Tag Archives: American dipper

Driftwood Creek – its outlet

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I know it’s time to begin to wind down these Driftwood Creek reflections now that we’ve moved. But images keep arising. This time of year we’d have been looking for harlequins, we’d have been wondering how wild the spring freshet would become. First thing in the morning, we’d hear its muted rumble through the open bedroom window. The creek filled our well and watered our garden. When I think of all the stones we tossed its way! All the rocks we winged at passing sticks – to hit them, to sink them, to unsnag them. Laughing, competing, losing, succeeding and still the sticks floated off, tumbling downstream to join the pile of driftwood at the mouth of the creek. Along the banks of the Skeena all the way to tide water. Cumshewa, the Chinook word for bleached driftwood – or the white men drifting into shore in their big boats and floating off again at high tide.

The creek is a path we seldom take – except in winter. As Eminem sings,

I walk on water
But I ain’t no Jesus
I walk on water
But only when it freezes

We skied from our house down to the confluence one winter, maybe 1979. We snowshoed down in the early 2000s with Jim and Rosamund Pojar. I remember a large wing print in blood-splattered snow, a dipper nest in the canyon by Nageli’s bridge, and a complicated descent over a rockfall. The descent was not as much fun for us as it had been for the otters, the smooth grooves of their slide trails twisting and turning through the boulders.

That rockfall just above the confluence, over forty years old now, stops the salmon that used to come miles up the creek. But the fish still come to the pools below, feeling the tug on their hearts, the ravelling up of an ancient genetic thread.

Once I started the Driftwood Creek project, I wanted to revisit the confluence and find that rockfall again. We even talked about initiating a salmonid enhancement project to clear the rockfall and allow salmon back up the creek.

The route down to the river.

We found a pleasant route through Walter Faeh’s property down to the Bulkley and downstream to the confluence. We repeated this trip many times over the last couple of years. We tried to follow the creek up to the rockfall, but kept getting blocked by seriously precipitous canyons, the conditions never quite right on foot or snowshoe to persevere.

One lunch at the confluence.

 

 

 

 

 

Another lunch with Karen and Owen Diemert.

 

When we finally had the sense to ask, Tristan and Damien Jones pointed us in the right direction. Last fall we slithered down the slope beside their house to the creek and followed it up to the rockfall. Any thoughts we had of clearing it evaporated. Indeed, it seemed miraculous that the creek had ever found a way through. How we snowshoed our way down the jumble of huge boulders that winter so many years ago baffles me – there must have been tons of snow.

 

These canyons, where the creek pushes back against the rocks that were once liquid themselves – rocks thrust up into their own future – are special places. They form passages through pools of light, openings in a geological shadow. Secret places away from our roads, our trails, our bridges. You’ll find them in many places along Driftwood Creek, from its beginnings to its end. Like the one just above Al Fletcher’s disintegrating cabin. The one below Nageli’s. And this one.

Hidden from most of us most of the time, but not from the dipper who knows the creek and its canyons summer and winter. And as if in response to my hopes, we found one right at the bottom of the rockfall that day last fall. The animal spirit of the creek, binding it all together.

Thanks to Karen, Bruce, Owen, Jim, Poppy, Joan, Brent, Pica and the others who accompanied us on the trips to the confluence. Some of these pictures are likely theirs.

 

At last, dippers!

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It’s been a quiet few months on Driftwood Creek. Just snow, snow and more snow. The driveway ploughed and ploughed again, the deck shovelled and shovelled until there was no place to put the snow, the roof shovelled onto flowerbeds, six feet of compacted snow. The snowbanks got so high we couldn’t see the creek, the snow heaped so high on the bridge railings we had to clear openings, one to look up the creek, one to look down.

But in the last week, we’ve seen dippers again. Finally. Sometimes a pair. And the juncos are back, the mountain bluebirds flash their brilliant blue, the robins flock by the dozens, the bell tone of a single varied thrush. Flickers and sapsuckers hammer the house. Hawks cruise the cottonwoods. Along one of the bare slopes of the canyon, about thirty grey-crowned rosy finches – birds we rarely see. Geese overhead, mallards on the melting beaver pond and, of course, cranes.

