I have a dispute with the beavers. Their dams have raised the pond levels so high that some of the spruces on the margins are starting to suffer from flooding. I don’t want any more dead trees. So Buki and I went out to the dams to dig sluice channels to let some of the water out.

Buki helped pull waterlogged wood out of the dam. What could be more fun for a dog and a man than this kind of muddy work? My expression was similar to Buki’s. We laughed a lot. But I think the beavers won’t be laughing.

With our spillway, we created a sort of waterfall–a thrill for Buki, who knows the meaning of the word ‘waterfall’. I was happy with the quantity of water tumbling over the dam. When I went out at dusk to examine the change in water levels on the opposite side of the pond, I found it had gone down by only about a quarter of an inch, but I want the water level to drop by 3–4 inches. I don’t know how long it will take the beavers to discover and repair the breach. If they fix the dam by the morning, then I’ll have to breach it again tomorrow. I’m sure Buki wouldn’t mind undoing the beavers’ repairs.

The swamp candles (Lysichiton americanus) below the dam now have a bit more water flowing by, but they won’t be harmed.

Here’s Buki on the largest of the three beaver lodges. And notice the distant shore of the pond with the row of alders…that is all beaver dam. That portion of the dam is about six feet high. It amazes me to see what enormous structures beavers can create. Admirable animals.

Ravena watched what Buki and I were doing the entire time we were on the dam. And after we finished, she flew home with us and we all had treats. It was a good day.

The next morning, the spillway was blocked again. Beavers hate unplanned water flow. They will rush to the sound of falling water and start to work right away to repair the damage. And I got to work undoing the repairs and creating three more spillways. This time (as of another morning later, as I write this), I got my desired three inch decline in the pond level, but all the spillways are now repaired.

Notice in the photo below the engineering used by the beavers to fix this spillway: 1) wood placed parallel to the outlet flow, 2) wood placed perpendicular to the flow but parallel to the pond shore, 3) mud packed against the shore-parallel wood. Each of the spillways was repaired in this same manner. I wonder if beavers everywhere use this same engineering. Or could our beavers be idiosyncratic, just making it up as they go?

I’ll be interested to see how long it takes the pond water to rise again. The rate of filling will give us some idea of the amount of spring inflow into the pond.

If someone told you to go find some live clams, how long do you think it would take? Probably less time than you think, so long as you know what to look for and where to search. Pisidium casertanum, the “ubiquitous pea clam” occurs all over the place, wherever it’s wet enough for long enough. I once found pea clams on a drippy cliff in an Idaho rain forest. I would love to know of any other example of vertical terrestrial bivalve habitat.

Every year, in early spring, when our sylvan pools are flooded, I go to see the clams. It’s reassuring, somehow, to find them, living happily in their ephemeral habitat. In a month or so, this pool will dry up, and the clams will be dormant until next spring.

The Columbia spotted frogs have been vocal during the past few days. They make a subtle sound. Most people wouldn’t notice, even when there are dozens calling. Just a muffled clicking sort of sound. They’re also rather hard to see. There is one in this photo, but even I as the photographer have a hard time making it out. Trust me, it is there. They like to go unnoticed.

We visited the Symplocarpos foetidus (eastern skunk cabbage) planted at the edge of Sky Pond. It’s in full bloom now, as are the wild western skunk cabbages (Lysichiton americanus). The two genera are rather closely related. I wonder if I could force a hybrid progeny from them, just to prove I’m not completely opposed to mischief science.

A squirrel went bounding along the top of the rock wall and dashed up this little spruce. It chattered away up there, vexing Buki. If only she could fly, then she’d get the squirrels. I do wish she could have a pair of hovering wings, like a hummingbird. She’d be even more fun if she were airbound. So would I.

