Blogs
I’ve been thinking a lot about how I am connected with the ocean. I love being by the sea, whether I am on the shore peering under rocks or beneath the waves diving over colourful corals. So when the pandemic hit and I was forced away from my favourite places, I felt trapped between mountains and endless prairie. I couldn’t help but feel a little resentful about being stuck at home.
Fortunately, my family has a small property out in central Alberta right on a beautiful lake. At least I can get away to the quiet of the countryside. I love sitting out on the dock, toes in the water, just watching the world go by. Even here, at a shallow, mud-bottom lake in central Alberta, I find myself drawn to the water. The colours that paint its surface change over the course of the day, and the gentle movement of the waves and ripples are simply mesmerizing. I could watch the water’s surface for hours – and trust me, I have.
I also love coming here because we are often visited by a diverse cast of characters from the aspen parkland forests, the most charismatic of whom are the birds. Every time I visit this place, I have to bring out my ‘Birds of North America’ guide book; the area comes alive in the summer and is teeming with birds!
Purple martins and tree swallows dance overhead like little fighter jets, picking off insects in midair. A Northern flicker excavates an ant hill in our grass, stabbing at the ground like a woodpecker. Common terns dive fearlessly into the shallow water, emerging with a silvery baitfish in its beak. Dense flocks of Franklin’s gulls fly low over the lake, picking off emerging aquatic insects from the surface.
Sometimes, when I lie back to feel the sun on my face and stare up at the impossibly blue sky, I spot a small… something… way, way up above me. I squint a little… and I spot another something… and then another. There’s a whole group of white things flying way up above. I can’t take my eyes off them; what are they?
Then, in slow wide circles, they start to spiral lower and lower, until this monster of a bird soars a few feet over head before landing gracefully on the water.
White pelicans – Pelecanus erythrorhynchos
These soaring giants have 9ft wingspans and are one of the largest birds in North America! They come to northern prairie lakes, lakes just like this one, with high productivity to support lots of fish for the pelicans to breed and raise their chicks. In the fall, they make the long journey south to spend the winter in the warm tropical waters off the Gulf of Mexico, Florida, Central and South America.
It is so easy to forget that millions and millions of birds migrate inland from the coasts every summer to breed. The wetlands of the boreal forest and prairies support over 75% of all waterfowl (ducks, geese, pelicans, gulls, terns, pipers, plovers, etc.) in North America. So much so that the Prairies are called “the duck factory of North America” by Ducks Unlimited. Isn’t amazing that tropical and sub-tropical birds come here to raise their young? It really makes you think about how everything is connected if you look closely at the world around you.
