There was a helicopter coming by.
I could hear the whomp-whomp of its blades as it approached, no doubt on its way to do some heavy lifting somewhere south of me. It’s not something I would normally notice. Helicopter work is pretty common in southern Alberta.
But the ruffed grouse I had my lens aimed at definitely noticed.
I was in a little patch of forest in the Chaffin Creek valley not too far south of Chain Lakes. The wind was blowing overhead but down here among the trees it was calm, calm enough I could hear the soft clucks of the grouse as it poked along the forest floor.
It was calm, too, when I’d left the city six hours before. And even though the sunrise was still more than an hour away, the sky was already bright. A solar storm had reached us the day before and for the two previous evenings the sky had been a riot of greens and reds as the aurora borealis put on a show.
I’d stayed out shooting pictures of it until the wee hours of Monday morning but when it erupted again Monday night, I decided to stay in so I could get up early Tuesday morning. Naturally, the light show was even better — or so I was told — but now, leaving town in the dark, I could still see remnants of it.
Stopping on a ridge in the Cross Conservancy, I could see the arc of green and purple in the sky above the city’s glow and it was bright enough to silhouette a stand of scraggly aspens a little further on. On the Millarville side of the hills, the colours were still visible even with the warm glow of the rising sun. Truly amazing skies this year!
As the sun approached the horizon I could see more things beginning to glow. First were the taillights of vehicles crossing the ford on Threepoint Creek. The ankle-deep water caught their shine as folks crossed on their way to work. Following shortly, still with the sun not yet emerged, were the leaves.
This was the reason I’d come this way, this was why I’d wanted to get up early. I knew without even seeing them that the leaves would be spectacular. And now, in the near-dawn glow, I could see they actually were.
A field lay swathed and ready for the combine just north of Diamond Valley, and the windrows aimed right at a hillside covered with golden aspens. Some still held hints of green but nearly all of them had turned yellow and amber, the leaves making the bone-white trunks seem even brighter than they were.
And then, just the other side of town, more aspens, these ones fronted by a green field that a little group of mule deer were munching on. Traffic whizzed and rumbled past and the dawn breeze was beginning to pick up but if you could ignore the sounds, it was as lovely and tranquil as you could ever want.
The rising sun was already lighting the mountain peaks off to the west but it took a few minutes more to clear the hills and spread its glow to where I was. But when it did, oh my!
The leaves reflected golden light into the shadows and shone like neon where the morning light passed through their translucency. Road dust kicked up by passing vehicles wafted like mist while the scattered clouds overhead caught sunlight on their edges.
From the ridge west of Hartell I could see across the Tongue Creek valley to the bright aspens and poplars on the far side. Behind them, the mountains were dappled with bright light and cloud shadows. A small pond sitting in the shadow of the ridge and out of the breeze was like a mirror, reflecting the trees around it and the sky above.
The tall grass along the creek in the valley bottom was shades of bronze. I could see where beavers had been working to ready their dams and cache willows to gnaw on once the ice locked the water up. Across the valley someone on horseback was chasing a cow. They disappeared into the brush.
By the time I made it to Pekisko Creek an hour later, the wind had started to blow. Cottonwood leaves torn free were gathering in the eddies along the creek while the ones still on the branches — the vast majority — rattled and glittered in the morning light. Somewhere close by cattle were making a racket while magpies and chickadees chattered and chittered among the wolf willows, saskatoons and roses among the trees.
Somewhat surprisingly, there were still a lot of green leaves, especially on the branches close to the ground. I tried to pluck one and found the bond between the stem and the branch was still quite strong. Interesting. The ditches, though, were full of red and orange grass with silvery wolf willow adding a metallic accent.
The aspens on the western slopes of the Porcupine Hills along Chain Lakes were brilliant. The sun was angled perfectly to skim across their tops leaving some in bright light, others in shadow. It backlit the balsam poplar leaves along Willow Creek where it exits the Chain Lakes dam and sparkled on the water.
