For the love of all wild things: Life working under an unpredictable weather

2015/05/19

Life working under an unpredictable weather

I was able to put in one-and-half days (17th and 18th) worth of fieldwork before today's weather turned unpredictable again and forced me to work inside most of the day.

I discovered that there are (at least) two Gray Jays (Perisoreus canadensis) that hang out near my study site because I saw them there for two consecutive days.

This was taken after a snowy morning, and this bird looked very raggedy.

Close-up on the tidier-looking individual.

Another Gray Jay on the second day (18th).

The weather was quite nice yesterday, so I took some photos of the view across from my study site.

Such a powerful mountain - Gothic Mountain in black-and-white.

And then this was what I saw this morning - snow covering the cabins and trees. Ugh.

I worked for a couple of hours inside the lab and then saw this before lunch - a break in the clouds with blue sky!

I decided to walk along the Gothic Road and see what the road condition is like. Because last year, the front portion of the road was covered by snow (due to avalanches) and prevented me from going to Emerald Lake at the end of May.

A lot of snow had melted considering this was taken only 2.5 hours after this one.

However, the clouds were still hanging low and you couldn't see the top of Gothic Mountain.

While walking along the road, I saw two Steller's Jays (Cyanocitta stelleri)! It has been almost 2.5 years since I last saw this beautiful bird (although still not as flashy as Blue Jays, in my opinion).

Every aspen tree is a piece of interesting art.

While walking, snow and sometimes hail started to fall but I kept on going. I turned most of these images into black-and-white since the images were mostly gray to begin with.