058 Time to clean up the bird feeders, bobcats be coming, and the bears are back.

This week I look at the importance of taking down your bird feeder and cleaning the area to avoid attracting wildlife. I also investigate an increasingly common visitor to the bow valley, the bobcat. Finally, I take a look at the emergence of bears from their dens as the spring theoretically arrives – even though it rarely seems to feel like it this year.

Time to take down your bird feeders

Now that spring is, well, technically upon us. It’s time to take down your bird feeders. Communities like Banff and Jasper, located within the national parks, already ban bird feeders. While Canmore is outside of the mountain parks, it has a bylaw that forbids bird feeders between April 1st and October 31st.

While maintaining bird feeders can provide hours of amusement in the winter months when chickadees and nuthatches gather for sunflower seeds, there is no need to have bird feeders during the summer months.

While I don’t have stats for Canadian bird feeders, some 40% of Americans regularly put out food for their feathered friends.

It’s important to distinguish back-yard feeders from visiting wild places to feed ducks and geese. Even in Canmore, it’s important never to feed bread to ducks.

In one study in Massachusetts, in a one month period, some 38,500 people fed ducks the equivalent of 7,800 loaves of bread. This didn’t take into account the soda crackers, cheezies, popcorn, pretzels, cookies, peanuts, and other calorie-rich but nutrient poor foods.

Feeding ducks encourages large flocks to congregate in areas that may not be able to naturally support such high numbers. It can cause increased stress, and provide a vector for disease to enter a population. Any time there are unsustainable numbers of any species, nature will find a way to take advantage of that, whether through the introduction of insects, parasites, or disease.

That doesn’t mean that all feeding has to be bad. This past week, I’ve begun to wake up to the song of our resident robin outside our window. We have the loudest, most persistent robin in Canmore…every time I have the opportunity to sleep in that danged…oh wait, that’s another story.

Proper feeding of birds during the winter months can provide some great entertainment Choosing the right seed mixture can do two things. It can help to improve your chances of attracting local birds and reduce the cleanup in the spring.

Many cheap bird seeds include fillers that are not popular with some birds. Take the time to find out the best seed mixtures in your area so that the seeds you put out pack the best combination of calories and nutrition for the birds that may rely on them.

Whatever strategy you choose, if you feed them, you need to clean up after them. Now is the time, at least if the snow ever melts, to clean up the remnants of your winter feeding.

The ground beneath your feeder may be littered with empty sunflower hulls, faeces, and a great deal of seed kicked out of the feeder. Many years ago, I had a feeder on a second story balcony. I had a vast number of finches that invaded my feeders. What kind of finches? It was a very long time ago, but I think they were grey-crowned rosy finches. They simply took all the seeds from the feeder and kicked them to the ground where they preferred to feed.

Time and again they emptied the feeder of sunflower seeds. When spring arrived, so many seeds had been ejected that the entire eavestrough around the balcony was clogged and rainwater couldn’t flow through.

That was the first time I realized that feeding in the winter means cleaning up in the spring. Living in a landscape with bears offers an additional reason to make sure that any feeders you fill in the winter are emptied in the spring and the area around it well cleaned.

Even in areas where attracting unwanted wildlife isn’t an issue, there are plentiful reasons to take spring cleaning seriously. Seed on the ground can rot, begin to smell, cause damage to grass and garden plants, allow mildew to grow, and even spread disease.

Like feeding ducks, bird feeders allow birds to congregate at a single location which can help in the spread of disease. Birds can also suffer when bird seed mildews and rots. Always make sure your feeder is clean and dry. If you notice any adverse behaviour of birds, or signs of ill-health in your yard, dump, disinfect, and clean your feeder. It may not have anything to do with your feeder, but it only takes a few minutes to ensure that any seeds you offer are free of disease or toxins like salmonella.

It’s also helpful to remove your feeder if you notice any kind of outbreak of disease so that the birds disperse and reduce the level of contact found at most feeders.

As the ground dries, check out the area beneath your feeder. There may be significant collections of seeds and seed husks, along with faeces. This is where a good, old-fashioned shop vac can be helpful.

Take a rake to the ground and then suck the detritus up. If you can place your winter feeders above hard surfaces like sidewalks or wooden decks, you also have a much easier cleanup in the spring. Be especially cautious of having feeders above flower beds where rotting seeds can have negative impacts on the garden.

