On The Road with Mike Drew: Early bird and all that ….

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I didn’t really need to be out on the road quite so early.

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I’d set my alarm for 6 a.m. but woke up a good hour earlier, so rather than just toss around in the sack waiting for a wake-up call I didn’t need, I grabbed my gear and headed out. There were still stars sparkling in the sky and only a faint blue glow in the east but it was calm and quiet and I had the roads pretty much all to myself.

I was going east again, thinking I would hit the Bow River in the first light of day, maybe look for some hints of fall colour. The night had been clear and windless and I was hoping that the heat of the previous day might have warmed the water enough that mist would be drifting along.

That would be a bonus, of course. I knew that the morning light would be lovely no matter what. Because it always is.

Dawn was still a ways off when I hit Langdon with just a slight touch of pink tingeing the sky. Weed Lake, on the east side of town, mirrored the sky above with patches of magenta and blue barely ruffled by the slight pre-dawn breeze. Day was yet to break but the birds were wide awake.

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I noticed the herons first. There were a half dozen of them along the shore, tall, semi-silhouettes slowly striding along or standing still in the shallows waiting for breakfast to swim by. There were black-necked stilts among them and a few avocets. Flocks of little sandpipers were whipping by.

Behind them were pelicans, their huge white bodies standing out against the dark water. They were preening, running their long beaks through their feathers, straightening up whatever had become rearranged from roosting in the shallows all night. Ducks swam around them, mallards or gadwalls, maybe. It was too hard to tell in the dim light.

There was no traffic at all so I stopped on the road that bisects the lake to swing my lens past the birds. More herons and other waders on the south side but also way more geese. They were mostly Canada geese, some still sleeping but most of them getting ready to head out into the fields to feed and starting to make a lot of noise.

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And among them, a surprise. There was a lone snow goose, its white feathers making it pretty obvious among all the darker birds. Pretty cool.

Dawn was just about to pop now so I kept going east and just a bit after 7 a.m., the sun sent streamers of morning light across the fields and farmyards. There were already hawks on the move, some hunting over the fields, others perched on power poles. Squadrons of gulls were milling around, settling on the harvested fields to gorge on grasshoppers.

But, alas, there was no mist on the Bow. The light was lovely, though, warm and slightly softened by thin clouds to the east. The foam kicked up by the water coming over the Carseland weir looked like meringue on a pie, creamy white with tinges of gold.

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A pair of cormorants were fishing in the churning current, diving, swimming, popping up and diving again. I kept my lens on them hoping one might come up with a fish but they never did. And then one of them decided to fly upstream.

It took off running across the water, flapping its wings and lifting into the air. But it couldn’t get enough lift with its wet wings and it smacked right into the face of the falling water. Three different times it tried. Three different times it smacked into the falling water. Finally, it got airborne again and turned to head downstream instead.

Above the weir, its cousins were perched on a log letting the morning sun dry their feathers. Wise move.

Pelicans churned along, leaving wakes behind them in the glassy water while ducks wheeled by overhead. A momma mule deer and her twin fawns bounced across the road in front of me and dropped into the poplars and Manitoba maples along the shore. There wasn’t much colour among the leaves yet, just a hint of lemon on some and splashes of red on others. The spider webs were far more interesting, the light coming through the trees making them shimmer.

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It was past eight now and though I didn’t have to be back to town right away, I started heading in that direction.

But as I drove up out of the valley, I saw something dark out in the middle of the river. And it was moving.

It turned out to be two somethings, a momma moose and her baby. They were standing out in the current of one of the main side channels munching on a weed bed, dipping their big heads into the water and coming up with mouthfuls of streaming green.

The current eddied around them as they fed while morning light caught the trees and tall grass along the shore. Pelicans roosted upstream while ducks swam along the banks. So lovely, so lovely.

I slowly made my way back to town as the sun rose higher in the sky, stopped for a quick breakfast and headed to my appointment.

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But two days later, I was still thinking about that momma moose and her baby. So I decided to go see if she was still around, this time in the evening light.

I didn’t really have to be out on the road so early but I was getting bored sitting around waiting for the afternoon to go by so I grabbed my gear and headed east. My pal Stu had been out by Standard the day before and had called to tell me — with his usual surfeit of hyperbole — how great the light on the land was, so I decided to take the long way out to the Bow.

He wasn’t wrong. I’d cut north before heading east and passed a slough covered with ring-billed gulls north of Strathmore and found pelicans and cormorants relaxing on several other ponds. The light swinging across the Chimney Hills and lighting the blond straw in the harvested fields was still a bit harsh but it made the stubble glow.

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It glinted off the water of Severn Dam north of Standard and backlit the sunflowers growing along the banks while on the other side of the Chimney Hills it lit up dragonflies and damselflies in the wetlands along Parfleche Creek.

The sun’s harshness really helped over there. It was bright enough to shine through the thick leaves of the cattails and put a bit of prismatic sparkle on the cellophane dragonfly wings. It no doubt lit the very loud little marsh wren I could hear while I was photographing the plants and insects but unfortunately, I never did get to see it.

And its brightness helped with the samphire, too.

I found a big patch of it by a dry slough over in the Wintering Hills, bright red and glowing. I just had to stop for that.

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This is such a fascinating plant. When I last photographed it a month or so ago, it was still mostly green and kind of asparagus-looking. Now it was screaming red and looking more like fresh hamburger than any kind of plant.

And a weird thing happened to my vision as I lay among the tiny plants taking my pictures. After a few minutes of seeing nothing but bright red in front of me, my sense of colour got skewed. The red began to look kind of greyish while the sky above turned almost purple. The green grass close by looked yellow.

The camera, of course, recorded the true colours but when I found a little funnel-web spider sitting in its nest among the red plants, I had a tough time focusing on it. I could see it fine but because my colour perception was so far off, it blended into the background when I looked through the lens. Luckily, I managed to get a couple of pictures that worked.

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My eyes were back to normal when I stopped to take pictures of combines working in the fields. Stu had found a bunch of them working in the evening light the day before but harvest is moving along pretty quickly thanks to the dry weather so there actually wasn’t all that much harvesting going on. Good that the crops are coming off so quickly but I ain’t getting many pictures of it.

Afternoon was heading toward evening now so I turned back toward Carseland and the Bow River. The light was nice on the fields and I would have been happy to linger and watch the sun go down out there but I was really hoping that momma moose and her baby would be back in the water.

The only thing I stopped for was a flock of geese descending on a field. Not the greatest picture but they turned out to be white-fronted geese, early arrivals from the north. I guess migration has begun.

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The river was lovely in the evening light, the air just as calm as it had been in the morning two days before. Bugs were swirling around, clouds of midges and a hatch of caddis catching the light as they flew among the stream-side poplars. The pelicans were roosting above the weir while the cormorants were scattered on the water or sitting on gravel bars.

As soon as I saw the boats in the shallows and the fisherfolk casting, I knew I wasn’t going to see the moose. I’m sure they were someplace close by but it wasn’t likely they’d come out with people around.

Not that it mattered. In truth, I didn’t really expect to find them anyway. Lightning, lottery wins, meteor strikes, they all happen more than once. But they rarely pick the same spot.

The sun was setting now, lighting the clouds with pastel colours and filling the Bow valley with soft light. I paused on the hill to look back and take a couple of pictures before rolling on back to town.

The sky turned orange and silhouetted an owl on a power pole before fading to salmon and blue. It was just after 9 p.m. when I got back to the house.

Nope, I really didn’t have to hit the road as early as I did. On either day.

But I’m awfully glad that I did.