We went out by headlamp to look for night creatures. In early spring, earthworms emerge part way out of their burrows at night, like little sarlaccs. They scavenge for food among the dead leaves. Or maybe they eat the leaves. When approached, they retract suddenly into their burrows, making a rustling noise as their bodies disturb the dry leaves in passing. If you approach very slowly and quietly, as Buki and I did here, they don’t retract and you can watch them forage. When you get bored with watching them, then jump up in the air and land with both feet hard on the ground: THWUMP! The impact causes an outgoing ring of leaf-rustling sound as thousands of earthworms retract into their holes, each as the shock wave reaches them. It only works in early spring, before new growth smothers the previous year’s dry, rustle-y leaves.

As we often do, we enjoyed a late night canoe ride. Penetrating the dark pond water at night with a headlamp beam reveals much that can’t be seen easily during the day. Such as:

A giant water bug, here lying in wait to ambush its prey. They use their muscled front legs to grab a passerby, and when they have a grip, they then stab the poor animal with their dagger-sharp mouth parts. And then they suck the juices out. It’s a rough world. Poor prey.

And so as not to end on the giant-water-bug-nightmare, here’s a scene from the garden, with potted Princess Irene tulips. It’s still brown season. April isn’t the prettiest month here in the north. But the lawn is starting to turn green. And we’re enjoying some spots of colour here and there, both in the garden and in the wild. The sap is still flowing up into the forest trees, the pressure is building in their buds, and soon, the green-up will happen suddenly, entertainingly, and beautifully.

A catbird nest from last year. It’s a flimsy construction, but that seems to be characteristic of catbird architecture. This one is made of loosely bound twigs and bark peels of paper birch, plus the horsetail species Equisetum fluviatile. The nearest E. fluviatile is about 250 meters away, and there are other, more abundant Equisetum species nearer the nest. But it seems that only E. fluviatile would do.

And we also found:

The remains of a snowshoe hare. Probably killed by a lynx, which specialize in hunting rabbits.

Poor rabbits.

In some traditional European cultures, a rabbit’s foot is a luck charm, especially if found on a Friday (it was indeed Friday), and especially-especially if found on a Friday the 13th (we missed that by one day). So we brought home the foot, which is now in the freezer to kill any creepy-crawlies that first claimed the foot. Poor creepy-crawlies. Later, I’ll make an amulet of the foot, and it will bring me good luck.

…which weighs almost nothing, and which has two kinds of fur: the upper side has straight, forward-pointing hairs, and the lower side has fuzzy, downward pointing hairs, which would be good insulation against the winter cold, and which would allow the rabbit to run on snow without sinking in much. The fur on the lower surface is amazingly soft. If you asked a friend to close their eyes, and then you brushed that fur over the palm of their hand, they would hardly be able to tell that anything was touching them. I was reminded of a line from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem The Armadillo, in which she describes a fire-fleeing baby rabbit she caught in Brazil: “So soft! – a handful of intangible ash”.

Poor rabbit.

Here’s a link to the poem, which is a life-long favourite of mine:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57076/the-armadillo

Setting out for our morning walk, we checked on the trail-side beaver lodge. The beavers, at least two, survived the winter. Their tail-slapping has resumed.

It’s “Brown Season” in the Clearwater Valley. The retreating snow reveals a lot of dead, squashed, moldy things. The green-up won’t start for a few more weeks. That distant late-lingering snow patch corresponds to the Pucker Bog, the only true bog within walking distance of the house. There’s a reason why the snow leaves the bog last. And that is the reason for the bog’s presence there. Bogs like it cold. Sadly, Pucker Bog is evolving into a Spiraea stand. The local climate’s gotten too warm for bogs in the southern Clearwater Valley. The fens are OK, but the bogs are doomed.

Moose poops. We used to see dozens of moose poop piles along our usual trails. But now we’re now lucky if we see one. I suspect the main problem is all the crisscrossing jiggle-jaggle of blown-over drought-dead trees in the forest. It’s hard to get around now, even for the moose despite their powerful long legs. They’ve had to move on to where they aren’t so restricted. The wolves can more easily pass through all the wreckage of dead trees. So for them it’s good hunting, and for the moose it’s a catastrophe.

