Tag Archives: Wildlife

Day 5 – Luna Azul II

Thursday 23 February 2023 – We were awake quite early, which is a plus if you’re planning an early morning walk. One thing that has surprised me here is that the dawn is not marked by a tumultuous clamour of wildlife greeting the coming day. I’d expected to be deafened by the calls of strange birds and the howls of, erm, howler monkeys. But it hasn’t thus far been like that. One can just about hear the competing calls of howler monkey troupes – but it’s nearer to a penetrating growl or a gruff barking than a deafening shriek. Apparently the noise they make carries well for distances of up to a mile, and serves its purpose, which is to tell other troupes about location so as to minimise competition for the tree vegetation that is their main fodder.

So it was that we were up in time to depart at around 6am for the morning walk that was described in our Pura Aventura booklet. Although I knew that the route was basically along a dirt road, I had formed the impression that it was a good expedition to see and hear wildlife. My mental images of seeing exotic life forms skittering across the track in front of me or rustling ominously in the undergrowth were, frankly, overblown. The only real examples of wildlife we came across were what we now know are Black Vultures, 17 of which were resting in a tree.

Presumably, the number that were gathered there means that something nearby is on the point of death. Otherwise I can just imagine one of them saying, “I’m bored. What shall we do?” and another saying, “I dunno, what do you wanna do?”.

One thing we shall suggest to Pura Aventura is that they put some flesh on the bare bones of their description of this walk. For a start, it would be useful to know how long it should take. All we knew is that if you start out at 6am you can still be back for breakfast – but that could mean 10.30! As it happens, it took us about an hour and a half, which is perfectly reasonable length of time for a morning stroll.

Except it’s not a stroll. Like the Xandari walk of a a couple of days ago, it was rather up-and-downy.

Exactly how much harder it is than normal walking can be inferred from the statistics from my Garmin activity tracker. Normally, for a walk of three and a half miles, I would expect to expend 350 calories; for this walk the figure was 564. Not that I mind, but I can imagine that some people might be daunted by the steepness and skiddy surface of some of the track.

Another item we shall feed back to Pura Aventura is what awaits you at the top. We were told to expect a gate, beyond which was a track leading to a platform which gave great views over the countryside. The reality differed somewhat.

The vegetation got in the way not only of progress to the viewing platform, but of the view itself. One could just about get this

but only by crashing through relatively dense under- and overgrowth to an uncertain footing unnervingly close to a steep drop. In fairness the thickets would have stopped you from too long a fall, but it wouldn’t be a comfortable experience.

There was a reasonable amount of traffic on the “road” as we walked forth and back, much of it on two (motorised) wheels and all of it greeting any idiots out walking with a cheery wave. We were passed by a couple of chaps on motorbikes on a downhill stretch, only to find that the next uphill bit was too much for one of the bikes

so his mate had stopped, walked back down the hill and was helping him push his bike up to where he’d stopped. We passed them as they were struggling (cheerfully, it seemed) with this recalcitrant bike – thankfully they refused our offer of help – and it became clear that they made it back up to the working bike, which was then used to tow the other along the now-level track.

The implication of this is that a tow rope is an essential part of a biker’s gear in these parts.

We got back to the hotel, where we discovered that we would have got a better chance of seeing wildlife by staying put. Whilst I did various things but mainly had a short kip, Jane sat quietly on the veranda and noticed that there was a troupe of Howler Monkeys moving around in the trees nearby. So she took some photos

including this one of a mother and baby, which nicely illustrates the prehensile tail that is a feature only of new world apes; African apes do not have this, it seems.

You can just about make out the baby clinging on for dear life as mother hangs upside down from the branches.

Jane was good enough to alert me and I got a little bit of video, too.

Then it was time for breakfast, which was once again a good meal, and further gave us the chance to see more wildlife. Jane spotted a Great Kiskadee on the railings opposite us

and a couple of vultures did a bit of yoga by the pool.

This Tree Pose is alleged to help them warm up for the day, or perhaps the heating of the black feathers helps rid them of parasites, or it may possibly aid their digestion.

Anyway, there was no shortage of wildlife action, and it continued after breakfast. As I toiled in a creative fervour over the blog entry preceding this one, Jane once again quietly sat outside to see what happened. And before you know it, along came a lizard – quite a big one, so Jane got snapping.

