The Marmot Who Cried Wolf

A wise sage once said, “Listen to the marmot, and you will see everything.”  Well, maybe I just made that up, but I have learned that the alarm call of the marmot is a great way of finding animals like hawks, eagles or bears.  And last week, it helped me (Joel) find a pack of wolves.

I was hiking down from Packer's Pass in the Skoki district, when I heard a marmot whistling on the far side of Ptarmigan Lake.  The whistling was insistent, so after about a minute I plunked myself down on the trail and got out the binoculars.  At first I thought it was a false alarm, but then I spied an adult black wolf.  Was it alone?  No, a little further away, having a break, was the rest of the pack, including six wolves born this spring.  What luck!

They were a long way away, but my timing was good, because the whole gang serenaded the wilderness with a big group howl, and then all nine wolves began travelling east towards Baker Lake.  I'd heard they were efficient travellers, and they proved it by covering almost 1 km in very short order.  I took some footage with the zoom on maximum, so even though they are in the distance, you can get a taste of what travelling wolves look like.  Enjoy.

PS: I saw another two wolves later in the week, right on the Lake O'Hara Fire Road.

Taking a Walk on the Wild Side

It's rare for Nadine and me to get a day off  together in the summer, but two days ago the stars aligned, and we went for a walk on the wild side, going beyond the end of the formal trail into one of the many great valleys in the Lake Louise area.  It was a very memorable day.  The wildflowers were great, we got to walk along the top of a long and serpentine moraine crest, and we enjoyed a close-up view of one our favourite hanging glaciers.

But what we'll probably remember most is our turnaround point at the top of the valley.  We were planning to right to treeline, but our forward momentum was halted by a close encounter with grizzly #72 and her two cubs.  We'd been making plenty of noise, but we came over a little rise and there they were, feeding on the lush grasses and plants in the meadow.  I snapped a couple of quick shots on my maximum telephoto, and then we retreated.  From 150 metres away, we enjoyed about five minutes of binocular time watching three of the most famous citizens in all  the Lake Louise area.


They were beautiful.  It would have been great to have Harry Potter's invisibility cloak, so we could watch them some more, but we felt these bears needed to be on their own, so we quietly slipped away.  It was a day to remember.

A Bird in the Hand

Banding station and coffee!

On Monday this week, I (Joel) got up at 3:45 a.m. This is not something I particularly like to do, but if you want to volunteer to band birds, sleep deprivation just comes with the territory. I slipped out of the house at 4:00, drove to the banding site, and in the pre-dawn shadows, fellow volunteers Peter, Jen and I prepped the site for a morning of banding.

Banff's banding station is located along the Bow Valley Parkway, and volunteers like me have been collecting data there since 1999. Six times a summer, from mid June until early August, a series of nets are set up for six hours at the site. Every half hour, the nets are checked, and we gently release the birds from the mesh and bring them over to our master bander, Greg, who identifies, weighs, sexes, and ages our feathered friends. Greg fits each bird with a numbered metal band, and then releases it.

Greg banding a warbling vireo

So why go through all the trouble? Well, for one, if you love birds, it's great chance to see them up close. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, as the expression goes, and I believe it. On Monday, we caught a hummingbird, and it's bill was dusted with pollen from the flowers it had been visiting. Wow!

It's also great to watch the sun rise on the peaks, and hear the dawn chorus of birds singing.

Northern waterthrush

But mostly, I like to bird band knowing that it's part of a long-term continent-wide science project that monitors the health of bird populations. It's one of the biggest citizen science projects going on in Canada and the USA.

If you want to know more, check out the website for MAPS (Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship), and you might find you want to hold a bird in the hand as well.

A Year in Wildlife

Banff National Park has recently posted a fascinating video that chronicles the animals (of all sorts!) that have passed in front of a remote camera over the last year.  Wildlife dominates in summer and people dominate in winter.  It's an amazing look at who's out there!

We're not sure where the camera was located, but our best guess in the Redearth Creek fire road, which is now a trail used for hiking-biking in the summer and cross-country skiing in the winter.  It is also close to the low elevation prime wildlife habitat in Banff.

