Dear Readers,
Top of the day to you and your green—ever observant—army of Alberta Plant Watch watchers.
"What's up?" you ask, and immediately the observations begin to pour in.
Yesterday's sunshine is history. So, too, is its mesmerizing cerulean sky. You should have been here. The gates of heaven were open, and I can't begin to describe the view.
Today, herds of deer and elk still dot the eastern grasslands, but the sky is gray. The morning sun can't find the Livingstone Range, can't play across its snowfields, can't dance along its cutting edge.
The grizzlies I've trailed during the past week have proved that, while they leave tracks, the trackways fail to coalesce into a defining and revealing picture. The bears appear to be everywhere, and nowhere. They present an enigma best defined by tangles of downed timber, dense thickets of wolf-willow and maze of lost trails.
Stalking flowers, I've come to realize, tends to be easier and, typically, more revealing, especially if you're trying to see, and capture, smiling faces.
And so it came to pass that, yesterday afternoon, during the last hour of a spectacularly beautiful day, Monica and I drove to tiny Burmis Lake, a stone's throw from the Crowsnest River.
We went to see what was up, so to speak.
When we arrived, a pair of Barrow's goldeneyes swam away from us, and a nesting Canada goose assumed a huddled stance and a tucked-neck to conceal its nest. Overhead, tree swallows played in the sky as snipe dove past them in erratic, noisy displays. Ruffed grouse drummed from somewhere across the river. We ignored all of this, of course. We were there to find flowers.
Spring's parade of emerging wildflowers had advanced considerably since our last visit. The early buttercups were pretty well gone. Yellow bells and prairie crocuses, the new kids on the block, stole the show.
Yesterday's bloomers included shooting stars, Perry's Townsendia, moss phlox and white Draba.
Here, with no introductions, are the take-home faces from May 1st:
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