Our signs of spring

Ross
- March 19, 2003

Dear Dan,I've been receiving your column for some time and always enjoy it. Enjoyed your latest on the first signs of spring around your home in Wisconsin. Here in the mountains of southeastern British Columbia, on the shore of Kootenay Lake, March came in like a lion, as the old saying goes, with cold and a couple of snowfalls, but it's looking to go out like a lamb. Lovely weather lately, and walking in the woods now, with the snow virtually gone on our south slope, you hear the cheerful little calls of chickadees and, more thrillingly, the trilling, unmistakable "whistle" of the varied thrush (always reminds me of the whistle of a London bobbie). Varied thrushes (also called mountain robins), when you actually see them, which is seldom, look a lot like common American robins, though with both sexes the breast is more orange than red, and males sport a black band across the breast and wear black masks. Their call is everywhere in the woods this time of year. Later in the season you don't hear them anymore because they move up the slopes with the advance of spring. But then their call is replaced by the lovely, liquidy song of the Swainson's thrush, a brown little bird with a spotted breast almost impossible to see. Their beautiful song seems to echo in the woods through the summer evenings here. What we especially look for in spring here is the arrival of our ospreys. Kootenay Lake reportedly has one of the largest concentrations of ospreys in North America, and they arrive usually (from the Pacific Coast of Mexico, I think) in early April, to restore their big stick nests that you'll see, on old steamboat pilings and in the high, dead branches of trees, every couple of miles along the 22-mile stretch of the West Arm of Kootenay Lake, and all up and down the "main lake" itself, a fiord-like body of water some 90 miles long. Cheers, Ross