all sorts of finds

This morning we woke up to find a little dusting of snow on the forest floor. Not in the yard, the gravel having stored more heat during the day, melts or evaporates a snow dusting.

Yesterday  Don and I went for a drive again, as i have always tried to avoid driving anywhere and take my walks starting at the house. I do enjoy his 'need' to go for drives out in the country :)

We ended up at his personal archaeological dig and indeed the   natural erosion taking place had uncovered quite a lot. 

Don and I we like to tally now. Having covered approx. 100 km distance, round trip (walking and driving)

we encountered:

20 gophers

1 hawk ( probably Northern Harrier)

1 ROBIN ( our first this season)

20 sheep

3 juncos

1 mourning cloak

1 deer

and at the very last, one more walk up a hill

2 crocuses (our first of the season)

here is one of them

butterflies and a moose

all these first... what does it mean?

I tell Don, who is the one wondering, it is like meeting a very good friend you haven't seen since last summer.

This year the first mourning cloak i saw in the yard was April 9 2017

That is still quite early

spring log 1998 - mourning cloak on April 16

I do remember '98 proved to be a wonderful butterfly year . I remember because  i had just bought a butterfly book the summer before. And it seemed my eyes where opened to see butterflies.

When looking at weather graphs, which common sense tells weather is related to the happenings in the Natural world .... 

April 9 for a butterfly, according to my notes is at least a week early to all the other dates i collected for the mourning cloak, who is a hibernator and can come out on any given warm day.

Last year i didn't record it, but i have a photo of mourning cloak here on April 3, 2016

Last year spring came extremely early.

Spring Log 2005

March 6 squirrels active

first week of March -melting snow

                               - 2 owls

April 4, moose in the yard

April 22 - moose on the hill

April 26 - on the highway , a moose, porcupine and black bear.

April 27 2 fox sparrows 

last week of April -mosquitoes

May - snow totally gone

May 2 golden crowned sparrow

This year we saw a moose  on March 20 and yesterday, April 15, 2017 on the Kusawa road!

It does seem we did not see many moose around here for a few years, and this year 2 already

and yesterday Don saw his first mosquito

Happy Easter.

the length of Spring

Here in the Yukon we do enjoy a long spring. For me it starts in February and ends in June. So three months plus. Winter  5 months, fall 1 month really just September, and summer 3 months.
Springs is lovely slow untill it all explodes gloriously somewhere in May.
So yesterday  no new sightings
Wednesday i did check out the townsendia with Mary Withley and the buds had swelled ...very slightly

As i was raising awareness for the grasslands in Southren Alberta ( where the townsendia is probably a more regular occurrence) it has come to my attention that the flowers are blooming in the coulees.( see my fb page)

Entering my old spring logs here and looking out into the forest i had the idea that the last ten years had been wetter then the first 10 years i lived here. I figured with all this talk about climate change there must be some data that reflect that. NOT SO, at least i can't find that kind of data. It means i have to read every individual page of what the weather was like at any given month and then make my own graph.

This is surprising to me...

So on my search i did find that March 1996 was exceptionally warm and average  of -1.1 C

compared to this year -14C

If i want to invest the time and work, i will try to make a graph, just to see what is going on. It is not that i don't believe climate warming. Yet

For me, i am very optimistic about the future. ENJOY NATURE  I believe that smelling the roses ( ehhh for now like yesterday when the sun does get very warm, it is smelling the dry grass, wonderful summer smell)

will eventually overcome all difficulty in the world. Smelling it right now right here. 

haha me running after crocus buds.

20 years ago

                                                                       April 19 2017

spring log 2000

2000

April 13, mud play

April 19 swans flying over

April 20 geese flying over

April 21 a mourning cloak

April 22 crocuses on the hill

April 26 juncos and white crown sparrow in the yard

April 28 crocuses blooming along the driveway

April 28 snowstorm

April 29 Audubon's warbler

May 1  took mulch of the garden, coming up: nettles,rhubarb, iris, bluebells,platain,sweet william, coltsfoot.

