Tough Birds

8:00 AM temp: 49
Yesterday: 62/46
Normal: 66/39

Spring green

I heard some noise this morning and went outside to shoo away any woodpeckers that were attacking the roof or exhaust vents, as they occasionally do, and saw two flickers sparring. Ah, Spring.

Someone is excited to have plants and flowers on the deck this summer. But mid-May is still a bit early for potted plants in this climate – a low of 30 is forecast in a few days. I’ll have to baby them.

I’ve recently returned from the red rock country of southern Utah. Arrived home at night and woke up to Spring, definitely with a capital ‘S’. The view out the window has turned aggressively green. The aspen are especially vivid.

Fortunately the male robin who was valiantly conquering his reflection last Spring, and making a mess of the windows on one side of the house, has not turned in a repeat performance. I was in the process of buying the house at that time and it was vacant, so he was free to bully his reflection undisturbed. Hopefully having residents in the house will dissuade him from picking up the gauntlet again.

 

Bear Stories

8:00 AM temp: 24
Yesterday: 41/24
Normal: 56/31

We watched as a black bear walked through the yard one night in November. It left these tracks next to the house.

The bears are out and about again. According to the paper, a turkey hunter in the southern part of the valley was charged by a grizzly that was, along with her two yearling cubs, feeding on a deer carcass. A motion camera subsequently placed near the spot filmed a large male grizzly feeding on the carcass the same evening.

Closer to home, it would be surprising to see a grizzly in the neighborhood, but we did have a black bear scavenging for garbage here in the fall. We came home from a weekend of camping to find a bag of trash (not ours) strewn around the back yard along with several piles of bear droppings. While on our walks over the next week or so we occasionally saw garbage cans knocked over. Then one night around 2 a.m. Steve happened to get up and look out the window, catching sight of the bear walking up through the back yard toward the house.

As the bear walked around the side of the house we ran to a glass door and pulled up the shade, and the bear was standing just a few feet away from us. It ambled on around to the front of the house and across the street. When it started checking out garbage cans we decided to try to scare it off, waving flashlights and yelling from our front porch. It wasn’t too worried about us, but eventually did shuffle off.

There was a skiff of fresh snow, so in the morning we followed his tracks around the neighborhood. He was obviously looking to strike it lucky with an unsecured garbage can. It didn’t look like he found any that night, but sadly people seem to be quite casual about leaving the cans outside with garbage in them.

Lunch time walk

8:00 AM temp: 30
Yesterday: 40/26
Normal: 56/31

There’s a cold wind blowing today. Even Tess decided it was too cold to swim. She thought it was a good day to work on some of her other jobs, chasing sticks on dry land and rolling in the grass. She works hard at
keeping her skills current.

Seasons, cycles, and change

8:00 AM temp: 39
Yesterday: 52/22
Normal: 55/31

Spring visitors

The deer are back. And so am I, after travels south to find the sun. The grass is starting to green up, but there is snow in the hills and the forecast calls for an inch or two of snow here in the valley today. The fluctuations of spring.

There is something comforting about watching the ebb and flow of the seasons. It feels eternal, timeless, certain. Yet, this is an illusion. The earth bears the marks of historic variations in climate, from ice ages to warmer periods. But no change has occurred as rapidly as the one that we are currently in the early stages of. What will spring look like here in 10 years?

The train

8:00 AM  temp: 37
Yesterday: 55/33
Normal: 50/29

Freight train heading west. Photo taken earlier in March.

Between my house and the lake is a rail line over which about 45 freight trains and two Amtrak trains run each day. I like watching the trains go by, and I figure I can tell a lot about the world economy from what is being hauled back and forth across the country.

When I moved in last summer, the first thing that struck me was the high percentage of containers with the names of Chinese shipping companies on them: Hanjin, Yang Ming, China Shipping, COSCO, CSCL. Lately I don’t notice this as much; what catches my eye is the number of shiny black tanker cars going by. Whole long trains of tankers that look brand spanking new wind through here, presumably headed for the Bakken oil fields on the eastern edge of Montana and in North Dakota. So far we don’t see coal trains here, but that could change if those who want to ship Montana coal to China are successful.

Snow falling on swans

8:00 AM temp: 25
Yesterday: 39/27
Normal: 48/27

There are a couple dozen swans on the lake this morning. I’ve been watching them through the telescope, white bodies floating on the gray water with snow lightly falling. It’s beautiful in a Japanese, wintry sort of way.

Tundra or trumpeter swans? I can’t tell from this distance.

Still waters

8:00 AM temp: 31
Yesterday: 50/29
Normal: 47/27

Mountain reflection

Yesterday evening we walked down by the lake after a rainy afternoon. Water had pooled on top of the small amount of ice that is left, creating a still surface for reflections.

