I came home from my Saskatchewan trip to a fresh blanket of 25cm of snow. We spent our first few hours at home snow blowing and shovelling. While I was gone from home for three weeks, Chris hadn’t been very motivated to go out snowshoeing.
I decided to do a snowshoeing walk around to see what the wildlife traffic had been like while I was away. Sadly, the deer had come around to eat the lower branches of our pine trees. Personally, I don’t understand why they LOVE to eat them. This is what many of our smaller pine trees look like now; fuller at the top and empty or no branches near the bottom.
The other thing I quickly began to notice was that the moose tracks seemed to lead from one Saskatoon bush to the next. Some of the bushes just had the ends of the branches chomped on but others, like this one, were mostly destroyed. The moose bent and broke main branches trying to get to the tasty tips.
I am a bit frustrated because this particular bush usually yields loads of Saskatoons each year. It appears to have few producing branches left now.
Chris has seen three moose each day this week in our neighbour’s low bush Saskatoon patch. They just LOVE Saskatoon branches. We have willows everywhere but they are definitely second choice to Saskatoon. With all the sightings, it was inevitable that they would mosey into our yard for a snack.
On Friday I glanced outside to see a moose eating my Saskatoon bush beside our garden shed.
I put on boots and a hat (it was only -10) and went out to try to coerce it away. I walked to the edge of the driveway/snowbank. I felt no fear as the snow between myself and the moose was waist deep. Even a moose couldn’t charge me that quickly in waist deep snow. I saw to my left, another moose lying on the ground just inside the tree line. It ambled to its feet. As long as I kept talking they seemed to keep their ears up and had stopped eating.
Eventually, the first one I spied, got tired of my constant chatter and crashed through the willow thicket in the opposite direction. Having tried to create a path through the willows before, I wondered why it did that as willows are quite painful when they hit you. The other moose walked on my path away and past our pond with no real urgency. The Saskatoon bushes safe for another day.
I seem to have a special relationship with our chickadee population.
They land on my hand to get peanuts and my head if I am not offering nuts.
On Friday’s walk around, one of the male chickadees got it into its head that maybe, with the warmer weather and sunshine, it should start finding a mate. It began its tell tale mating call which sounds like the notes E C#C#. Anyhow, as I walked around it went from tree to tree and sang its song to me. I had to laugh to myself. I guess, with me as its mate, it would have peanuts for life. LOVE was in the air.
Even when the snow is deep animals make an effort to get to food that they LOVE. The circle of travel they do just becomes smaller. Weather also dictates the mating behaviour of birds; any sign that spring is on the way and they start to sing their LOVE songs. It is in these more snowy winters that I find LOVE in all the wrong places.
I think Sping is a good 6/8 weeks yet, here.
Always nice to watch wildlife. Too bad they appear to like what you are trying to preserve. Don’t know if you saw the clip on CBC showing a moose in Newfoundland eating the birthday cookies one woman set outside her house to cool. They were intended for her husband’s birthday.