In all our waking hours it never ends, the game of “Can’t Have My Stick”.

Four rattly birch bark cylinders strung along the stick, and the whole assembly perched on saplings beyond jumping height. Buki’s doing “push-push” to knock the stick down. She’s had a lot of practice at this, and she usually handles the task expertly. This game of push-push was difficult at first. It’s not a natural canine action. But once she mastered it, we transferred push-push to more applications, such as opening and closing doors.

In this photo is one of the nearby forest patches (which we call “Whisper Wood”) that remains in relatively good condition, without so many dead and fallen trees. It’s in a moist hollow, so the trees are somewhat buffered from the effects of the drought years. It’s become a favourite place for us to visit. A reminder of how healthy our local forests used to be before the climate started accelerating in its warming/drying. Buki knows this forest by name. She’ll lead us there if we ask her to take us to Whisper Wood.

Home again to an afternoon’s worth of maul-work, chopping aspen rounds. Or in other measures, this is one tree worth of aspen rounds. Poor tree. Yet another of our loved old aspens reached its fungal and ant-chambered end. I admired this tree for 20 years. Today, I saw its interior in each cross-section from base to tip. I smelled the perfume scent of its polypore fungal infection and examined the dark sinewy borders between the fungal territories mapped out within the trunk. It’s a scent that will alter to something less pleasant as the wood dries, but today, it was a scent I wouldn’t mind having in bottled form. I chopped each of those sections and felt the grain and knots resist or give with each strike of the maul. I set aside the rotten portions from the trunk base for campfires, and retained the less punky portions to burn two or three winters from now in the woodstove for winter heat.

Except the twigs, this whole tall tree will pass, log by log, through our house, transforming into heat and ash, and smoke that will drift out the chimney. A strange thought.

Before today, I knew this tree only from the outside. Its standing glory is only a memory. But now I know something of its anatomy. Poor tree. But at its roots, it remains alive. New stems will grow, but I won’t live long enough to see them as tall and glorious as the stem I chopped today.

This entry continues the story of the Walker explorations, following the one posted on March 13

Stitched up. Somehow in 50 years of living, these were my first stitches. I’ve had plenty of bruises and scrapes, and a few minor bone fractures. But no previous major lacerations. Maybe this means I’ve been too cautious and should fling myself harder at life.

Buki is safely back at home, bleary-eyed and sad this early hour of the morning as I depart again for the Walker. It’s always difficult for a dog to be left at home. To Buki, it means she’s rejected while the rest of the pack (me, solo in this case) heads out for the excitement of exploring and (to a dog’s understanding of the world) the hunt. But in this case, after Buki’s intense experiences in the Walker over the previous two days, I’m sure she feels especially devastated to be left out of the trip. But it just wasn’t going to work out between her and the big, rambunctious, intimidating dogs at the accommodations.

Now the rest of this trip is a hobbling job on my cut and patched-up foot. It hurts, but there’s a job to do, and it doesn’t matter very much how I feel. I won’t remember the pain after the wound heals.

After four hours of driving, I meet Shane in the town of Mcbride for breakfast at the Beanery 2 Bistro, a favourite of mine. It’s a cafe in a historic train station, filled with train lore, paintings, knick-knacks, potted plants, and antiques. The ultimate reason why I became a botanist is because I’m drawn to the dazzling variety of the world’s plants, and this cafe, with its packed yet tidy decor appeals to that same sense of fascination I have in all arrays of variation. There’s a lot for the eye to explore all along the walls. The proprietors are kind people, the food and coffee are good, and it’s where you can sit back and chat with the locals. The diners at the table next to Shane and me strike up a conversation with us, first about fire fighting (that’s another story). And then they express curiosity about what we’re up to. I mention the Walker project, and they lean in to the conversation, eager to express their admiration for that nearby wilderness. They hunt, they explore. They know the wilds. I like this town.