It wasn’t so still along the edge of the ice, however. There the waves were causing the ice to fracture and were pushing smaller pieces of ice on top of the larger slabs. You could hear a tinkling sound, like ice cubes in a glass, as the waves jostled the ice fragments against each other.

Ice breakup

The mountain

8:00 AM temp: 30
Yesterday: 44/16
Normal: 47/26

A February morning on the mountain

Despite the mild winter, the local ski hill has had a pretty good snow year. As of today, Whitefish Mountain Resort, formerly known as The Big Mountain, has a snowpack of 112 inches (285 cm) at the summit (elevation 6817 ft or 2078 m), and 30 inches (77 cm) at the village area (elevation 4464 ft or 1361 m). That’s a little less at the bottom of the hill than in recent years, but very respectable at the summit.

Most of the lifts and ski runs are on south-facing slopes, which may make the area particularly vulnerable to warming temperatures in coming years. Fingers crossed that we have many more winters of skiing there.

Bird chatter

8:00 AM temp: 26
Yesterday: 43/27
Normal: 46/26

Morning sun hits a ribbon of cloud

There was a conclave of goldeneyes on the lake most of the morning, a large number of them rafted together. I also saw a handful of snow geese in flight, and the neighbor pheasants were squawking and walking down the road. Several eagles were gathered on the edge of the ice over by City Beach.

After seeing deer in the yard daily during the summer and fall, they have disappeared for the winter. These days, it’s all about the birds.

Spring wind

8:00 AM temp: 33
Yesterday: 49/28
Normal: 46/25

Sun and clouds

It snowed this morning and clouds obscured the mountains for much of the day. In the afternoon the clouds lifted, the wind picked up and there were pockets of sun.

The afternoon wind sent waves smashing up against the ice, breaking off chunks. I watched a pair of Canada geese standing on a piece of ice about the size of a surfboard, bobbing in the waves, then navigating their way among the ice chunks back to open water.

Receding ice

8:00 AM temp: 45
Yesterday: 54/30
Normal: 45/25

For Tess it’s swimming season again. For the rest of us…well, we’ll wait.

The ice by City Beach shrank noticeably the past couple days, but hasn’t broken up yet. Usually the Whitefish Lake Institute has a fundraiser where they suspend a large rock above the ice and people guess which day in the spring the ice will melt enough that the rock falls into the water. Typically that day is in April, but that part of the lake never froze this year.

Early spring

8:00 AM temp: 32
Yesterday: 55/34
Normal: 44/24

I’m seeing lots of goldeneyes on the lake again. They are hanging out along the edge of the ice, sometimes sitting on the ice and sometimes in the water paddling along and bobbing under.

Yesterday at dusk we saw a large flock of geese on the far side of the lake, lifting off in waves, circling, and landing again. They looked small for Canada geese, making us wonder if they could be migrating snow geese. It was too dark and they were too far away to tell. We’ll keep our eyes open the next few days.

There’s big melting going on with this warm spell. It’s supposed to reach 55 again today. I can see patches of ground in the yard again, reminding me that I need to do something about landscaping – last summer’s repair work on the house left much of the yard torn up. Time to make a plan, a good task for early spring.

The melt

Puddles on ice

There are puddles on top of the frozen part of the lake today. The forecast highs for the next couple days are in the 50s. How much longer will this ice last?

Warming up the Big Sky

8:00 AM temp: 37
Yesterday: 36/27
Normal: 43/26

A March 5 article in The Missoulian had an article by registered nurse Beth Schenk about the effects of climate change on human health. A factoid that caught my attention: Montana has warmed an average of 1.5 to 1.7 degrees F over the past century. Schenk cites NOAA as the source for this data.

I have been digging around various web sites associated with NOAA and the National Weather Service, looking for this type of data. Yikes, there is a complex, not always user-friendly tangle of products and data out there. While wandering through the climate cyber-wilderness, I came across some graphs from the National Weather Service that are a good visual representation of recent local temperatures compared to normal.

The first chart shows at a glance that there is a whole lot more red than blue, meaning a whole lot more temps above normal. The really interesting piece of information is in the second chart: the green line shows the mean difference from normal is 1.73 C. That’s 3.1 F warmer mean temps for the past month (Feb 11-March 11).

Slush ahead

8:00 AM temp: 30
Yesterday: 49/27
Normal: 44/24

It’s snowing now (11 AM) but is supposed to turn to rain this afternoon and through tomorrow. Ugh. Have I mentioned that March is my least favorite month here?

There are big chunks of ice floating in the lake today. Presumably they broke off from the sheet of ice covering the City Beach area and floated out into the lake. I got out the telescope to take a look at some gulls standing on a piece of floating ice across the lake. There is definitely more bird activity on the water the last week or two.

No pretty pix to post today, but I added some graphs to the Monthly temps page. The one for this winter is interesting, so I’ll post it here as well.