It is time for the harlequins to return as well. Last year this time they were making out in a pool just above the log jam; this year the creek is still thawing. Last year this time the trail up out of the canyon was open and welcoming; this year it’s a litter of fallen trees and rotten snow. The combination of several years of willow borer and leaf miner in the aspens left them vulnerable to heavy snows and erratic windstorms.

Sometimes we feel the same way. Vulnerable. To illness. Age. Accident. The news is full of bad luck. When big gusts blow through the huge old spruce trees outside my window, I listen for a crack, get ready to run.

But the light brings us back. The silliness of daylight savings is soon washed away in the widening smile, the opening arms, the head thrown back, the crow of light’s laughter. Welcome, welcome light.

Teetering past the solstice

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Oh, it can be dark here in the canyon in December. Three hours of direct sunlight if we’re lucky. And cold. The solstice arrived with, finally, a dipper on the creek below the bridge up the road from our place. The one where the outlet of the ground water seeping out of Gordon Harvey’s old park enters the creek and makes an open spot even when everything is frozen. The old park where little bridges used to cross the creeklets trickling through tall spruce and cottonwood. A carved bear, long gone. A guest book anchored to a tree, also gone.

The solstice also brings a plane landing into the -14 winter evening. On it, our elder son and his fiance. Vancouver kids shivering in the cold. Life in the house doubles. That night, wolves howl nearby. It feels like a sign, a return of life and light. The next day, -20, we climb the hill and look for tracks. We don’t find them but we relish the sunlight as we look across the valley, its murky air.

The other boy arrives with our almost six-year-old grandson, wild with Christmas, keen for everything. We walk over to the creek, throw chunks of snow off the bridge into the open spot just under the bridge’s arch. No dipper.

The birdfeeder is a circus of colour and movement: Steller’s jays, whiskey jacks, redpolls, nuthatches, chickadees, hairy and downy woodpeckers, a magpie and pine grosbeaks. On the fringes, a pine marten. A pair of ravens. Look, we say to our grandson, whose first language was raven squawks he made with his grandpa, raucous squawks the ravens answered. Look. There they are. Your old friends.

The house is quiet as we come to the end of the year, the boys and the girl gone. The temperature stays low and the creek is quieter and quieter. The openings all closing. But the light is returning and I know somewhere on Driftwood Creek a dipper is dancing in the new year.

… some lines from an old poem of mine … Why are some rivers?                                                                            

A quiet seepage –
too quiet, really, to be called a spring –
can unlock the earth’s own heat.
The ice exhales and opens
a sudden pool for this dipper
bobbing on a splintered stone.
It dives right in and finds a current
that’s warmer than the winter air.
There’s spirit in there somewhere
and bouncing back, the bird
it dipsy doodles
on the slippery dance floor
tapping out some bebop riff
we all wish that we could follow.

Happy New Year from Driftwood Canyon!

The harlequins are here again

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Just this past week, we’ve spotted the harlequin ducks on the creek, within a week of the time they show up every year – shortly after the sandhill crane migration has moved further north. Friends on Haida Gwaii report seeing over 200 of the ducks just offshore from Sandspit. Why some choose mountain streams and others stay on the coast is a mystery. Maybe for the same reasons some of us leave the salt chuck and head for the mountains.

I wrote this post for my Say The Names blog back in May, 2012 and thought I’d share it here.

We’ve been out looking for a couple of weeks now, wandering the edges of the creek, noting the rise and fall of the water, the muddy and nutrient foam tricking our eyes into seeing ducks bobbing in the back eddies.

This morning, just across from a small viewing platform in Driftwood Canyon Provincial Park, we saw the usual three: two males and a female. We stood high up on one bank of the creek; they hopped up onto rocks on the other side and we all had a good look at each other.
There’s a fascinating Species at Risk Study that outlines their use of creeks for breeding – they tend to form long-term bonds and the females will take up to four years to reach reproductive maturity. Having clear, fast-flowing streams seems to be essential to their survival because they feed on the “invertebrates in the substrate” – i.e. all the little creatures wriggling around in creek gravel. Dippers eat from the same table.
They are both markers of the ways in which home is one specific and familiar place connected to the greater world in ways we barely comprehend.