Chinook clouds were building up as I headed south and by the time I hit Riley Road an arch had formed overhead. The limber pines on the sandstone ridges were bending in the freshening wind and the willows along the creek were shedding leaves that spun and landed on the beaver ponds. But further to the west and deeper into the side valleys it wasn’t quite so strong and in the shadow of the clouds, the leaves glowed.
A fire burned through here a few years ago so this area is a mix of skeletal trees and new growth, a testament to the renewing power of fire. Tall, skinny aspens that missed the flames grew on the hillsides while new shoots from the unburned root systems of the scorched trees stood thickly among the trunks.
Across the valley where the flames never reached, the trees grow in waves of yellow and green all the way to the mountain slopes. No road runs over that way, though, so I followed the one I was on into the next valley. And in the shaded area between the two drainages, I met the grouse.
Here, at an angle that the sun rarely reaches, the slopes are covered in small shrubs and moss with spruce trees adding additional shade. It’s a mushroomy place so I was driving slowly along looking for fungus poking up through the green moss and had stopped to aim my camera at one growing beside a big red leaf.
And as I did, I saw movement out the corner of my eye.
A ruffed grouse was striding slowly along and if it hadn’t chosen just that second to move, I never would have seen it. In fact, its brown and cream feathers so perfectly matched the forest floor that a couple times I lost track of it and thought it had wandered off before finding it again with my lens just a few feet from where it had been.
Down here in the shade there was no wind at all but I could hear it in the trees above. Still, though, it was quiet enough that I could hear the soft clucks of the grouse as it walked along and even pick up the tearing sound of the small leaves it was plucking and gobbling down.
All was tranquil until the helicopter came by.
At first, the grouse didn’t react but as the thud of the rotors got louder it stopped wandering and paused, neck outstretched. Then, as the helicopter passed overhead and the sound crescendoed, the grouse turned its head and looked up.
OK, the right eye looked up. Grouse, like most birds, have eyes more to the sides of their heads, the better to see predators and photographers. But there was no doubt the grouse was looking up as the copter passed. As the sound faded away, the grouse went on with its day.
Me too.
Further up the valley, there were beaver ponds with freshly reinforced dams and hillsides covered with bright aspens. They were so bright, in fact, that through my lens the hillsides seemed like a solid mass instead of individual trees. In other places, they weren’t so uniform, places where poplars mixed in and evergreen spruces added a peppering of dark green.
The individual leaves were fascinating in themselves. Stopping to go for a short walk, I picked up yellow aspen and bright red rose leaves, alder leaves the colour of carpaccio and poplar leaves that were eroding away. Heading back down the road I found wild raspberry and geraniums glowing in the ditches.
Back on Riley Road I followed the south fork of Willow Creek past spring-fed ponds that were full of water beetles and aspens that were bare in places and green in others. Up on the hillside that separates the two forks of Willow Creek the grass was blonde and bright with a blush of red from all the low roses that grew along with it. The shady hillsides were lined with bright aspens and in the deeper shadows I found the reds of chokecherries and osier dogwood.
Down along the creek there were cottonwoods and pines, willows and saskatoons. The grass was taller here and it was bent in the wind. On the other side of the next ridge, down along Mosquito Creek, big thickets of diamond willow stood defiantly green, their leaves drying out but holding their summer colour.
In Williams Coulee, west of Nanton, golden grass covered the south-facing slopes while aspens dominated the north-facing side. Here, it was plain to see that most of the trees were clones with great swaths of still-green trees right next to copses that had already turned yellow. A whitetail doe paused for a moment among them before bouncing off and letting out those crazy coughing barks that they make. From somewhere on the high ground above the coulee came the haunting whistle of a bull elk looking for love.
Clearing the coulee and headed back toward town, my phone began to ping and chirp with missed messages blocked by the hills I’d been in. Among them were several updates from an aurora app. Another solar storm was on the way.
And that meant the sky would dance with aurora once again.
That would be a silent but beautiful show and it made me wonder.
Would that grouse turn its head to have a look?
I’d like to think that it would.