May 2 Robin arrived

May 26 and 27 big rain showers

May 29 green leaves  aspen coming out

May 31 bee

June 2 summer has started

Looking at the data of that year on environment canada

March 2000 the average temperature was - 2.7C

and precipitation was a total of 1.8 cm that month

again compared to this year

Oh right Government of Canada doesn't have that data yet, i had to go to another site...forgot which it did say Average -!4 C, which seems fairly accurate as we had a cold March.

Love

spring log 1996

 in my yard at the Takhini river road Yukon

1996

feb. 20 a flock of red polls
feb. 24, 8 am -40C
march 4 squirrel sighting
march 6 laundry outside ( which might mean it was warmer and clear skies)
march 7  -27 C
april 15. the creek flows
in april  swans and geese flying over and grouse drumming
april 16 dinner outside (which indicates nice weather)
april 18  one robin
april 19 first rain shower of the season
april 26 snowshower

This year the redpolls were in my yard here in Mendenhall, march 11, 2017,(maybe a few days before, i didn't write it down) which was much later then they were sighted in Whitehorse. Note that i did feed the birds for a number of years....not anymore. I might have been feeding the birds in 1996...

percipitation

The first of the season, spring 2017, starting last night,  little flurries, now dry, 5 minutes ago specks of water, half an hour ago white stuff.
Accumulation ZERO! meaning it evaporates.

And yesterday instead of updating this spring log,  Don and I went out all day. The way we like it these days, we drive slowly, stop frequently, look, walk, pick herbs and have french fries at Otter Falls. We went as far as 14 km on the Aishihik road, left at 11 am and were back at 7 pm.

I always feel i should drive as little as possible (using oil products as little as possible) to know that over 8 hours we ( two people one car). We did drive approx, 130 km, round trip.

What we saw
13 swans
3 eagles
2 dark hawks
2 magpies
3 grey jays
10 gophers ( ground squirrels)
8 sheep
2 chipmunks
5 butterflies, mourning cloaks and probably comma's
dozens of grasshoppers
hundreds of crocus buds
male flowers coming out on one poplar, aspen
flowers on juniper, almost blooming

 poplar, trembling aspen

juniperus  horizontalis

spring log

I don't know if i ever put all my spring records together in one place? I have kept records, but as i kept them on pieces of paper or objects( objects so i would have a collection of objects with notes on it, papers getting lost in my care. But the objects are scattered too, and the writing fading.

Ha the computer being my  personal best organizing system.(Actually i do have little faith in computers for the long run, if anything there already is so much information, we might still not find what we are looking for)

for now
randomly archiving

2007
feb 26. bison
march 3. after a 2 week cold spell still -40 in the morning
march 5. -26 C in the morning
                22 inches,1/2 a meter snow accumulated over winter
first week of march. Hairy woodpecker pecking on the house
2nd week of march. birdsong
march 28. 2 red polls
                squirrels chasing eachother
april 6. above zero temperature
april... black bear
april 7 and 8 we went to the summit, when we came back it had melted a lot here in the yard.
april 30 biked to the narrows ( kusawa) on ice.
may 3. snow practically gone

later today i will enter relevant observations from this year.
 like
bison
the last bison we saw....

sept 20 2016

This being a good crocus hill

same hill in  April 2016

April 23 2016

and the week before

April 17, 2016

and 

this year:

April 10, 2017. the weather very warm, plus 10 C , the crocus bud still very small and only a very few, yesterday we saw 2.

Don did see an orange butterfly! probably a comma.

gopher

awe, a scared ground squirrel.
Is this his/her first time out this spring?
It was my first  gopher sighting for the season. this was two days ago, and yesterday my first butterfly.
It is all happening. One mourning cloak, possibly two.

About names, i am particular about names.
Call me anything you like, but i want to call you by the name you were born with or the name you most prefer.
 To me this is a gopher,  it is not socially correct anymore to call it so, apparently it is a ground squirrel, it is, i know. But i feel when saying hi to them, calling them by their 'correct' name, i am somehow...
It just doesn't seem right, to address them as ground squirrels.
So it is gopher to me and my gophers, but when speaking to people, i will use the name ground squirrel.

And happy happy, Don looking over my shoulder, says; A gopher, where did you see that? Thank you Don.