It’s time to go. There’s work to do. We drive up the Walker Forest Service Road to get our first look at the western edge of the study area. There’s a lot for my eye to take note of, as always on these summer days in the wilds. If you take most people and place them where I’m standing, and then ask them to look at what I’m seeing and describe it all, they would report “trees”. Asked what else they see, “um…mountains?”. What else? “Aaah, a butterfly!”. And that’s all good. Great, in fact. But they will never see much more than that. But if you bring in a birder, they’ll rattle off the names of warblers, sparrows, flycatchers, raptors, ducks, all kinds of species I can’t even identify, let alone notice. I have a botanist’s senses. It does my work no good to notice the mobile beings. For me, motion is distracting, so I filter it out. When the wind blows through the grasses, I have to see only the grasses, not the grasses in motion. I have to filter out the flights and songs of birds; they’re distracting. But I’m happy to complement the work of birders.

Ever heard of the “Invisible Gorilla Experiment”? It’s a psychological demonstration of selective attention. The subjects are asked to watch a video showing several crowded basketball players passing two balls. Half the players are wearing black shirts, and half wear white shirts. The experimental subjects are asked to count how many times white-shirts pass a ball by the end of the video. In this short video, someone in a gorilla suit walks into the middle of the crowd, looks right at the camera, drums their chest, and then walks onward out of view. When asked if there was anything odd about the video, only half reported the gorilla. The rest were too focused on the action to see the ridiculously obvious. Even when told that there would be a gorilla in the video, many did not see the gorilla. I quickly lost count of how many times white-shirts passed the ball; I found that boring and couldn’t force myself to concentrate on all that commotion. I was more interested in the players’ hair, their slouched posture, the colours of their pants, their frumpy shirts, the letter S scrawled on the wall behind them, the scuffed floor, the ugly portals (elevator doors?), and then, obviously, the gorilla. I noticed nothing about the two balls, who had them, who passed to whom how many times.

This describes how I see the world. My selective attention goes for the colours, the patterns, the lines, the shapes, the variation. And so I see the grasses as if they were stationary, even in a stiff wind. A botanist with a trained eye scarcely notices the bird’s flight across the view of the grasses. A good birder sees the bird’s flight and ignores the grasses and all else that is affixed to the ground. I see the gorilla. The passing of the basketballs is irrelevant and uninteresting. I never could get interested in basketball–it’s all motion, dozens of arms and legs and elbows and knees all in non-stop motion, and I find it exhausting to watch.

Standing on the side of the Walker Road, looking at what’s growing in forest clearings or at the epiphytes on the conifer twigs, or in the sedge fringe around a beaver pond, I have to see (not just look at, but see) dozens of species at once. I have to filter out the ones I’ve already recorded and notice only the novelties. Sometimes they’re stand-outs, not at all hard to notice, like the paintbrushes (Castilleja), or blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium montanum, a new find for the Robson Valley). But most are inconspicuous, the mosses, liverworts, crust lichens, or the smaller grasses and sedges. Searching like this for a species inventory is like the “Where’s Waldo” books in which you scan across the complicated illustrations to look for the amiable-looking fellow named Waldo in his characteristic coke bottle glasses and red-striped shirt & cap. Except you’re also at the same time having to recognize and name everyone of the hundreds of beings in the illustration. And you can’t turn the page to the next illustration until you’ve accounted for everyone. It’s exhausting. I have little leftover attention for the bird that flies across my view, so I fail to notice most of the avifauna on my jobs. And I fail to notice much else. Like the caribou that moved out of the corner of my view. I saw the motion, but I zoned it out. If Shane hadn’t said something, I would have missed it altogether.

