On the Road: Bluebird country

I finally got the blues. Little flashes of them flitting by, sitting on fence wires, diving into the grass and perching on posts. And, of course, making themselves viciously hard to photograph.

Lemme tell ya a few things about bluebirds. First off, they’re small, bigger than a chickadee but barely half the size of a robin. Second, they are fast and unpredictable.



They can change directions in a blink, hover like a hummingbird — and even fly sideways a bit — or blast away like a line drive. And, C, they are very, very wary. Fortunately, at this time of year, they are also very easy to spot.

The bright blue feathers of the males really show off against the still-brown grass of the open areas they prefer. The females, although not quite as luminous, are often perched close to nesting boxes. And in the southern Alberta foothills, there are a lot of nesting boxes.

So as I drove slowly along the perimeter of the Ann and Sandy Cross Conservation area just southwest of the city, I wasn’t having any trouble finding the bluebirds. The trouble was getting pictures of them. The first problem was the wind.

It was blowing out of the west at around 40 km/h so as soon as the bluebirds took off, they were just...

gone. One second they were perched on a fence post, the next they were just a rapidly receding blue dot. The second problem was my ridiculous lack of patience.

Like I said, I was having no trouble finding the bluebirds. In an hour of idling along the roads I’d found easily a dozen. But as soon as I slowed or stopped, they would take off and either fly a couple of fenceposts down or let the wind change their postal code.

If one stayed close, I’d try to sneak up on it and take a few shots before it flitted away again. At which point I would either follow or just go look for another bird. But the ones that didn’t get blown away always seemed to come back to the same area.

I saw this happen, I knew that if I just waited, that little patch of sky would flit right back again. But no, I just had to keep moving and getting distracted. So it wasn’t long before I was taking pictures of the silvery aspen flowers on the hillsides or the ratty-looking whitetails — they’re shedding their winter hair — that had come bouncing out of the trees.

I even went so far as to put my little action camera on the end of a pole to shoot underwater pictures at a small beaver pond. I could hear bluebirds around me, that soft chirpy voice barely audible over the wind, but I was sitting in the dusty grass beside the pond with my camera on a stick. Yeah, I had pretty much lost the plot by that point.

But I packed up the wet camera and started looking again even though the wind had picked up and clouds had moved in. And I managed to get a couple pictures. One bluebird hopped off a post and dove into the grass just as I aimed the camera but it popped back up onto the post with a spider in its beak.

Not bad. Another caught a bug quite close by, gobbled it down and then cleaned its beak on a fence wire. But the wind seemed to keep the birds hunkered down, maybe in the grass or inside the nesting boxes, and they were far fewer than I’d seen earlier.

So I went somewhere else. This whole area is bluebird country, rolling hills, grassy pastures, copses of aspens, so there was a possibility of finding more along every kilometre I drove. But I didn’t.

I did find a young moose who kept an eye on me as it chomped on bright red willows over closer to Millarville. And there were several bald eagles a bit further south by Diamond Valley. Managed to get an adequate picture of one of them.

But of bluebirds, I got no more. Back home looking at the pictures from the afternoon run I thought, these just won’t do. I mean, they were fine — especially the spider one — but I could have done better.

So next morning as dawn cracked, I headed out for another try. And I got blue almost immediately. Rolling over the ridge that leads down into the Pine Creek valley I dropped into the shadow cast by the brightening sky to the east.

It wasn’t dark, exactly, but dim, the flat light the colour of slate. With the windows rolled down, I could hear robins singing and see their dark forms leave the branches as they flew out to the fields. But it was the bird on the fencepost that made me stop.

The blue of its feathers stood out even against the blue of the pre-dawn light. It was a male mountain bluebird, of course, and, unlike its cousins from the day before, it was sitting still. Slowly, I raised the camera and shot a couple pictures.

A blue bird in blue light, yeah, the blues were working for me this morning. By the time I got down by my favourite beaver ponds in the creek valley, the sky had turned orange. The bald eagle nest in the trees just a bit east was nicely silhouetted, as was one of the eagles perched in a tree close by.

The little pond I’d dunked my camera in the day before had a thin skin of fresh ice while the silvery sheen of the aspens turned a bright amber in the first rays of the day. Pairs of bluebirds were by nearly every nesting box but none of them were very cooperative until I crested the next ridge. Up there a pair posed nicely next to their summer home as the last of the dawn colour faded in the eastern sky.

Down the road a bit another male perched on a box and gave me a look over his shoulder. OK, great start. I had two, maybe three pictures I wasn’t entirely ashamed of and the possibility of more to come.

So did I stay there and wait for the morning light to brighten all those blues? Well of course not. Nope, figuring that if there were this many bluebirds here, there must be more further along the road. So further along the road I went.

The bison on the ranch next to the conservation area were grazing out on a grassy hillside and I saw what had to have been a couple of the first cowbirds of the year among them. Over the next ridge and closer to Millarville, a dozen or so big trumpeter swans were on a slough right beside the road so I stopped to photograph them. A moose, maybe the same one I’d seen the day before, relaxed in the brown grass next to a willow flat.

But no bluebirds. Eagles again closer to Diamond Valley and a redtail hawk that was carrying a stick to add to its nest just south of town. A raven perched on a post and made noise as the light brightened across the Tongue Creek valley by Hartell.

There was fresh, bright snow on the mountains and longhorn cattle in the pastures. Robins, magpies and ravens, a few more hawks but no bluebirds. But there was a place I was sure I would find them.

My favourite dead-end road was muddy in the shadowy sections from the snow melting in the ditches and dusty from the wind that was now blowing rain and snow clouds across the western sky. A lunatic whitetail deer near ran into me as it decided to vault a fence and run across the road. Lucky I was driving slowly.

The bluebird boxes out this way were as yet unoccupied and a few of them had fallen apart over the winter. There were robins around and a couple of smaller birds that darted among the willows in the boggy areas. Yellow-rumped warblers, maybe.

But alas, nothing blue. Some green, though. The sun was shining through the trees and lighting up the moss on the forest floor.

Deer hair hung up on the fence barbs shimmered in the breeze pushing through as did spider silk caught in the branches. The little spring that spews from a pipe beside the road had created a dome of splash ice over the winter so I stopped to photograph that as well as fill up a bottle with that delicious water. Got nice and mucky doing it.

OK, but now what? Keep going to look for blues in other places or head back to where I knew they would be. I opted for the latter. Back through Diamond Valley and across the ford on Three Point Creek, stopping to grab some groceries in town and a quick picture of a pheasant beside the road, and then back into the hills.

Another moose off across a valley and shimmering aspens on the slopes. And finally, bluebirds again. Up on the ridge where I’d seen them nearly six hours before and down in the creek valley next to the beaver ponds, they were flitting around and diving into the grass to get bugs and grubs.

Despite the gusting wind, I could hear their soft chirping every time they perched near one of the nesting boxes. Such a pleasant sound. And such a pleasant sight.

These little creatures, these little shards of sky, show up here every year to brighten that transition from winter brown to spring green. And I’m so glad they do. They are the very best way to get the blues.

.