I managed to get some stills and a bit of video as well.

Jane later saw a woodpecker, sadly it was too skillful at hiding itself among the branches to enable any good photos, but all in all it was a good morning, wildlife-wise and it was an agreeable prelude to spending the rest of the day at leisure. One has to grasp these opportunities while one can, as the next few days would seem to consist of a froth of activity once we reach our next destination.

For tomorrow we leave the very pleasant hotel Luna Azul, and head off in the direction of Bijagua. Most of the day will be spent in transit, or rather in a Toyota RAV4 (only slightly scratched), but there is a possibility for some photogenic excitement en route. You’ll just have to come back to find out whether this is the case, won’t you?

Rocky Mountain, Hi!

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Sunday 4 September 2022 – While we have made it a rule almost everywhere we’ve visited to go for an unstructured wander to explore (sorry, Kamloops – apparently you’re quite interesting after all), today was different in that the wandering would be structured – we were Going Hiking. With A Guide.

Of course, he wanted to make an early start, so once again we had to tear ourselves from the arms of Morpheus slightly earlier than we might have liked; however, since the day was forecast to be a fairly hot one, an early start was probably best. We met our guide, Geoff, in the hotel lobby and headed out to find the rest of the group he was leading on the hike. There were supposed to be five others; in the end, there were only four because he actually refused to take one lady on – she was, in his view, totally unprepared – wrong shoes, no backpack, no water. If it was the lady I thought I saw him talking to, he might also have assessed her as being physically the wrong shape to be taking on the hike.

Whatever, the group ended up as being just the six of us – Jane and me and two couples from Boulder, Colorado; Andrea and Dave, Susan and Scott. Geoff took us about half an hour out of Banff to the trailhead of the Stanley Glacier Trail in East Kootenay, dispensing some wisdom, safety guidelines and information about what we’d let ourselves in for. He described it as an eight km hike (four out and four back) of moderate toughness, which didn’t sound too daunting; but all the same he spent time making sure we had at least a litre of water each, and provided us with lunch packs. The schedule for the hike seemed very leisurely – starting before 9am and expecting to be done by about 2 or 2.30pm.

We started up the trail

which shows, in the distance the Stanley Head Wall, a face of Mount Stanley (yes, the same Stanley that the Vancouver Park is named for). The views as we went along were quite striking

but very hazy in places. Much of the haze is due to wildfire smoke, as wildfires are an important part of the cycle of nature in the Banff national Park as in other parks. The haze lightened as the day went on but it was, photographically speaking, a challenging day; allow me a geeky photo-type digression, here.

— START OF DIGRESSION: I SHAN’T BE OFFENDED IF YOU SKIP IT —

While modern cameras do a good job of extracting pleasing images from their sensors and presenting them to be viewed on a computer screen, they have to make editorial decisions about the data from the sensor in order to create such an image – so, for example, the .jpg file you see on your mobile phone screen has been extensively edited by the phone. When I take my Big Camera (Nikon Z6) with me to Take Serious Photos, I decline to have the camera make these decisions for me, as I want a greater degree of control, so I shoot in a format called RAW, which creates an image not immediately readable by a computer without specialist software (DxO Photolab is my go-to) but which has very much more data from the sensor available for the photographer to play with in creating a final image. (In the good old days, one played with bits of cardboard and an enlarger projection on to paper; digital life is much easier.)

The practical upshot is that in challenging conditions such as today, the camera will suggest this as an image with a lot of haze in the background:

whereas I know (because I was there) that there’s much more to the scene than this image shows. Once I’ve finished tinkering with the RAW file, the image looks like this:

Actually, the processed image is a little clearer than the reality as seen by the human eye; but I’m OK with this – what I’m after is not necessarily a recreation of that reality, but something that may be more striking.

The net of this rambling is to let you know that I have tinkered with virtually all of the images from the hike to bring out specific elements of the image that I consider important; they are not necessarily a representation of what I saw, but I hope that they go towards telling the story of the hike.

