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The sky didn’t look too bad.
Kinda pretty, actually. There were big fluffy clouds drifting along, flat-bottomed with bouffant tops. Behind them, the sky was a soft blue.
There was a bit of wind but just barely enough to ruffle the water on my favourite bisected slough just east of Strathmore. On one side, the blackbirds were calling and a pair of geese were paddling around while on the other side, cattle were wading udder-deep into the muddy water.
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Last fall, this part of the slough was nearly dry but now, thanks to the springtime rain and snow, there were ducks swimming around among the wading cattle with killdeers and snipe along the shore. Doesn’t mean there isn’t still a potential drought but nice to see.
Speaking of droughts, I was heading over to the valley in between the Chimney Hills north of Standard and the Wintering Hills south of Dalum to see if all the rain and snow we had this spring had refilled the shallow sloughs over that way. The last time I had been out there, they were pretty much dry.
So I left the muddy cattle and rolled east through the greening farmland onto the western edge of the Chimney Hills where I stopped for a minute to take pictures of the hawthorn blossoms glowing yellowish-white among stands of saskatoons.
Looking back west from where I had stopped, I could see those clouds I’d admired back closer to Strathmore were thicker now, still roughly the same shape but more numerous and crowding against each other. Off to the northwest there looked to be curtains of rain hanging under a few of them.
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That was what the forecast had said would happen, mostly sunny but with a 30 per cent chance of showers, so I shot a couple pictures of a tractor rolling by with that increasingly dramatic sky above and rolled on.
I followed a road that twisted north along the shoulder of the hills and then climbed to the summit above the Serviceberry Creek valley southeast of Rockyford before dropping down into the dip that separates the Chimney from the Wintering Hills. And from that summit, I could see the 30 per cent chance of showers was almost certainly going to be closer to 100.
The sun was still finding its way between the clouds but the sky to the north was getting pretty dark. Stopping by a windbreak of skeletal trees, I aimed the camera skyward and saw the clouds were churning, their shapes changing as they tumbled toward the south. But I was headed east so I just took in their snarling beauty and headed over to Severn Dam.
This little impoundment has been around for a while. I remember fishing here back when we lived in Gleichen many decades ago and it is still a popular place to park a motorhome and throw bait at the stocked trout. It’s also a pretty little spot that a variety of birds like to hang out at.
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Parked on the dam and watching the sunlight sparkle off the water I saw cliff swallows and bank swallows trying to snag bugs from the air while terns and gulls patrolled the shoreline hoping to find something tasty to pounce on. Out on the water, mallards and gadwalls paddled along and coots dove into the bays.
There were grackles along the shore and cowbirds and sparrows in the hedges. Yellow-headed and redwing blackbirds bounced and hollered among the cattails in the bays. I heard a sora rail laughing but I never did see it.
And there were pelicans.
They don’t nest here but non-breeding and younger ones spend the summer at the dam gulping down the stocked trout and whatever else they can scoop up. And they are fascinating to watch.
While I sat there, a group of them flew into a bay by the boat launch and then proceeded to swim wing-to-wing in a phalanx toward the shallower water in the corner of the bay. After a minute, they would stop and, in unison, drive their heads and massive bills into the water. After a few seconds, they would raise back up again, a few of them with something wriggling in their orange pouches.
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Then, in unison again, they would chug off in another direction, stop and dip and then swim on. Yeah, fascinating.
As I was watching this pelican parade play out, clouds began to block the sun. While it was still bright in spots to the west, the sky over the dam was darkening rapidly. And with that darkening came the wind.
It was a strange situation. The clouds were moving in from the northeast but the wind was coming straight down the reservoir from the west. One minute it was nearly calm, the next, waves were crashing on the shoreline rocks.
The flotilla of pelicans had broken up and the individual birds were allowing the wind and waves to corral the fish against the shore where they tried to grab them. A few of them lifted into the air to change positions and simply hovered there, the speed of the wind enough for them to stay airborne without flapping a wing.
The barn swallows seemed to have all bolted for shelter but the cliff swallows still tried to hunt. I don’t know if they were having any success but I saw a couple of them flying low over the water get completely swamped by the waves. Fortunately, they managed to surface and take flight again, trailing streamers of water from their wings.