If you plan your winter feeding around the spring cleanup, you can really reduce both the work and the risk that your feeding will negatively impact the birds your helping.

The bears are up and exploring. Bird feeders need to be taken down so that inadvertent seed acts as an attractant. Bears in the Rockies don’t have a lot of early season food choices.  After meat, the next most nutritious food category for bears are seeds and nuts. A bird feeder full of sunflower seeds is an irresistible attraction.

If you don’t believe this, then check out the images on this page. Bears are very persistent when there is an easily available, high calorie food available. As communities, it’s our job to keep the wild in wildlife and to keep our yards clear of attractants that may bring unwanted visitors.

Next up…that ain’t no lynx!

Bobcats moving north

It’s no secret that climates are warming, winters are shorter, and snowpacks are thinner….bahahaha just kidding. This year has been epic for snow, cold, and persistence. In terms of climate change though, this winter is just simply a single data point on an ascending line on a graph of long-term average temperatures.

Like most of us, other than the hardcore skiers and boarders with their cherry red spring skiing complexions, I’m absolutely tickled to see spring.

By the way, if you’re Canadian, and the chances are good based on my demographic, you may have seen the final Rick Mercer Report tonight. For 15-years Mercer has been poking fun at politics while bringing Canadians closer together.

Over the years he had many highlights. As the story commented:

“The self-proclaimed political junkie said some of the highlights from the show have been bungee jumping with his childhood hero Rick Hansen, interviewing every living prime minister, flying with the Snowbirds and dangling off the CN Tower.”

On the show, he recapped a session that poked fun at Environment Canada’s weather forecasting that seems particularly apropos this year. Have you noticed that on every 7-day forecast there was a glimmer of hope on day-7?

He joked that on every 7-day forecast, day 7 would show nicer weather. Of course, 7-day forecasts are mostly bogus, but he poked fun at the forecasters always giving us a glimmer of hope when the nights were cold and the cars were frosty. We’ll miss you Rick.

Oops. Sorry, back to bobcats moving north. Way back in Episode 16, I talked about a wide variety of species moving north with warming climes. You can check out that episode at www.mountainnaturepodcast.com/ep016.

I love cats and dogs. When I started my career as a naturalist way back in 1982, I hoped to encounter cougars and lynx in my explorations. I’ve been lucky to view lynx on numerous occasions, and followed their tracks on even more occasions. Cougars continue to evade me. I’ve seen tails disappearing into the trees, found fresh tracks, and even stumbled upon a kill site, but I’ve yet to be able to definitively say that I’ve seen a wild cougar.

Bobcats? Back in the 80’s, they were a thing of myth. I was trained with the understanding that lynx and bobcats were the only two animals that respected the 49th parallel.

Lynx are truly Canadian. They evolved in our deep snowpacks and long winters. As snowshoe hares evolved bigger and bigger feet to allow them to escape predation, the lynx simply followed suit. Their feet also grew significantly bigger over time. Biologists call this coevolution. As one species adapts, so must its predators.

Along with the massive feet, the lynx has distinctive tufts of hair on its ears. If you see a cat with sasquatch-like feet and ear tufts in snow country, you’ve found yourself a lynx.

Bobcats, on the other hand, are much more diminutive. They lack the ear tufts of lynx and because they evolved in shallower snowpacks and warmer winters, they lack the snowshoe-like feet of the lynx as well. Their bodies are also heavier. Small feet and heavy bodies makes for a sinky cat in deep snows, like the conditions historically found in the mountain west. So then what the heck are they doing in Canada? Apparently following the sun!

While this winter is an anomaly, on a long-term trend, winters are getting steadily warmer. The snows arrive later and the spring arrives sooner…so what’s a cat to do? Bobcats headed the same direction so many other animals have – north!

A tracking study of the eastern Bow Valley conducted in 2010 found plenty of evidence that bobcats had followed the warming trends and moved right in.

Over the past decade or so, reports of bobcats in southern Alberta and British Columbia began to pop up more and more regularly. Signs of bobcat were still rare, but they first began to show up in tracking studies in 2004. If this is news to you, it was to me as well. I had no idea that bobcats had made the move this far north as early as 2004.