A Five Dipper Day

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I might as well name the American dipper (Cinclus americana) my spirit animal. I frequent streams, especially the “clear, rushing, boulder-strewn mountain streams, within tall conifer forests. [I]float buoyantly and swim on the surface (poorly) by paddling with unwebbed toes. [I] frequently walk about on the gravelly bottom of streams.”

Chunky, fairly nondescript, not very musical except for moments in the spring when it even surprises itself.

The dipper is our only aquatic songbird. It feeds on the little creatures that live in the water – caddis flies, mayflies, mosquitoes (whoopee!) and also dragonflies, worms, fish eggs and even small fish. In winter, it’s hard to believe there’s anything in that water, but if you can find  a pebble to flip, you’ll see little shrimp-like wigglers squirming for cover.

I’ve only seen two nests – one in winter when we snowshoed down the creek all the way to the Bulkley; the other, the parents actively attending to the chicks inside, was behind a noisy waterfall in the Rockies. The nests are always near, and usually overhanging, a mountain stream, but they are easy to miss because they look like a clump of moss. Under bridges is another good spot to look.

Males and females may work together to build the ball-like nest, often in freezing temperatures. Materials are dipped into water before being woven into two layers: one, an outer shell, 8-10 inches in diameter, made of moss, and the other an inner chamber with a woven cup, 2-3 inches in diameter, made of grass, leaves, and bark. Once the nest is finished, the mossy shell absorbs moisture and the coarse grass keeps the inside dry.

Every birding book and website says they are mainly solitary, that after a pair brings its chicks to fledge, the parents usually divide the brood and head off to separate territories. But this fall and winter, we’ve seen two and very occasionally three foraging within a few feet of each other. We find one almost every day.

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Sunday was special. A grey and gloomy morning, the road an inch-thick crust of ice. At the first dipper viewpoint, I spotted one in a newly opened pool just above a big log jam. We watched each other for a while and then I looked up the creek to where our snowshoe track had collapsed into another pool. Another dipper. And then, further up again, a third one.

Another km up the road, at an opening where we always look but rarely see them, there was another. And on the way home, looking downstream from the bridge that crosses the creek just below a tiny stream flowing out of a trickle of little springs, springs that never freeze, a fifth.

The dipper. Industrious. Likes the outdoors. Tends to stay resident all year round. Enjoys poking around under rocks in creekbeds. Spirit bird indeed. Almost forty years of turning over stones, tossing them in and skipping them across Driftwood Creek. Listening for the bird’s sharp alarm call.

Last fall, my grandson and I were both hunkered down beside the creek lynn-and-casey-at-creek-2-399x600when I started telling him about dippers. Just as I had told his father and uncle more than thirty years earlier. How they dive under the water and walk around on the bottom, how they blend right in with the stones they stand on, how they squawk as they fly up the curve of the creek.

One popped out of a nearby pool and looked us over, tilting its head, one eye zeroing in. The white eyelid. It hopped closer and closer. I held onto my grandson’s arm, stopping the pebble he was about to throw. We all watched each other for several seconds, me doing the little bobbing dance we always do when we see one: dip, dip, dip, dip, dipper!

The boy’s shout of laughter made that moment even better than a five dipper day.

(Thanks to Uncle Dan for the dipper photographs)

After reading this post, Mark Tworow sent this lovely reminder of summer and the creek in a completely different form.

Hi Sheila

I’ve attached Driftwood Creek in the Summer, one of the largest paintings I’ve ever done. (48 x 72)

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If you walk from the summer parking lot towards Sunny Point there’s a a small climb down a rocky slope to this pristine view of Driftwood Creek. The painting at such a large scale hoped to capture a small part of the feeling one has of this beautiful crystal clear creek tumbling around the water smoothed boulders. How many years has the creek flowed through here? The smooth boulders give a small answer, though the course of the creek has probably changed through the years. If you pass this place one summer, stop and pause here. It is a full place.

I think you might likely spot a dipper here too.

Mark

Sheila,

You can tell Mark that dippers live, fly and dive all along the Driftwood cinclezenrock_francoidepeycorridor…and yes indeed right downstream from the location of his painting by a place some locals refer to as Zen Rock.  I was lucky enough to catch one of them with my camera a couple of winters ago.

Cheers,

Françoi (Del Pais)