Company on the hill

From the first forest walk, I returned to the logging road and went on up the hill. Now I stopped at a side road, going into a logged-off area.

Recovering.

Seedling trees, saplings, dried ferns from last year, bits of salal. And dried stumps.

Here there is no moss. The sun has baked the old stumps; the ground underfoot is hard and dry.

Closer to the edge of the cleared area, a stump harbours salal and a huckleberry shrub (the red twigs).

From the road, a faint trail led off across the hill. Looked like an elk trail to me.

See it? I followed it to the edge of the hill.

There were a few faint elk tracks, not clear because the ground is so hard, so covered with dry branches left over from the logging. But there was a patch of elk scat.

Elk scat, not fresh, with bits of dead fern on top.

But no elk. Maybe down in the valley ...

Google Earth view. Next trip, I'll go all the way to Pye Lake.

Time to go home. I walked back to the car, crawled down the hillside, dodging potholes. So I was going slowly enough to see the grouse watching me from behind a huckleberry bush. I stopped; so did she. We sat and watched each other for a few minutes. When I rolled down the window to get a photo, she turned and went into the trees.

Photo or no photo, I was happy to have seen her.

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Desde el bosquecito, regresé al coche y seguí cuesta arriba. Encontré otro caminito que cruzaba un area donde habían cortado los árboles hace unos años.

Aquí no había musgo; todo es seco, duro, tostado por el sol. Pero el bosque se está recuperando. Hay arbolitos, retoños, y jóvenes. El suelo está cubierto de helechos, los del año pasado, ya secos.

Un tronco al lado del bosque protegía plantas de "salal" (Gualtheria shallon) y de "huckleberry" (Vaccinium parvifolium), dos arbustos que se llenarán de frutillas en el verano, alimentos para pájaros y osos.

Un sendero apenas visible cruzaba el camino; parecía hecho por alces. Lo seguí por un rato. Las huellas que vi eran ligeras; el suelo está muy duro. Pero si había caca de alce.

En camino a casa, bajando el cerro despacito por los hoyos en el camino, tuve la suerte de ver una gallina fuliginosa que me observaba desde la sombra de un arbusto. Me detuve; tambien ella. Nos sentamos mirándonos por unos minutos. Cuando por fin bajé la ventana para sacar una foto, ella se dió vuelta y desapareció entre los árboles.

Con o sin foto, me sentí privilegiada de haberla visto.

Elk signs, yellow, brown, muddy

Signs along the highways, going north or west from here, say "Elk", with a distance, such as 55 km. Or they show an outline of an elk, with the distance.

Elk sign, Highway 19.

I keep my eyes open, watching the road and the bushes along both sides. I never see an elk. Not in the daytime, not at night. Many deer, at any hour, but no elk. Not a hair.

On a hillside above the Salmon River, I found a different kind of elk sign.

Elk scat. About the size of brown marbles. Fairly fresh, still moist.

A closer look. They're slightly squarish, a hair longer than they are wide. That bit of glitter at the left is ice.

Farther along, I found more:

This scat is older, drying and splitting. My fingernail is 1.5 cm. at the wide point, so the largest of these is about 3 cm. long. The scat contains quite a bit of fiber; their diet at this time of year includes dried twigs, branches, whatever has survived the winter weather.

Elk droppings are bigger and longer than deer droppings. Moose are even larger yet. If the droppings are dry and cracked, it is because they are old and not left there recently. If they still glitter & shine from moisture and each one spreads like grainy peanut butter or room temperature chocolate chips when you slide your boot across them, it could have been minutes, or an hour or two, depending on the weather. If they are still steaming in the cold morning air, they’re close by!  (All About Moose)

No steam seen. The elk had left the immediate area. I wandered about, looking behind piles of logging slash, to be sure. No elk. But I did find this:

There's a baby!

Near a stream, where the water crossed a logging truck access, the gravel was soft, so that elk feet sunk deeply. Here, and nowhere else, I found the little tracks of a calf, still too small to make an impression on more solid ground. The deep end is the rear of the track.

With my muddy shoe for comparison. The bottom of the track is about 4 inches long. The scruffy area at top is caused by her dewclaws, which will leave no impression on a more solid surface. She and her calf were walking peacefully; when she runs, her toes spread apart in a V.

Another print near the muddy area. The dewclaw marks are clear.

So: still not an elk, but closer. Maybe next time.