Like all the wild cats, they spent most of their time in the valley bottoms, preferring to stick to the more sun-exposed south side of the valley. Without the snowy adaptations of the lynx, bobcats took advantage of the landscape and the warmth of the sun to help guide them in their explorations.

In a series of track studies conducted between 2004 and 2009 in the eastern Bow Valley, bobcat tracks were discovered 15 times, as compared to 81 times for cougar, and 153 for lynx.

The eastern Bow Valley at that time was rarely used by wolves due to the fragmented habitat. In fact, there was no evidence of wolves in the eastern part of the valley between 2004 and 2009. Move a little further west, towards the north side of Canmore, and signs of wolves became more prevalent.

For carnivores moving through the Valley of the Bow, the area from Heart Creek to Mount McGillivray is a critical pinch point for wildlife movement. The valley narrows, and high cliffs limit the movement options for animals through this area.

Add to the mix the busy Trans-Canada Highway, Bow River, Canadian Pacific Railway, and industrial development on the north side of the valley, and the pinch is especially tight.

One curious result in this study was that, in the most fragmented habitat around the town of Exshaw and the hamlet of Lac des Arcs. This narrow corridor, despite its cement plant, railway, and river forming barriers, the bobcat was the only wild feline to take advantage of the landscape.

This may have shown that the bobcats are much more adaptable than lynx and cougar to urban environments. Like coyotes, these medium sized felines are showing a great ability to live in close quarters with people.

Curiously, the first direct evidence in the Kananaskis Valley was in a photo captured by a wildlife camera in 2009. All it showed was a slightly blurry foot. As biologists studied the spot pattern, the apparent gait, and the size of the foot, they concluded that it had to be a bobcat.

A recent article on the CTV news site, reports that Calgary is receiving hundreds of calls to its 311 city services hotline reporting bobcats wandering around urban and rural neighbourhoods alike.

This article states that Calgary has:

“two big areas where bobcats thrive; one in the southwest near Deer Run, the Weaselhead and Fish Creek Park and another in the northwest community of Varsity.”

Bobcats get along quite well in urban environments. Cities like Calgary are alive with red and gray squirrels, white-tailed jackrabbits, and other small mammals and birds. Bobcats are, in many ways, a large house cat. They are incredibly flexible in the prey they select, but they are bigger and so instead of mice and small songbirds, they can tackle jackrabbits and some of the very large urban gray squirrels. Although called gray squirrels, the urban squirrels of western Canada are almost as big as a house cat and usually jet black in colour.

Warming climates are letting more and more plants, animals, birds, parasites, insects, and even diseases, to move north. There are many advantages to a cold climate, and we are losing some of those natural barriers to movement that helped to create the ecology that we have taken for granted for so long.

In a study published in May of 2017 in the journal Phys.org, bobcat populations in the U.S. have begun to explode, becoming visible around some of the largest cities in the country, including Las Angeles.

More and more, they are gaining coyote like boldness in communities. They have also benefitted from protections that have been afforded predators in the last few decades when biologists began to realize the importance of top level carnivores in keeping rodents, deer, and other potential pest animals in check.

They found that the numbers of bobcats had tripled since the 1980s. As the study states:

“The bobcat’s success also reflects its ability to eat almost anything and thrive almost anywhere, from cornfields to swamps to suburban parks. With cottontail rabbits declining in New Hampshire, they shifted to preying on plentiful wild turkeys and squirrels.”

In British Columbia, biologists are seeing similar trends. T.J. Gooliaff, a Masters student at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, has been tracking the northern expansion of bobcats in B.C.

He asked people to submit photos of lynx and bobcat across the province. He looked at more than 3,000 photos. They now have evidence of bobcats as far north as Prince George, much farther north than they have been found in Alberta. It’s even slightly farther north than Edmonton, Alberta.

Bobcats are here to stay. They are adaptable and in some areas, have been seen to simply wander from bird feeder to bird feeder looking for easy meals.

Our communities are evolving, and coyotes are not the only carnivore roaming the trails at night. They are adaptable and can get just about anywhere. Unlike coyotes, a fence is little barrier to a bobcat. In the first story of this episode, I talk about cleaning up your bird feeders at this time of year. Bobcats might give us a reason to be vigilant even in the middle of winter.

Also like coyotes, unattended pets are vulnerable and leaving pet food or other attractants can help to bring carnivores into your neighbourhood.