This was only the second caribou of the deep-snow subspecies that I had ever seen. We saw their tracks in our first days in the Walker, so I’d hoped to get to see one of the animals live, but didn’t hold out much hope. This subspecies is rare and has been in fast decline for decades. They used to be common, but the widespread industrialization of the BC landscape, done with the blessing of government, has nearly wiped them out, and the remaining herds are reduced to such small population sizes that they’re bottlenecked into vanishingly small chances of continuation. The local subpopulation is one of the larger ones, but how much longer can they last as the province condemns more and more wilderness to the devourings of the feller-buncher machines? So to see this caribou, loping down the road, is a splendid treat. Shane took off his hat and gave the animal a deep bow. We were charmed by the caribou’s gait. Such a beautiful, dignified looking deer, and yet we couldn’t help but to laugh at the way it trots: each leg swiveling wide in an outward semi-circle. The bureaucrats in the “Ministry of Silly Walks” would have a special file on deep-snow caribou.

Rattlebox (Rhinanthus) is blooming early. Not surprising in such a hot year. This is one of the genera whose species in North America can be identified only with a “who-knows?” It’s taxonomic terra incognita. A few names are given to the various North American species, both native and non-native, but in reality, the taxonomic certainty stops at “who knows?”. The taxonomic work is lacking. It’s a difficult genus to study in the herbarium, which is where most botanical taxonomic heavy-lifting happens. No matter how carefully the plants are pressed and dried, the resulting specimens are always blackened, looking as if they rotted in the press. So the characteristics become obscured. The genus must be learned “in the field”, as botanists say of the study of live plants in situ.

The least satisfying plant taxonomies in North America apply to those genera that make poor specimens (Lupinus, Taraxacum), or for which specimens don’t really capture the key characteristics of growth form or seasonal variation (Artemisia, Huperzia), or that grow mostly in remote, hard-to-access regions (Oxytropis). Rhinanthus is a triple-whammy in all these regards, so it doesn’t surprise me that the existing taxonomies are unrealistic. Most of the native species grow at high latitudes and/or elevations. You need time, energy, and funding to get from home to the field see them in their living state. I’m one of the few botanists who is paid to explore the North American northern wilderness, so I’m in as good a position as anyone to study this genus; it feels like a responsibility. Slowly, slowly, I’m trying to piece together a taxonomy that works. But there’s a long way to go. Neither of the two roadside Robson Valley Rhinanthus species are clearly identifiable.

I’m not even certain whether those two Rhinanthus are introduced European species, or native species that benefit from the disturbed habitats of roadsides. Most road fringe plants in British Columbia are European invasives. Landscape industrialization comes with a lot of road-building. Roads, including the astonishing total length of logging roads in British Columbia, are conduits of weed invasions. The weed populations spread along roads and establish new colonies like metastasizing cancer cells spreading along the veins of a body. The weeds follow the roads, then go off-road. It’s a progressing ecological catastrophe that almost no one knows about (due mostly to selective attention).

Whole horizon-to-horizon landscapes in western North America have become nothing but ugly European invasive weeds. And the locals end up feeling ashamed of where they live, because it’s ugly, though they may not understand why they see it as ugly. Most people are blind to plant diversity, but no one can be blind to the ugliness of a landscape that is nothing but cheatgrass or tumble-mustard or Halogeton as far as the eye can see. Landscape industrialization comes with such dire costs. If the Walker Wilderness is logged, wherever roads are cut in, the vegetation will be invaded by weeds. All those clearcuts in surrounding landscapes, and their feeder roads, and their weeds, are ugly, and that’s not how I want the Walker to end up. But for now, it’s beautiful, at least where you look away from the clearcuts around its fringes. And Rhinanthus, native or not, is harmless. It grows with a light touch. And in fact, it can help to reduce the potency of spreading invasive grasses, on which it is parasitic.

As I’m writing this, months later, I realize that today is the first day of spring. There’s much to be done in the garden. No time for blog posts or reminiscing. So I’ll close, abruptly, with a glimpse of the sundew patch Shane and I admired in the calcareous fen where we ended our day. So much more could be written about all we saw. But enough is enough.

Thanks, Shane, for being such a good field assistant and for seeing the caribou. Cheers, my friend!