— END OF DIGRESSION —

Geoff

is a very experienced guide, as well as a writer and scientist, and has a wide and detailed knowledge of matters to do with the National Parks of North America; Yellowstone was the first to be established and Banff was the second. He said that the theme of the hike was “Wildfires and the Forest”, and it was very interesting to hear his perspective on forests, wilderness and managed ecologies. His philosophy is well expressed by work published in 1995 by one William Cronon called “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Cronon said that it was time to rethink wilderness: that the the idea of wilderness as being a place that stands apart from humanity is wrong; and that wilderness – as an area that has no humans in it – is quite profoundly a human creation.

Geoff made a striking assertion: “The forest is doomed”. A forest is not a permanent entity; bits of it will die from logging, fire or disease. The cutting back or burning of forests saves the trees from dying of diseases caused by overcrowding and allows the forest to support a wider range of life. The indigenous peoples that have been in the area for tens of thousands of years knew this, and effectively managed the forests to improve their lives – a greater selection of wildlife which is easier to hunt. Fire was an important part of this management.

When Europeans came to the area and forced the indigenous peoples out, they lost sight of this; wildfires were regarded as something to be avoided or restricted – absence of wildfires was seen as a success. The result has been overcrowded, diseased forests with a paucity of wildlife, and only now has this realisation sunk in to the extent that proper action is being taken – or, at least, would be, were political will up to the task, which often it isn’t. A very interesting and counter-intuitive philosophy.

Anyhoo…

We passed some nice scenes of forest and creek

with plentiful evidence of previous forest fires.

Above, you can see the red colours of the fireweed that is first to grow back after a fire.

We met a grouse, unconcernedly pecking away at the path

until disturbed by some people who passed us with a couple of noisy dogs, when it flew up into a nearby tree and posed for us again.

We passed buffalo berry plants

which are prime fodder for grizzly bears. (Their other mainstay apparently is dandelions – dandelions – not much meat or fish in these here parts). The berries are, apparently, oily but I’m still astonished that berries can sustain an animal as big as a grizzly. Another name for the berries is soap berries, and if you taste one – carefully, just a little of the juice rather than a whole berry – you can understand why; they have overtones of bitter grapefruit juice and detergent.

After a while, the path got steeper

and we ended up, some 1,000 feet higher than the start, at our lunch spot. We were first there, but this trail is a popular one and so we were soon joined by others.

This is a big landscape.

In the distance, at the foot of the vertical bit of the Stanley Head Wall, were some climbers.

You can just make out some dots of colour near the white boulder at the bottom of the picture, with two red dots also visible some feet up the wall. I tried to give some idea of just how big this landscape is.

The distances are deceptive. For example, the patch of greenery towards the bottom of the picture above doesn’t look that far away,

but, on closer examination, actually has people in it

which are difficult to pick out with the naked eye (well, with my naked eye, anyway).

I tried taking photos of the glacier

and the waterfall caused by its melting

but, as I burbled about above, the light is extremely challenging, and it has taken quite a bit of fiddling to get images that I’m happy with. I just want you to know that I suffer for my art.

After an hour resting at the top, we retraced our footsteps down the trail. At the bottom, a stream we had crossed at the start of the trail was showing some lovely glacial blue colour in the water.

And that was it for the hike, which had been a really nice morning – an agreeable temperature, slightly demanding without being ridiculous and giving an opportunity to listen to Geoff’s wisdom about wildlife, ecology and forests.

My Garmin thingy told me, on returning to the hotel and a source of internettery, that we’d expended some 1,300 calories in the course of the hike, which is quite a lot, and could be interpreted as justification for taking it easy for the rest of the day.

So we went for a walk. Obviously.

Geoff had mentioned an area called Bow Falls, which is about half an hour’s walk from downtown Banff. We needed something to eat anyway, so we headed the 15 minutes to downtown, ate a decent, cheerfully served, early dinner at The Keg, and then headed out along the path towards the falls.

Downtown Banff was busy, probably more than usual because we were here over a Labor Day weekend

but the lower part of the main street has a pedestrian area and is attractive, particularly with the mountains as backdrop.

The path to the falls is a riverside walk, and one has to decide which side of the Bow River to walk on; there’s a pedestrian bridge to help when you’ve made the decision.

We went along the north shore towards the Surprise Corner viewpoint, passing some lovely bits of real estate

almost certainly worth a fortune. At the falls, one gets a pretty spectacular view

part of which is the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel.