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The terns and gulls were riding the gusts like the pelicans were riding the waves, sometimes hovering, sometime letting the wind sweep them away. A bald eagle flew in to see what it could see and for a few seconds the wind allowed it to hover right above me like a big, lethal hummingbird.
It was hard to tell what direction the storm was moving mostly because there were at least three other ones close by and they were all swirling across the sky. Back on the dam again and looking westward across the water I could see patches of blue sky where the sun was shining through but above me and all around, the sky was nearly black.
And then, just as suddenly as it had fired up, the wind died down. It didn’t quit but within a minute it lost half its velocity in another two or three, the reservoir was back to gentle swells again. The swallows returned and the pelicans began to regroup. The hills to the west were lit up by shafts of soft light, the bright green of the fields and pastures and soft browns of the fallow fields contrasting with the deep blue-black of the storm clouds.
Looking off to the northeast I could see the far edge of the storm that was passing overhead and a curtain of rain coming down from it. Strangely, no rain had fallen on the dam. But it was coming.
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So I headed on down the road. The sloughs I wanted to check out were another six or eight kilometres further east so I left the dam behind and rolled that way.
I met the rain a few minutes later. It was coming down steadily though not heavily, just enough to keep the dust down on the road. But the clouds were still thick and the light was dim as I pulled up beside one of the sloughs.
There was water in it but not a lot. At this time, in years past, I’d seen the basin filled nearly to the roadside. Now, despite the months of wet weather, it was nowhere near that. The same was true of the other nearby bodies. Only one had enough water to support nesting ducks but just barely.
Around the corner and over on the north slope of the hills it was much the same.
One pond where I’d found a peninsula with dozens of ducks relaxing on it before was just a series of semi-connected ponds. The peninsula itself was covered with blooming goldenrod. At the next, though more full than it had been last fall, the shoreline was a good 10 metres below the high-water mark. That made it pretty good for the godwits, avocets and willets that were wading in the shallow water but there were very few ducks at all.
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The rain was still pelting down as I rolled on east and then cut south again to recross the hills. But I was in for a bit of a surprise.
As I rolled over the summit and got a view to the south and east, I could see the wall of storms ended just a few kilometres away. Over there the big wind turbines were spinning and cattle were grazing on sun-dappled pastures. The patches of blue sky outnumbered the ragged clouds.
It was still windy, of course, and surprisingly chilly but the rain was behind me and the birds were singing. Savannah sparrows and meadowlarks were in full voice and a pair of geese honked by as well. The cattle were hock-deep in green grass and grazing contentedly along.
I hadn’t actually intended to come this way, thinking I might follow the Rosebud River back to the west after I’d checked the dry sloughs, but now that I was here, I figured I might as well go have a look at nearby Deadhorse Lake.
The clouds were heavy again over an old homestead along the lake’s eastern shore and, because it was now past eight in the evening, it was even darker than it had been when the storms first moved in. And it was windy, too. Parked by the homestead fence with the camera braced against the truck’s window frame, I could smell the alkali blowing off the lake.
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Which was, as near as I could tell, totally empty. All that springtime rain and snow had done nothing but make the lakebed muddy. But, it wasn’t ugly. No, not at all.
There was a stand of dead poplars along the south shore where a meadowlark was singing. Off to the north, under the edge of that bruised sky, a little patch of peach showed where the sun was shining. The alkali flats of the lake bed glowed a kind of ghostly white.
Yeah, lovely.
I headed back toward town now, through off and on rain, following side roads to Strathmore and past the bisected slough before heading south and west again toward Langdon. Where I had to come to a rapid stop.
The sky had suddenly turned pink, the setting sun finding its way through a hole in the dark clouds to brighten up their undersides with the day’s last light. Beautiful. But it was the sight in my side mirror that really finished off the day.
A rainbow, a gorgeous 180-degree rainbow, that glowed like neon against that cerulean sky.
It lasted for maybe five minutes and then, like my day, it was done.
It had been a day of skies, some sunny, some dark.
And some, like this one, spectacular.
No, the skies didn’t look too bad, at all.
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via The Novum Times
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