Leaving behind days of rain that drenched lawns and gardens in northern Nova Scotia, Vilis and I flew away from sunrise early this morning, westward to Calgary. Cloud obscured much of the Canadian landmass as we jetted over thousands of kilometres of it, but Alberta – ‘Sunny Alberta’ – welcomed us with sunshine and farm fields resembling a slightly rumpled patchwork quilt of tawny stubble and fallow fields pocked with sloughs. The entire landscape appeared drier, browner, less well acquainted with heavy spring rains than Nova Scotia, which is married to the sea and its wet caresses of air and water.

After storing our baggage in a rented red Mitsubishi Lancer, we drove west out of the city and toward our destination of Banff National Park. Rolling rangeland led us into the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, that spine of jutting peaks granting Canada a stunning example of the rugged landform known as cordillera (chains of roughly parallel mountain ranges).

Wanting to stretch our legs after the five-hour flight from Halifax, we made a brief detour to Bow Valley Provincial Park. There, the voices of yellow-rumped warblers, ruby-crowned kinglets, red-breasted nuthatches, and ravens greeted us from mixed montane forest comprised most obviously of lodgepole pine, balsam poplar, white spruce, Douglas fir, juniper, and creeping juniper. Snow lay in melting patches on a trail we hiked into the forest, belying a mild, early afternoon temperature.

On the dry slopes of eskers – long, snaking hills of gravel created by the past movement of glaciers – prairie crocuses pushed silver-haired stalks up into the sunshine, and dwarf, creeping bearberry plants dangled bells of tiny white flowers tinged with pink. Red squirrels chattered from the conifers, and diminutive mountain chickadees with black-and-white-striped faces called out their nasal rendition of the classic ‘chick-a-dee’ vocalization. We spotted numerous elk droppings as well as trails that we attributed to the large ungulates.

Following our esker walk, we explored a shoreline trail bordering Middle Lake, a ‘kettle pond’ or depression formed when a massive block of glacial ice melted in the distant past. Drifts of snow still lay on the far side of the lake, and on adjacent mountain slopes the dark green of forest and white of snow intermingled. Robins strode on faintly greening grass, and male red-winged blackbirds sang territorial songs from bleached and broken cattail stalks in a freshwater marsh. Vilis and I noted a muskrat house near shore, and ducks – Barrow’s goldeneyes and buffleheads – floated on the wind-stirred water. A lone killdeer scurrying over shoreline stones rattled out an alarm call.

In mid-afternoon, we drove deeper into the Rockies, the TransCanada leading us past Canmore – a winter sports hotspot – to Banff, that tourist mecca flaunting stunning wood homes and surrounded by spectacular peaks within Banff National Park, Canada’s oldest national park. After checking into our motel, we located the Banff Centre, where Vilis registered for the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution meeting, a four-day extravaganza of seminars exploring current ecological and evolutionary biological research. Later, we ate at a salad bar, with dark-eyed juncos and a golden-crowned kinglet flitting in trees beyond the windows.  As dusk swept in, we explored Banff, spotting elk grazing on public lawns, and the stately Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel rearing up into the oncoming night. Our arrival coincided with that of good weather, we were told by a local, the mountain town having been blasted by a pair of snowstorms the previous week and shrouded in cloud since. It seems we’d escaped the Nova Scotia wet and slid through a crack in Alberta’s capricious mountain weather window into spring sun and warmth. As darkness descended, I was already planning my hiking excursions for tomorrow.

Today’s fauna: tree swallow, Canada goose, black-billed magpie, American crows, red-tailed hawk, yellow-rumped warbler, red-breasted nuthatch, ruby-crowned kinglet, northern raven, *mountain chickadees, American robin, red squirrels, red-winged blackbirds, Barrow’s goldeneyes, killdeer, buffleheads, common merganser, dark-eyed juncos, golden-crowned kinglet (*lifelist sighting).