Lake Louise is a Royal Destination

At Lake Louise, the combination of bright sky, glacial ice, dark forest and emerald green water has attracted many tens of millions of visitors.

Historic Skoki Lodge

Two names can be added to that list.  Last night, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, William and Kate, spent the night at Skoki Lodge, an historic backcountry lodge across the valley from Lake Louise.  They got a special flight in by helicopter, and did some hiking in this lovely backcountry destination.  The presence of this world famous couple will no doubt put Lake Louise in the spotlight for a few days, but it is not such an unusual occurrence here.  Lake Louise has been a royal destination since the 1890s.

Princess Louise Caroline Alberta

First off, many of our place names come from the royals.  The peak behind Lake Louise was formerly known as Mount Green, but during the Diamond Jubilee for Queen Victoria in 1897, it was renamed Mount Victoria.  Once known as Emerald Lake, the body of water fed by Victoria's glaciers was renamed Lake Louise, which is fitting – Princess Louise was one of Victoria's daughters.  Louise's middle name was Alberta, which is now the name of our province

Second, Kate and William are also not the first royal visitors here.  Edward, the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) visited in 1912, and since then, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip been to Lake Louise.

It's been a beautiful couple of days here, so let's hope that William & Kate had a good time away from their busy schedule.

In Praise of Willows

Yesterday, while leading a group up towards Yoho Pass, I (Joel) came across an interesting sight: a pile of what appeared to be toothpicks on the ground at the base of a willow bush.  On closer inspection, the “toothpicks” turned out to be willow shoots that had been stripped of their bark by a vole or mouse.

It was the fourth time in the last few weeks I'd seen willows used as food by animals.  In mid-May, on the way from Jasper to Lake Louise, I watched a black bear munching pussy willows by the banks of the Sunwapta River.  And not just any old munching: this was a sit down meal!  The bear parked itself right beside the bush, and pulled the branches towards its mouth.  One by one, the pussy willows disappeared.  When the bear finished, it walked over to the next willow, plunked itself down, and started all over again.

A couple of days later, our first rufous hummingbird of the season arrived in Lake Louise, and it too was drawn to the pussy willows.  As one of our earliest blooming flowers, pussy willows keep hummingbirds going until other species of plant come into bloom.  There's a willow just outside our front door, and it was a treat to watch our resident hummingbird use it as his local restaurant into early June.

Speaking of “Chez Willow,” the latest diners to visit have been migrating warblers.  The first ones showed up about a month ago, but in the last two weeks, we've seen a pulse of Wilson's, orange-crowned and yellow-rumped warblers come through, and they've all been busy catching insects at the willow thickets.  The bugs go for the pussy willows and the fresh leaves, and the warblers go for the bugs.

Here's to the humble willow.

Making a Find in Banff National Park

On a snowshoeing trip this winter, I (Nadine) and two fun-loving young Brits headed up Bath Creek near Lake Louise.  Poking around on the edge of the riverbed, we were looking at some pine marten tracks when I realized that the tracks disappeared into a hole that was framed by peeled logs - intriguing!

Refocusing, I could see the outline of the log cabin ruins beneath the snow.  A quick reconnoitre and we found another cabin footprint nearby.  I was not surprised to see them as that area was home to railway building camps in the late 1800s and some light logging in the early 1900s too.

But I was curious if they were already on the list of ruins that the national park archeologists were aware of.  Every once in awhile I'd read about new "old cabin" discoveries in the paper - ruins found when people were in unusual places in the park.

So I contacted the park archeologists in Calgary to see.  They had me double check the inventory and sure enough... they weren't listed.  After a few back and forth emails, it was confirmed!  We were the "discoverers" of these two cabins.  Very exciting!

Unfortunately we didn't take pictures that day, so this is a photo pulled off the internet that is something like what we saw.

At some point, I'll join an archeologist on a return trip to document the cabins.  But most importantly,  what a treat it was to provide at least one set of guests with an unusual and satisfying national park experience!