Today, I played hookey from my desk. Instead of writing, I reveled in unexpectedly mild temperatures and bestowed last-minute-before-winter care on my yard. I clipped and removed old growth from eight flowerbeds and fenced our Harrow Fair peach and Red Delicious apple trees as protection against deer. Then I ran out of daylight.

These belated chores had me recalling this past spring, when I worked madly to reclaim our yard after a year away in Australia. However, Vilis and I also spent a week in the Rockies (check my archives for May posts from our trip), followed by a week visiting family at Viking, Alberta. During the week on the prairie, I rose at dawn each morning to check out the local birdlife.

The landscape surrounding Viking is rolling prairie dotted with thickets of aspen and willow, alkaline lakes, and prairie potholes or sloughs. The last are small, medium, or large shallow depressions filled with fresh water. Many are permanent, marshy wetlands vegetated with cattails and other water plants, but others are temporary pools that dry up in late summer heat.  All are magnets for breeding birds.

I spotted a warbling vireo, eastern phoebe, least flycatcher, robins, American goldfinches, and song, white-throated, savannah, and clay-coloured sparrows singing in trees and shrubs bordering potholes. A trio of sandhill cranes strolled the edge of a pothole in a grain field awaiting planting. Wilson’s snipes winnowed high in the air and scuttled among broken cattail stalks at a pothole margin. Male red-winged blackbirds raised scarlet-and-gold epaulets and vociferously defended their cattail territories. American crows and black-billed magpies cruised the area, checking out the action.

Most striking, however, were the water birds. A male ruddy duck with a cerulean beak and stubby tail cruised a pothole’s waters in the company of horned grebes. A sora scooted across a gravel road from one pothole to another. An American coot paddled across still water that looked like rippled glass. While a skein of snow geese flew toward more northern breeding grounds, Canada geese incubated eggs on mounds of pothole vegetation.

Ducks abounded. In addition to the ruddies, I spotted mallards, canvasbacks, red-heads, pintails, and blue-winged teal. All except the ruddy ducks were extremely wary, flushing into flight on my approach. The coots and horned grebes were much more accommodating, floating within range of my camera and diving into pothole waters in search of breakfast.