mammals – Page 13

Now I know why they call the firemen out

Playing in the snow

I’ve been distracted this weekend, at my parents’ new place; between the regular chores and fussing about the computer situation, I haven’t been looking at things closely enough to blog about them. I also haven’t been out too much, preferring to stay within the comfortably warm house. Though beautiful and sunny, today was a chilly -16 oC (3 oF) before windchill. The sort of weather that one likes to enjoy from the inside.

I did venture out a couple of times to let Raven play, and of course I had to take care of the horses and stoke the wood furnace. I took my camera with me on the final run out today. The landscape is so different from the rocky lakes and forests where Dan and I live – here it’s flat and open. My mom calls it Big Sky Country, because compared to where they used to live, on the forested Niagara Escarpment, the sky stretches out to near infinity, finally meeting the earth at the far side of what seems, comparatively, like the endless expanses of the open prairie.

The sunsets here are always interesting, since you can watch the sun sink so low to the horizon, unimpeded by trees or buildings. Today the lower sky was shielded by hazy clouds, subduing the colours of the setting sun, but beautiful in their own right.

The snow here is considerably deeper than it is back home. In some areas it’s up to my knees, as high as Raven’s chin. I really wished I had a video camera as I watched her bounding like a deer through the snow. Still photos just don’t do the boing-boing-iness justice.

Raven had a blast. She loves snow. At home, when I take her for walks down the road, she can’t resist rolling in the snowbanks, or flopping around like a fish out of water when we go down to the thick snow blanket on the lake.

Here, she bounded about, kicking up snow with a big grin on her face.

Her ears flying in the wind.

And a goatee of snow from snuffling for voles.

Today at Kingsford – Evidence of beavers

What a difference a day makes. Yesterday morning Dan and I took Raven and walked down the lake, across the ice. The entire lake was frozen solid, shore to shore, with a thin layer of soft, dusty snow settled on top of it. We could probably have taken our skates if we wanted. This morning the weather was warmer, and it rained all day. Instead of a thin layer of snow there was a layer of water sitting on the ice, reflecting the sky and the skeletons of the trees on the opposite shore. The riverbed channel in the middle of the lake was starting to thaw out and thin.

This photo is from yesterday, when the frozen lake was an open, pristine expanse of snow, untouched, crisp and clean. These are my favourite snowscapes, broad, open spaces, newly fallen snow with no tracks or blemishes yet. Thick, wet snow outlining the branches of the trees is a very close second. It’s been a while since I’ve seen the lake from this point of view, not since we were able to take the boat out.

We noticed this while we were out. The thing that caught my eye was actually the change in colour of the ice where Dan’s footsteps had scuffed away the snow. Most of the lake is covered in cloudy white ice, but for a couple of steps the ice was clear and dark. Taking a closer look I could see that there was a noticeable track in the ice going back to the shore, and, following its length, a beaver lodge at the shore’s edge. There are several such lodges along the shores of the lake. I’m not sure how many pairs of beavers there are here, and therefore how many of these lodges are occupied, but it appeared that this one has active residents. The change in colour of the ice was due to the activity of the beavers as the water was freezing, keeping a narrow channel open as they moved to and from the lodge. Probably most of the ice began to freeze overnight, when beavers are more active, and then once they retired in the morning their channel finally got a chance to close up.

I tend to think of beavers as being semi-hibernators over the winter, but actually they remain active all through the cold months. In the fall they build up a substantial larder of branches and small tree trunks, stored underwater where they can access it from the lodge even when the water surface is frozen solid. Beaver activity peaks in the spring and fall; in the spring they are repairing their structures that may have sustained damage in the harsh winter conditions, in the fall they are stockpiling food for the winter. Beavers can hold their breath for up to 20 minutes, but like all land-dwellers must come up for air at some point. Sometimes the water level will drop after the ice has formed, creating an air pocket between the two, or if the ice is thin enough the beaver may be able to create a breathing hole, but more often it will need to return to its lodge. To provide air circulation and allow fresh air to enter the lodge, beavers don’t pack mud on to the top of the dome, which creates a sort of ventilation “shaft”. I didn’t look for it yesterday, but one website suggests if you look closely on a cold day you can see the wisps of warm, moist air from the beavers within escaping from the little gaps in the peak of the lodge.

Today at Kingsford – Puppy in the snow

The last few days we’ve had regular precipitation, which has variably been in solid or liquid form depending on the temperature outside. Temperatures dropped and stayed low enough overnight last night that when we got up this morning there was a lovely blanket of snow on the ground, the first solid couple of inches we’ve had (prior to this, all we’d got were light dustings). I love the way freshly-fallen snow looks, crisp and white, lining the branches of the trees and bushes and giving the landscape a light, lacy appearance. I can guarantee this won’t be the last freshly-fallen snow photo I post to the blog.

I took Raven out for her daily walk, bundling her up in her new coat as much to keep her dry as to keep her warm, since it wasn’t nearly as cold today as it had been a few days ago. When she just goes outside to relieve herself you’d think she was very put off by the snow, pausing reluctantly at the edge of the deck and then stepping delicately over its surface. But put the hiking boots on and head out for a walk, and it’s the best thing she’s ever seen. She tears down the path, then pauses and buries her nose in it, snuffling as dogs do. She flops over, rolls around a bit, then tears off again. It’s great fun to watch, she seems to be having a blast, and it helps to burn some of her inexhaustible energy.