Given that we’ve stayed in Fairmonts in most other places, I assume that this one was full because of the holiday weekend. Anyway, the sight of the hotel we didn’t stay in complements the splendid view rather well.

We retraced our steps to our hotel. Along the path is a variety of artworks

including one which is some glass bats in a tree, which is a rather fetching idea.

Banff town itself is quite an attractive place, in a sort of American take on Swiss skiing town way.

And so ended a very pleasant, sunny day, with quite a few miles under our boot vibram and shoe leather. All that remained was an evening of wedded domestic bliss – me writing the blog and Jane doing the laundry, because These Things Are Important, You Know.

The morrow brings the promise of a ride up the Banff gondola and it will be interesting to see how the logistics of that works – it’s a holiday weekend, so it’ll likely be crowded. I’ll report back, of course, and I hope you’ll come back to see how it all went.

Whitehorse, Green Light

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Saturday 27 August 2022 – Despite a late night, we couldn’t indulge ourselves with a late rising because we were booked on a City Tour starting at 10am. We took breakfast in the hotel; it was a substantial rather than a luxury offering, but tasty – and they have Earl Grey tea. The dining room (in fact much of the hotel) is set up with vibes from the good ol’ days when people came out here to die whilst failing to find gold.

After breakfast, whilst Jane was discussing the strange antics of the telephone in our room with reception, I popped outside to see what the temperature was. Looking through the hotel window, I’d been disconcerted to see ice in the gutter outside.

It turned out to be foamy detergent runoff, presumably from cleaning the car. The temperature outside was mild – about 10°C.

For the City Tour our guide was Bernie, originally from Germany but a long-time resident here. He first took us to the Hydro Dam, which uses the Yukon River for electricity generation.

Impressive as the mighty flow of the river is, it’s not as impressive as the facility that runs beside it – the longest wooden salmon ladder in the world.

These pictures tell only half the story, but, as a digression, if you look at the picture above you can see a beaver in the water. He obligingly popped out for his close-up (yes, I know I’m making an assumption here; deal with it)

and then rather satisfyingly buggered off before anyone else in our little tour group could get a photo. The salmon ladder extends out the other way as well before turning back on itself for a total distance of 1182 feet to help the salmon rise 60 feet vertically and bypass the dam, which would otherwise be an impassable barrier.

The dam constructors specifically put in an impassable waterfall to ensure that the salmon made their way up the ladder.

There is a hatchery there, which deals in the Chinook breed of salmon that inhabit the river. Inside, there are windows into the ladder

alongside much other information about this particular salmon run, which, at 2,000 miles, is the longest in the world (the red line in this map).

The shape of that red line is used in a rather nice, if slightly dog-eared, artwork outside

and there’s much other artwork on the salmonid theme there

along with a rather depressingly low number of returning salmon counted there this year – 128 so far, when in previous years the total was in the thousands. It all underlines the increasing challenges the salmon have to overcome in the face of climate change.

Bernie then took us to the Whitehorse visitor centre (via the log skyscraper, of which I hope to write tomorrow). He explained a lot about the geography of the whole vast area – Alaska, Yukon and the North Western Territory

in which mining is a major industry – all sorts of minerals come from this part of the world, celebrated in a display case in the centre.

The other major industries of the area are government – Whitehorse is the capital of the Yukon territory – and tourism. He also explained that it was an expanding town. There were lots of well-paid job vacancies, but the trouble is that house-building hasn’t kept pace, meaning that accommodation is (a) hard to come by and (b) expensive.

That was the end of the City Tour (it’s a small place, and Jane and I have a plan to walk round it to explore it further tomorrow, weather permitting); but Jane had spotted another tour which looked interesting, to the Yukon Wildlife Preserve. As it happened, Bernie led that tour as well. The preserve is about half an hour’s drive from Whitehorse and is home to around a dozen Yukon species, each in their own natural areas, spread over 350 acres. One can walk round the 3-mile trails, but Bernie took us in his minibus. Here’s a selection of pictures of what we saw; each species is in wire-fenced enclosures, some of which are very large and so we couldn’t get close, but we certainly got a flavour of the wildlife and spotted several species we wouldn’t otherwise have been able to see.

bison;

mule deer;

moose;

red fox (actually, this one was wild, nothing to do with the preserve);

thinhorn sheep, female and male;

musk oxen;

mountain goats;

a cute little arctic fox, which Jane captured very nicely;

reindeer, or caribou as they’re known in these here parts;

a scene which should have featured a moose but it was hiding somewhere;

and – my favourite – a lynx. I wouldn’t have spotted it, but Jane did and between us we managed to get a very satisfactory image even though it was quite distant. My mobile phone did a great job, here.