Have you ever seen a bobcat in the Rockies? If so, I’d love to hear your story. Leave a comment in the show notes at www.MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep058.

Next up…return of the bruins

The Bears are Back

Well, after a long, hard, cold winter, I’m welcoming every sign of spring that I can. Since the weather has proven to be unreliable as an indicator of spring this year, why not use some of the more reliable signals that the season is here if not the weather.

Just last week, robins began singing outside my home in Canmore. Canada geese are beginning to return to the north, much to the chagrin of many urban parks and golf courses, and while Balzac Billy might predict the length of winter, in the Bow Valley, we rely on our own indicator – the Boss!

Bear 122, better known as the Boss, was first seen on March 24 of this year. Last year, he was spotted on March 5, but who wouldn’t sleep in a bit given this winter’s persistence?

Just in case you’ve been living under a rock, Bear 122 is the top bruin in the Bow Valley. He’s usually the first to be seen in the spring and the last to enter his den in the fall. He has a fearsome reputation but he’s a bear that is a master of living in and around people. In all of his many encounters with hikers, he’s not acted aggressively.

Last summer I was guiding a group of hikers at Stanley Glacier. We stopped just before the first creek crossing to do a bear safety talk. As my colleague, Dave Honeyman of Canadian Rockies Alpine was going through the importance of bear safety, the Boss suddenly showed up on the other side of the creek.

Since Dave was facing the group, he didn’t see the Boss until one of the clients mentioned it. At this point, I just arrived to the location and, sure enough, Bear 122 was about 20 feet away following the creek.

Safety being the priority, we got the guests to put away their cameras and head back towards the trailhead. The Boss, well he just meandered up the trail following the footsteps of countless groups that had headed out ahead of us.

Our group, we decided to explore one of the many other fabulous trails in the Kootenay valley. Some bears can thrive close to people by combining a disinterest in them with an understanding of how to avoid the danger spots. Bear 122 essentially owns the CPR mainline and that’s usually where he’s first sighted in the spring. Most commonly, I’ve encountered him between Castle Junction and Lake Louise.

When he first emerges from the den he’s very lethargic. There is not much food available at this time of year and his main goal is to conserve energy and take advantage of any easy foods that might be available.

Train tracks are often a good place to find food. There may be train or winter killed elk, deer, moose, or sheep that he can munch on, along with grain spills that might not have been cleaned up.

Usually, the emergence of 122 marks the start of bear season. His disappearance in the fall marks its end. Every day, more and more bears are going to be lazily emerging from their dens to begin another summer of feeding, fattening, raising cubs, and mating.

The boys usually emerge well ahead of females with cubs. Generally, we start to see the mom and kids out in early May. By that time, although the cubs look tiny, they are around 5 months old and keen to explore their world.

On years like this one, when the landscape is still covered in a blanket of white, the bears will be looking for easy food sources. Again, it’s a reason to clean up not just feeders, but any potential attractants in your yards.

At this time of year, they become fairly visible along roadways as the heavy snows force them into the valleys where the roads dominate the landscape. While they are more visible at this time of year, they’re also in a vulnerable condition. They’ve lost an incredible amount of weight over the winter and any added stresses can cause added challenges to them.

If you’re lucky enough to see one, please stay in your car. Enjoy the sighting from a good distance and try not to force the bear to move on. Every phone comes with an amazing camera these days and you can zoom in to incredible detail even from a distance.

Our wildlife is our legacy. Please help us to ease the bears into their new summer season. Soon thoughts will turn to romance as females that do not have cubs emerge and the start of the mating season begins.

Spring is a time of rebirth, renewal, and love. Birds are singing to attract mates, bears are going to be looking to hook up, and many of the creatures of the mountains, from insects to amphibians to birds will soon brighten up our landscape for yet another summer season.

And with that, it’s time to wrap this episode up. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe so that you never miss another great story.

Don’t forget that Ward Cameron Enterprises is your source for step-on, hiking, photography, and snowshoe guides. We specialize in the mountain west and our guides are experts on the natural and human history of the Rockies.

If you’d like to reach out personally, you can hit me up on Twitter @wardcameron. You can also follow us on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/WardCameronEnterprises…and with that said, the sun’s out and it’s time to go hike-a-shoeing…or is that show-a-hiking…whatever, I’ll talk to you next week.