seeds that can potentially sprout into future trees. But the other obvious winners are any animals that eat the seeds in evergreen cones. Squirrels had a banner year.  We saw lots of youngsters, including a litter of four, which we'd never seen before.  And, in the last few weeks in Lake Louise, another species has been cashing in: white-winged crossbills.

These little finches are super charming, and have the most amazing beaks: they look like curved pliers with the tongs out of alignment. So, no good for a carpentry project, but great for opening cones and eating the seeds. You've got to see it to believe it.



Crossbills can gobble up as many as 3000 per day, and when the food is abundant, it will stimulate breeding, even in the middle of winter! Last week, we started to hear the cheerful songs of courting male crossbills, just in time for Valentine's Day. This is a little sample of their love song.

Murder mystery in the snow

The crime scene, February 8, 2014.

Nadine was out with a group on the weekend, and found a crime scene in the woods: the skin and fur of a snowshoe hare, as well as some entrails and a few drops of blood.

We went back to the site yesterday, and looked around more carefully.  There were lots of hare tracks, and lots of lynx tracks, but we could finally connect the two when we found a set of tracks from a lynx in full gallop.  We could see where it had switched from a slow stalking mode into a sprint.  It was the proof of the chase.

The lynx must have been going full speed: one pair of tracks were easily eight feet apart, with a snow covered log between the two tracks.  The log was at least two feet off the ground, and the lynx had easily cleared it.  If this were an Olympic event, the lynx would own the podium!  It was an exciting insight into what goes on in the forest when we're not around to see it.

The tracks of a galloping lynx.

The part we never get to see: the lynx and the hare
in the life or death chase.

Chasing Ice - Our Favourite Documentary this Season

Every year on the trail, we discover as much from our guests as they do from us, especially about goings-on in the wider world.  Often, there’s a book or a documentary that everyone is talking about, and in 2013 it was “Chasing Ice,” a terrific movie about shrinking glaciers.  Since all the critics have just released their "best movies" lists, here's our choice for the last year.

Crowfoot Glacier, Banff National Park, 1920s

Crowfoot Glacier, 2004

We’ve watched the decline of ice here in the Rockies for over twenty years, and the archival record for Banff and Yoho shows really dramatic changes.  But in “Chasing Ice,” celebrated photographer James Balog and his crew set up time lapse cameras in Alaska, Greenland and Iceland, and you can watch with your own eyes as ice vanishes in the space of months and years.

The movie swings between pure adventure -- setting up cameras in polar and alpine areas takes great courage and chutzpah -- and visual proof of our changing climate.  It is impossible to see this film without being strongly and viscerally affected by its message, especially as it builds to its rivetting visual climax, the largest calving event ever filmed, at the Ilulissat Glacier in Greenland. Spoiler alert: this sequence is the most dramatic moment in the film, and the bigger the screen you can find to watch it on, the better.

Grizzly Bears and the Wonders of GPS, Take 2!

In March, we wrote about grizzly bears being fitted with GPS collars during the summer of 2012.  Since then, the 2013 season for bears has fully played out: they woke up, roamed around for a summer and, with a couple of exceptions, they've now all gone back to bed.  Surprise, surprise, there were at least two bears still active in the park on the weekend, even though it was -38 Celsius in Lake Louise!

Here's the four coolest things that the GPS collars revealed this year:

1. EARLIEST WAKE UP: Bear #122 woke up on March 24.  This adult male is one of Banff's biggest bears (about 700 lbs), and he always wakes up early. Unfortunately, his collar is no longer working, but we know that as recently as three weeks ago, he hauled a drowned elk out of the frozen Bow River, dragged it to shore, and was having a late-season meal.



2. SHORTEST SUMMER SEASON: Bear #72, a female who has lived in the greater Lake Louise area for over a dozen years, was active for less than five months this year!  She came out of hibernation on May 4 and denned up on October 1.  Her big news: she was seen mating in June and may have new cubs next spring.

Bear #72 in Upper Consolation Valley

3. LONGEST HIBERNATION: Bear #64, a famous female who lives near Banff, denned from October 12, last fall until to May 3, 2013.  That's six months and 21 days!  During that whole time, she didn't eat or drink anything.  Great weight-loss strategy!

4. BEST USE OF THE GPS TECHNOLOGY: When Bear #138, a young female, went to into her den on November 1, she chose to snooze in Pipestone Bowl, which is adjacent to the Lake Louise ski area.  Since it is popular with out-of-bounds skiers, Parks Canada decided to close the bowl for the winter, so she can sleep in peace.  Without the GPS signal, they wouldn't have known she had denned up there.

We'll keep you posted on the comings and goings of Banff's bear's next year.

Skating on Bow Lake

 “Bow Lake is in, and it's like a mirror!”

Those words may not make your heart beat faster, but if you like to skate, this is exciting news indeed.  Bow Lake, along the Icefields Parkway, is one of the park's most accessible and photogenic bodies of water.  Last week, after the first of our winter's cold snaps, it froze clean with no snow.  Lake ice never stays flawless for long, so we put in several days of skating while the opportunity held.

The ice was smooth and thick, reflecting both us and the mountains.  It was also so transparent that it gave us the willies when we skated into the shallower sections of the lake.  We could see right to the bottom, and the fish shot off in front of us as we passed.

Because of the cold and the humidity, small impurities on the lake's surface had given rise to “ice flowers”, delicate and exquisite blossoms of frost.  We ended up splayed out on the ice, like kids, to take in the small scale beauty.

An "ice flower"

Taking in the beauty, up close

New snow fell on the weekend, and now we wait for the next lake to freeze....