Animal encounters

I'm still skiing, and writing about that over on my other blog. However, I've had some animal encounters recently that don't qualify for reports about how deep the powder is, so are worth sharing.

On our way to Big White, we once again saw bald eagles. Some were flying, but one was hanging out in a tree. The same tree we have seen eagles in for years on our trips to Big White.

Majestic in the tree 

I got too close, so he left 

Off he goes

No mistaking an eagle in flight

One year we saw 3 in that tree. We think they are used to that tree because not only is it close to the Shushwap River, which is full of fish and ice free all year, but that long narrow building next to the tree used to be a chicken farm, now closed (with biohazard signs all over it). One year, we saw 3 eagles sitting on what could only have been the farm's manure pile.

Two nights ago, I thought I saw a coyote in my back alley. I was right. An hour later, I saw him through the slats standing behind the fence. Then he sauntered down my alley...

Here he comes

Pausing to check stuff out

...and ducked into the neighbours yard.

Looking for something, but what?

About 2 minutes after that, we heard the unmistakable yelping and howling of a coyote, and a second came down the alley and joined the first in the neighbours yard.

Today, we saw two of them in the woodlot across the street.

On the bright side, coyotes are pack animals when they live or travel together, but are solitary hunters. This is mating season, so two travelling together are typically a "new family" looking for potential den sites.

On an unrelated matter...

I've been fending off lots of spam comments to this blog for the last few months, deleting literally hundreds of similarly nonsensical comments a day, mostly from from older posts (one 2011 post on Biking the Kananaskis Valley has had over 2,500 hits in the last month alone, with about 1,000 spam comments being posted to it, all of which I have to delete). I've now limited comments on older posts, plus turned on word recognition to prevent automated bots from putting up comments on recent posts. So I apologize to my 5 regular readers for any inconvenience.