There was no road noise. It only lasted for a few minutes but right around 5:45 a.m.
at a slough just north of Millarville, I was able to pull over, aim my camera out the window and hear nothing but nature. Redwing blackbirds, yellow-headed blackbirds, swallows, a robin, ducks and coots, splashes and all the other sounds of a slough at sunrise. And not a single vehicle.
No trucks or cars or tractors or planes flying overhead. In fact, there were no geese sounding off either. Maybe they slept in.
But it didn’t last long. By the time I aimed my camera at a tree swallow perched nearby, the first hum of traffic was reaching me from the big road a kilometre or so away. The geese had woken up, too.
But for 10, maybe 15 minutes, nature’s sunrise symphony played uninterrupted. I was on my way up the Sheep River valley to see if I could find a bear. My friend Mike — same name, different guy — had been up to the provincial parks that enclose the Sheep River the week before and found bears grazing on the new grass and dandelions along the road.
One, in fact, had put on quite an act for him, doing funny things like popping up on its hind legs or scratching its back on a road sign. I didn’t expect to be that lucky, of course, but maybe. You never know until you go.
The sunrise had now fizzled behind a bank of mammatus clouds so I stopped to shoot them and then, further west, I woke up a very scruffy coyote. It posed for a second before trotting off. I pulled over again by the An.