Whiskey Jack part 2

It's finally cold this morning. Cold enough that I turned on the house heater and considered putting a space heater in my room.  There is steam rising from my tea and the deck is covered in hoarfrost (pronounced whore-frost). The sun has risen over the horizon and glares; harsh white, down from a cloudless sky.  Winter is fast approaching.  The birds are outside, as usual, calling raucously and performing feats of aerobatics that a human pilot could only dream of.  This morning the blue jays are exhibiting a new behavior; the big matron is settling onto the platform feeder and then calls out to one of the two smaller less brightly patterned juveniles.  One will fly over and land clumsily inside the feeder.  The momma jay then picks up a small peanut and swallows it.  It takes the juveniles a few tries but each masters selecting the right size nut for crop storage and then selecting a larger one for beak carry.  Off all three go into the ponderosa forest to the south with six nuts in tow.  They'll spend the rest of their first winter learning how find food and water as well as how to collect it for immediate use and winter caches.  I returned my attention to my tea.  The morning was moving along faster than I think it had a right too.  I left the house in a hurry, an armful of clothes, a half packed camera bag, and a toothbrush loaded with toothpaste left on my sink.  An auspicious start. 

I sped along towards Divide; the hills are now barren, the only color left is conifer green.  The leaf bearers rest lifelessly in the median and on the hills.  At the small roadside turn off that melds into the 704 I grab a thermal shirt and a pair of jeans to pull on over my baselayer. I ended up repacking my camera bag, which was pretty much just all thrown in together.  And off I set, the thermometer read 30 degrees.  There were unfounded rumors of snow in the high country; I was a little disappointed to discover that rock still reigned.  The gravel crunched under my boot as I waked up the steep trail into the dark forest.  Dry, brittle aspen leaves littered the trail surface and the moss had lightened in colour.  It was quiet, only the occasionally wind blast from a fast moving car followed by the whisper of the wind which was blowing up and over the ridge on the other side of the trail and descending down the ridge where I was.  A two stroke dirt bike flatulated past and then even the sound of the road vanished.  I strained to hear the stream that had talked so freely a month ago.  Only the wind and gravel.  I walked on in silence for about a quarter of a mile.  I began to think that perhaps I was the only living thing in the woods. A truly lonely feeling followed by a bit of a panic when my fear was confirmed by more silence.  Trees grow up and over the trail.  Huge, ancient spruces and firs; some of their trunks large enough to wrap your arms all the way round, blot out the sun; cooling the air even more.  I was approaching the clearing where I had seen the juncos and the kinglet, watched a dozen northern flickers chase ants on their short down slope migration and caught a glimpse of a local resident, Whiskey Jack. 

A ray of light burned down through the canopy, illuminating the clearing and promising a rise of the mercury.  Large hoarfrost crystals were spreading across the clearing floor, looking something like those miniscule styrofoam balls that are sometimes used for packaging.  A flurry of musical,  "Chickadeedeedee"s rang clearly down the trail.  Mountain Chickadees, I was not alone!  I watched a large flock of the gregarious little birds glean tiny insects from the needle clusters of the mighty spruces.  It's hard not to like chickadees, they're so small and fluffy, with impeccable manners.  The birds are always in flocks and these flocks share the food sources they are harvesting with the other birds in the group.  If it's a feeder they will each take one seed at a time and abandon the feeder for the next bird.  If it's spruce needles they each spend a second before flitting over to their neighbor, who is flitting over to his neighbor. 

Mountain Chickadee hunting tiny bugs

There was a strange call, similar to an accipter contact call; high pitched, full voiced and clear, with a softness to it around the edges.  Another call.  It was not an accipter.  The call sounded exactly like the blue jay call only softer and sweeter.  Whiskey Jack.  I raised my camera directly up and caught this picture:

Whiskey Jack

There were five of them.  Gray Jays.  Denizens of the deep winter woods.  Remarkable birds.  They are year long residents of very cold climates, as their puffy grey coats might suggest.  While all corvids possess incredible memories the Grays is second to only one.  These birds spend the entire summer foraging and caching food.  Most corvids bury their seeds under the ground and dig through the snow. But the snowfall is too deep for the average Gray, so they stick it to the underside of loose bark chips on the trunks and branches of trees.  They have a sticky saliva that glues the morsels in place.  They can store tens of thousands of foodstuffs and remember where about 80% of them are.  They also nest in winter.  The birds I'm viewing have just come into breeding plummage.  They are winters favorite imp.  Gray jays have two nicknames, "Whiskey Jack," and "Camp Robber."  They have earned these names from their behavior of tracking large predators and stealing scraps from their kills, or their camp stoves.  In olde timey tradition the term "jack" was used for nonhuman things that took on human roles, The Union Jack, was the "eleventh man" aboard British naval vessels.  The Gray Jay was so common in miner and trapper camps during dinner, (whiskey) time that these rough men named the bird Whiskey Jack.  The delicate looking birds left the clearing when they realised that I had no food for them, their soft calls fading into the wind. 

Gray Jay in Englemann Spruce

I turned up the Ring the Peak trail towards Pancake Rocks.  The trip to the rocks was a straight forward affair, the only sounds were the alarm calls of the pine squirrels.  The rocks are set on a high hill where few trees grow, the forest just disappears from overhead as though it were never there.  The Collegiates and the rest of the Sawatch range can be seen; towering white giants shimmering in the distance.  Back on the trail, I turned down the rocky path in the direction of the Horse Thief Falls.  Another strange call.  This one a bass two note cluck.  Then the rustle of wings in motion and the same squeaky sound that doves make.  Band-tailed dove?  They have been seen here.  I stalked down the trail, camera up and at the ready. A dark shape about the size of a chicken hen quickly walked in the opposite direction, up the spruce covered hill.  Not a band-tailed dove, a blue grouse.  They had returned to the Canadian zone for the winter.  I heard several more calls throughout the day, all the booming calls of the male; though I only saw this single female.

Blue Grouse hen, defocussed foreground!

Ice had formed on the edges of the stream in thick bundled crystals, the falls are still flowing, though ice is claiming it as well.  In high flow the water rips freely off of the rocks and into a small, clear pool.  Today the water flows over the rock, gently rippling into the pool.  The marshy ground is frozen right up to the stream which makes crossing a simple matter of stepping over the sluggish course. 

Horse Thief Falls

While I was shooting the waterfall I heard a high pitched staccato finch call.  I turned to see said finch posted vertically on a spruce trunk, working its way upward in a circular motion.  What a weird thing for a finch to do! Finch eat seeds, not bugs; and they certainly don't possess the tail feathers to prop themselves up vertically.  I snapped a few pictures before I caught on that this was not a finch, but a nuthatch.  A brown creeper. 

Brown Creeper

The decurved bill and the stiff, notched tail feathers; visible through the camera lens, made this rare find obvious.  They were everywhere! I counted ten, calling loud and sharp to each other as they searched for the same kinds of bugs as the chickadees. 

The air was cold, my hands were tingling and starting to get stiff, naturally I left gloves in the car.  It was time to leave.  The walk out was again, totally silent.  I sat in my car to warm up for a few minutes; what a glorious day.