There are other photos – no, really – but these are the pick of the bunch in my view.

As I’ve hinted before and elsewhere, we had an activity booked to start at 10.30pm, so we went out for dinner to store up the necessary energy. Jane’s first choice, a joint called Klondike Rib and Salmon, was taking walk-in customers only and the line of them stretched down the street. So we headed for another place, one Bernie had recommended as we drove around on his tour. It is called Antoinette’s and has, I think, been recently opened, because they had all sorts of signs around the outside insisting that they were, indeed, open. They also had a table free, so we had their unusual twist of Yukon and Caribbean cuisine, and very good it was, too. I’ve not eaten bison or elk before, and this meal enabled me to try both.

Then it was time for our evening activity, which was an attempt to see the Northern Lights; this is actually the principal reason we visited Whitehorse, and was as part of a special Aurora package put together by Northern Tales, a local agency (who also provided our City Tour and Wildlife Preserve tour earlier). We were whisked away to a site north of Whitehorse (and not too far away from the wildlife preserve, as it happens), where there were a couple of heated cabins, drinks, snacks, a bonfire and an open area where we could set up to view and photograph the Aurora Borealis. As anyone who has tried this will know, success is entirely a matter of chance, and the initial omens weren’t too good, as we drove there through what sounded like heavy rain. The rain, at least, had largely ceased by the time we got there, and so I busied myself with the relatively drawn-out process of setting up to get photos should the clouds decide to clear and the aurora to turn up. This excursion was basically the reason I had toted a tripod and an extra wide-angle lens with me, though it turns out that I could have left the tripod at home, as they provided some. Never mind, I am familiar with mine which helps, I think.

After a few minutes, it seemed that the rain was going to hold off, so I set my tripod up with the camera and a remote trigger on it and checked, as far as I could, that I had a working setup. jane helpfully made tea and eventually (because the cabin was too warm and the weather was not cold) we settled down on a seat near my and others’ tripods and stared into the far distance to see if we could see anything happening. It was really quite dark by that stage, although we could just make out lighter and darker patches; after a while of getting dark adapted, my eyes started playing tricks on me and I could have sworn I saw flickering patterns in the sky and the odd occasional dancing light. We waited for about an hour, between 1130 and half-past midnight, taking occasional photos of dark sky and clouds. I got to the stage where I thought I could entitle this blog post “I came for the Northern Lights and all I got was this bloody wildlife” when we thought that maybe we saw a little extra light out to the north. So I took another photo, and, sure enough there was a tiny flash of green in the far distance.

Was it real?

Yes!

The next 90 minutes was an orgy of photo taking and checking the results as best one can in near-total darkness. I thanked God for a Nikon product called Snapbridge, which transferred photos from camera to phone, so we could check results on a phone screen rather than on the small one on the back of the camera.

It was great. We didn’t see the gorgeous dancing hanging curtains of light so beloved of marketing departments; but we did see enough to make staying up until 3am worthwhile.

A fundamental truth of the northern lights is that they are rarely bright enough for the human eye to see the colours; camera sensors, however, have greater colour sensitivity. Often, humans see just a greyish light when the camera shows green. But sometimes the lights are bright enough so that the cones in the human eye can make out colours; and so it proved now – we could just about make out the colours, although they were much clearer on digital images.

I took a lot of photos. No, really. But to save you the agony of looking through them, here’s a video constructed from two sequences of photos from two slightly different viewpoints.

Obvs, I’m pretty pleased with that little selection, but that may just be because I’ve only had four hours’ sleep and I’m getting hysterical.

You’ll be glad to know (yes, you will) that we repeat the whole process tonight, so I may take a few more snaps and share them with you. Come back tomorrow and see whether the clouds got in the way or not.

Steve Walker

Photography/Videography Hobbyist; Travel Enthusiast

Tag Archives: Wildlife

Day 5 – Luna Azul II

Rocky Mountain, Hi!

Whitehorse, Green Light