OK, it sure looked like a dust cloud.
I’d seen a few tractors out in the fields as I rolled along and they were trailing dust as they went so that’s what I assumed it was. Still, though, something wasn’t quite right. Instead of hanging in the air, it was moving across the horizon, changing shape, disappearing for a few seconds and then appearing again.
And as I watched it, suddenly, I realized what it was. It wasn’t dust.
It was birds.
I’d left town not sure what to do with my day. First, I thought, maybe head to the mountains and scout for wild horses on the way. Then I remembered the tamaracks up by Caroline and Burnstick Lake. They’d be looking pretty nice right now. Either one sounded good. Both choices meant heading northwest so that’s the direction I went.
The morning was pleasant, a touch chilly but sunny. The poplars and aspens were bright and golden and I hadn’t gone far when I came across a little moose that was trying to cross the highway to get to its momma. It had picked a bad spot, though, so I paused just long enough to grab a picture. I hope the little guy made it OK. I’m sure it did.
From there, I hit the Beaver Dam Creek valley by Madden and continued on north. I still wasn’t sure where to go but tamarack country was starting to pull a little bit harder than the mountains so I rolled over the ridges toward the Little Red Deer River.
But pausing to take a few pictures by a sunny, dewy pasture — nice soft light — I saw a bunch of geese on a pond close by. The autumn grasses and shrubs were casting a bronze reflection on the water, the geese were swimming with mergansers and mallards and as I shot my pictures I thought, OK, the mountains ain’t going nowhere and the tamaracks will likely hold onto their needles for a while yet.
But these birds aren’t going to be here much longer. So at the next intersection, I turned east.
Once I started looking for them, there were birds everywhere. In a bog up the road, I found a snipe poking around and a pair of canvasback ducks on the open water. Further east there were ring-billed gulls and yellow-legs wading in a shallow slough.
Flying high and out of reach for even my longest lens, skeins of geese and family groups of swans. On the bigger ponds, a whole variety of waders and paddlers. And plenty of colour.
I still didn’t have any destination in mind but since my belly was telling me it needed a pecan Danish, I headed for Linden in hopes the day’s pastry run hadn’t sold out. On the way, though, I’d be following Kneehill Creek and Linden Creek just to the north.
The aspens and poplars were still hanging onto their leaves and patches of bright yellow covered the valley sides. Down in the bottom, thickets of roses and willows were orange and red while the downy seed heads of thistles and hawkweed caught the sun. Birds here, too, tiny locals like chickadees and migrators that didn’t stop long enough for me to recognize.
Putting up my little copter for an aerial view of the bends in Kneehill Creek — I missed the pastry run, dammit — a flock of small birds flew under the copter. American pipits, I think. I could hear their voices as they flew by.
The creek valley was full of autumn colour, soft browns and a bit of green with the occasional lone aspen adding a bright splash of gold. The fields around it were blonde with trimmed stubble, green where winter forage was growing and even yellow with volunteer canola that had sprouted and bloomed in the warm fall weather.
I found the birds I was looking for just up the road at Swalwell Dam.
There are always birds here, even in winter when the cattails along the banks throng with them, and today was no exception. The shallow end of the impoundment held Canada geese and dabbling ducks like mallards and shovelers while tundra swans and snow geese paddled on the deeper water.
In among them, more yellow-legs and even a willet. Coots bobbed along and a flock of pipits — for sure, this time — whizzed by at cattail-top level. In the grass around the banks there were meadowlarks and family flocks of partridge. White-fronted geese flew in and landed with the snow geese and as I aimed at them I saw there were a few blue geese among them as well.
Watching them, I wondered if there might be more birds on the other lakes further south so I headed back across the Kneehill Creek valley toward Irricana. On the way, I saw that dust cloud.
Normally I wouldn’t go chasing a dust cloud but after seeing how it was moving and knowing there were migrating birds in the area, I just had to go investigate. Other clouds that I’d seen had turned out to be flocks of ducks or geese so I really wanted to have a look.
Not this time, nope, not ducks or geese. This time, it was starlings.
More starlings, in fact, than I have ever seen in one bunch. I have no idea how many there were but there had to be well over a thousand. The flock was so big I couldn’t get it all in a single photo and there were a couple of other, smaller, flocks close by. They whirled and swirled, dropped down to a field and disappeared into the stubble only to emerge and fly off again in a roar of wings and peeps.
Man, they were hard to photograph. Unlike the big flocks of geese I’d seen a couple weeks back, these flocks were made up of hand-sized birds. Focusing on a single bird left a smear of out-of-focus blobs behind them and shooting into the flock was like trying to get a ball in focus. The only thing that’s sharp is the curve that’s closest to the camera.
Still though, amazing to see. I watched them until they spun away beyond the horizon.
I kept watch for more birds as I rolled south toward the lakes near Irricana and stopped to fly my little drone over the sand hills and ponds south of the Rosebud River. Pretty country pocked with pothole ponds and grassy dunes but no birds. A couple of Hutterite gentlemen stopped by to see what I was up to and we had a nice chat before I moved on. There were a few gulls on the nearby lakes and a few tundra swans far off on the water but there were no more flocks until I hit Bruce Lake east of Keoma. There, a fair-sized flock of snow geese huddled along the shore with their white-fronted cousins while on an island further out there were more white-fronted geese. Beyond them, autumn-bright poplars and a nice red barn.
The birds were fewer from there on. A flock of ring-billed gulls sat by a shallow slough near a feedlot west of Nightingale. They flew off when a harrier came by. And then, closer to Strathmore, I found a few pintails. Gorgeous ducks, I haven’t seen very many of them at all this year.
After that, nothing. Which is just as well. It was already 5:30 and the sun was heading west. The days are still beautiful but they are getting shorter. Time to head back to town.
But it had been a pretty good day considering I had no idea what I was going to do. Did I make the right choice picking the direction I went?
Well of course I did.
Because in southern Alberta no matter what direction you choose to go, you’ve made the right choice.