All the wetness she’s been getting the last week or so has started to bring out her doggy odour a bit. She’s never smelled very strongly, the way some dogs I’ve known have, but it has been a month or so since her last bath. The first time we bathed her, shortly after she came home (her mother’s home smelled a little… funny) it took two of us, one to keep her in the tub and the other to lather and rinse. This is her third bath, and each time she’s gotten better about it. Now she looks, if not like she’s enjoying it, then at least resigned to it, and Dan was able to bathe her without having to hold her at all. We’ll make a water dog of her yet!

Braving the cold

It was another busy day today, a follow-up to yesterday’s car-shopping. I took my sister back up to Ottawa so she could pick up the plates from her decommissioned car, and then dropped her off at her house before returning back to my parents’. The outing ate up most of the afternoon, and by the time I got back again it was already dark. However, I did take Raven for a hike before we left in the morning, so that hopefully she’d be tired enough for the afternoon she’d just spend it sleeping. My sister joined me, and the three of us hiked along the trails that circle the perimeter of the property. We walked back as far as the pond where I saw the Canada Geese last time I was here, now completely frozen in. The sub-freezing temperatures have persisted long enough that even the river is nearly completely frozen over now.

There are also a few trails that cut through the middle of their woods, but we didn’t have time for everything. Not to mention that it hadn’t warmed up significantly since yesterday, and so we didn’t want to spend an extended period outdoors. Yesterday when we were out hiking about, I noticed Raven was shivering. I can’t say I blamed her, since I was wearing my thick down jacket and was still on the verge of shivering myself, wishing I owned a balaclava, or at least had remembered to bring a scarf with me. She’s got a thin coat for a dog (at least the dogs I’ve known), seeming to have the unfortunate combination of thin, soft border collie texture with the shortness of the lab. Unfortunate for our Canadian winters, anyway – I do like how soft she is to touch, though. There was a time that I would probably have rolled my eyes at a dog owner who bought their dog an overcoat, but now I’m one of the ranks. Raven seemed not the least bothered by it, romping about like usual, and I think it kept her warmer. She certainly looked cute.

We saw a few interesting things while out. Everything is frozen now, there’s hardly a drop of water left liquid, and what there is is all running in the riverbed. The vernal pools of the forest are full, and frozen. I’m not sure just what process creates these air-bubble patterns in the ice, but they were several layers down. You see this a lot in shallow puddles and such, where there’s a pocket of air under the ice. The little bit of searching I did suggests it may be the result of a warm or sunny day melting the top of the layer of ice or snow, and causing cracks in the rest, then a rapid freezing seals over the top of the surface again; the water that’s trapped between ice layers then seeps through the cracks in the lower layer (liquid water is heavier than ice), leaving an air pocket. But don’t quote me on that. My sister felt the pattern looked like a face, maybe sort of like The Scream if it had been painted by Dali.

Speaking of weird ice formations, there were a lot of these along the trails. It was really hard to get a photo that I felt adequately captured the shapes, and in the end I still don’t think I really got it. They looked like ice-covered grass stems, except there was no grass inside. They seemed to be solid ice, but thin and often curved like grass stems. Strangely, they were covered in dirt. I wondered if perhaps they were formed by a process related to that which created my freezer icicles, maybe starting out with ice forming on the blades of grass, but wicking moisture up from the ground (they were all in low-lying areas that were wet or damp a few weeks ago when it was warmer) and extending the ice crystal formation beyond the end of the blade. The dirt maybe got drawn up with the water molecules?

Carrying on with the theme of I’m-not-really-sure, I think this is Winterberry Holly, Ilex verticillata. My mom had commented to me that there were a couple of bushes with flaming-red berries in a wetland up the road, which she’d noticed on a recent trip to town, and she pointed them out to me as we drove by the last time I was up. I did a search for Ontario shrubs bearing orange berries in the winter, and came up with Winterberry, but I would feel more comfortable calling this that in the summer, when I’ve seen its leaves. Even though I’m not sure there’s any other shrub that grows in our area which retains bright orange berries into the winter. Unless there’s something conclusively distinctive about a plant I tend not to make definitive IDs in the winter, and even then I usually have some summer experience with the species, too. To prove this point, Jennifer over at A Passion for Nature recently included a photo of snow-covered Winterberry in one of her posts, but her bush doesn’t look much like mine, so I’m inclined to just leave it as a tentative ID.

We discovered this giant bracket fungus growing from the top of a stump alongside the trail. I had my sister put her boot up on the stump to provide a sense of scale, as my first photo didn’t look very impressive. Since I don’t have my fungus guide here with me, I don’t know the identity of this individual, although it somewhat resembles an oversized and independent Turkey Tail. I will try to remember to update this with the actual ID when I get home and return to my field guide. There’s lots of different types of fungus in the forest here, some common ones I recognize, but lots I didn’t, and so I admired them but for the most part didn’t bother with photos. Fungus is one of those groups that I mostly don’t even try to ID strictly using the internet, preferring to look it up in a printed guide where you can quickly flip through photos.

We returned to the house by way of the horses’ field, so that my sister could check their water trough level before we headed out for the afternoon. This was Raven’s first experience with horses (although she’d met the cows down the road from our house a few times, I think). I don’t think she knew what to make of them, or even whether to be afraid or curious or playful. The donkey made it clear that he wasn’t interested in playing, however (donkeys are often kept in herds of other animals like sheep because they are exceptionally bold and instinctively will drive off wolves or coyotes), and so we retreated back to the house to thaw out.