Carden Sounds

After a night of high winds and rain (and a leaking window), the morning brought another surprise - no power.  So what to do? What to do?

I went back to bed for a bit.  Got up, studied dragonflies for a bit.
And then, after a phone call from a friend, I decided to do the Carden thing - take a trip down Victoria Road and over to Wylie Road.  And what a trip it was.

The first bird of note: a shrike.  I'd seen one in this very spot last week; it seems it's sticking around. And the sound associated with the shrike is.......human swearing as it flies out of range just before I can push the shutter on the camera.

While stopped for the shrike, I become aware of other Carden sounds.

Upland sandpipers are wolf whistling in the distance and peeping right there on the fencepost.
Meadowlark lemon is everywhere. There are peents and rattles and that glorious clear song celebrating the arrival on the breeding grounds.

A savannah sparrow pops up from the grass and stands on a fence post but, again, not quite long enough to be captured by the camera.
Red-winged blackbirds chack and gurgle over territories.
Starlings whistle and squeak and murmur.

Both a great blue heron and a turkey vulture flap and soar overhead, soundless.
Snipe are winnowing high up in the sky and wheeting from deep in the grass.

Further along the road, the cattle munch the new grass found deep within last year's brown remains.
Turning onto Wylie, there is a bluebird, sitting silently beside the babbling roadside stream.

A chorus of chorus frogs strum their combs.
The tires splash through the ever-present puddle.

A song sparrow settles into a tree, practicing its song between bouts of grooming.
A kestrel sits in a dead tree watching my approach and takes to the air when I'm just three steps away from the fence which would have provided support for an over-extended camera.

A tree sparrow quietly explores a sumac while robins whinny and sing.
A lone leopard frog snores once, twice; a couple of geese argue with honks on a distant pond.

A single chipping sparrow trills and, out there, someone sings a song both repeated and varied.  Was that a brown thrasher?
As I move along to try to locate it, I am distracted by an even more distinct song.  Looks like a grackle but sounds very much different.  Rather like a rusty gate.  Rather like a rusty blackbird.  Hard to see the rust against a difficult sky but the gate and the eye and the bill are right.

A pair of mallards quack - how quaint the sound - as they move further away from my approach.
Then the rain starts plopping, leaving ripples in the water.
The wind rustles in the trees; the nose sniffs, running in the cold.
Back in the car, turn on the heater.  Warm, warm, cold fingers.

Stop at the puddles to listen again.  Turn off the heater, hear the chorus of combs and see the sandhill crane, no bugling this time, just steady wingbeats carrying it off to the distance.

On the return trip up Victoria Road, mourning doves coo their sad song.
The windshield wipers are squeaking.

A turkey gobbles and shimmies his wings, trying to entice his two female friends that he is better than the other turkey tom gobbling from the adjacent field.

A quick stop at the pond, a pair of bufflehead dive and come together and eventually flap the water in an anxious flight away from an unseen danger.

These are the sounds of Carden today.

Spring comes to Carden

Today it was warm for the second day in a row.
Today I went out without winter coat or winter boots.
Today spring has come to Carden.

After a morning of working on the computer I decided that I really needed to get out to enjoy the day.  Where better to go than to check out Wylie and Alvar Roads.  On the drive down Victoria Road, I saw that Alvar Road was still too snowy and icy to travel so I continued down and along over to Wylie.  Along the way, kestrels lifted from the hydro lines as my car passed by, crows flew overhead and the brown fields looked lifeless.

And then I saw what always makes me smile: the cattle are back on the landscape.

I can't tell you why seeing them out makes me feel so content except that there is something so basically natural here.  These are not manicured paddocks, not maintained, not groomed.  These animals have the chance to live in a very wild way, dealing with natural things like coyotes, lightning strikes and junipers.  They go into the trees for shade when it gets hot and wander the acres looking for food when they are hungry.  The cattle in Carden go out on the land in spring and don't come in again until fall turns the grasses too brown to consume.  Some have their calves out there; some are just fattening up for a different fate.

So after pausing to connect again with this life, I forged ahead. And Wylie did not disappoint.
It was in its usual challenging condition.

After careful maneuvering around potholes and puddles, I was eventually stopped by snow.

So I parked the car and continued on foot.  As I walked I could hear a couple of crows having an argument with a raven.  A killdeer was calling and the red-winged blackbirds were exclaiming over their territories.

And then I was stopped again - too much water to ford.

I took a few moments to look around, to listen to the wind and the birds and to wonder why this desolate landscape resonates with me so much.

And then I turned around and headed back to the car.

Nearly there, I encountered this little bit of wildlife as it made its way along the road.

On the drive back down Wylie I was stopped by the sight of a bird flying into a tree.  It was not a starling or a red-winged blackbird.  This was something different but the light was bad and I could not be sure what it was until she flew down beside her very blue mate.  I watched as this bluebird pair travelled along the fenceline.  Then they landed and I thought I could take a picture of them.  But as I focussed in my attention was drawn away by something else even more unexpected.

What was that I was hearing? Was I mistaking it for a variation of the call of a red-winged blackbird? There it was again.  And on the other side of the road, again. The unmistakable sound of a fingernail being drawn across the teeth of a comb.

Could it possibly be that there were chorus frogs there in the long wet grass feeling spry with the sudden warmth?  I sat and listened for several minutes and it surely did sound like that to me.

I drove further south along the road and then turned the car back northward, hoping to see the bluebirds again.  Crossed the massive puddle for the third time but no sign of the birds so I parked the car and waited.  I never did see them again.

But they have returned.  More will be coming.
And soon this desolate land will be filled with bobolink and grasshopper sparrows, upland sandpipers and snipe, butterflies and dragonflies and wildflowers.
It's already started.
We just need to wait a little bit longer for the Carden landscape to show its colours.