Still Winter After All These Months

Copyright © 2006-2007, Andrew Stark. All rights reserved.
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The Wily Ones

For quite some time, I've been carrying around in the back of my mind the notion that I should write a blog post about coyotes. Today, I decided to finally write it, spurred on by a certain post I read this morning. In preparation, I started looking around for info on coyotes. Well, I can sum up all the reference material in one word: Boring!

Coyotes--for those who have had no contact at all with them and might not know this--are one of the most fascinating creatures in all creation, and a collection of coyote facts just doesn't do them justice.* So, I've decided it's phfft! to all the reference material, but forward ho! without it. That's why the subtitle to this post is Everything I Know About Coyotes Without Looking Anything Up.

First, let's talk about what we call these wild dogs. Did you know that they have them in northern Minnesota, where I grew up, but they don't call them coyotes? They call them brush wolves, and old farmers there may even tell you that they don't have coyotes, only timber wolves and brush wolves. But a coyote by any other name, even if it's a little bigger than the coyotes here in the Yukon, is still a coyote. And even when we agree on the word coyote as their proper name, we still may pronounce that name differently. My dad, the Kansas farm kid turned eastern Colorado cowboy calls them ky-oats (first syllable rhymes with sky, second syllable with porridge, accent on first syllable), while in the Yukon and almost everywhere else, they're called ky-oat-tees (sky, porridge, type of shirt, accent on second syllable). Growing up, my dad told me that only silly sissified city folk called them ky-oat-tees, but I've since learned that is not completely accurate.

In the Yukon, this is the time of year when we are most likely to have coyotes right around our homes. Food is scarcer in the bush during the dead of winter, and they come to town to wander the streets looking for tasty garbage or even an available small pet. Several years ago, on a lovely forty below zero day, I walked over to my local elementary school to do some reading with students. As I approached the school, I noticed a coyote digging through the garbage can right up next to the main entrance of the school. He saw me, quickly grabbed a full lunch bag in his mouth and trotted off. Lately we've been seeing a coyote walking the street in front of our house, and I suspect when the garbage can beside the house was overturned and the remains our yummy food garbage spread down the driveway, across the street and on into the bush, it was coyote work.

The small pet thing is the reason we don't let our cat Leroy outside except by mistake. Sure he's sixteen pound of pure muscle and afraid of nothing--some of the local big dogs have lost fights with him--but he's no roadrunner. Neither was our previous dog, an old, friendly, deaf and lame Samoyed, who had his own won't-you-be-my-dinner run-in with coyotes.

Here's the story, but I'll give you fair warning: The dog doesn't die in the end, so this one won't win a Newbery Medal for children's literature. On a January morning several years ago I left the gate open while fetching something from the garage. The dog wandered out, as he often did, and I thought nothing much of it. He would usually walk down the street a bit, greet anyone out and about, and make his way home again. No worry, right? But that day something bothered me about the whole scenario and I went out to fetch him, just in time to see him loping off into the bush after a coyote. Then I saw the second coyote fold in behind from out of nowhere and I knew our old dog was a goner. He was deaf, remember, so calling him back to me was useless. But he turned, glanced back and saw me, and I motioned for him to come. For once in his life, he obeyed on command, and it saved his live.

Part of what makes coyotes so interesting is that they're not particularly frightened of us. That's partly why they've adapted so well--perhaps too well--to the spread of civilization. Every few years, someone here in Whitehorse has a run-in with a coyote. I don't think anyone's actually been bitten, but if I remember right, a woman carrying a bag of groceries had one tug on her clothing with his teeth. I suspect he was more interested in eating her groceries than in eating her, but I'm not volunteering to be the guinea pig to test out my hypothesis.

Not only are coyotes not scared of us, but they can be interested in what we're doing. A few days ago, oldest son was whistling a tune in the house while the friendly neighbourhood coyote was traipsing by. The coyote stopped in front of the house, looked toward the window, cocked his head and listened for 15 seconds or so before he went on his way. I wonder what he was thinking.

Sometimes, if you howl outside at night, the coyotes will howl back to you. Don't be fooled into thinking that you've tricked them and they think you're just another coyote. They know who you are, and we know that because coyote howls responding to humans are less complex than howls responding to other coyotes. They know who you are and they are dumbing things down for you.

One other thing I've noticed about coyotes--and I promise this will be the last--is that, for the most part, they are wild dogs on a mission. When you take your family dog for a walk unleashed, she probably darts here and there, sniffing this and that. Not so with the coyote. Coyotes do not stop to smell the roses, and only pause briefly to hear the whistling. Once or twice, I've seen a pair of coyotes romping around, but most often, they are traveling in a bee-line to wherever it is they are going. They are business travelers only, and workaholics. Do you think that's the key to their success?

Oh, and the post that prompted me to finally post something on coyotes? This one, from Charlie, in which we learn at least one more thing about coyotes. You can probably believe what Charlie tells you, because he consulted coyote researchers.

Serendipitous morsel: Today's final jeopardy answer was, "The middle initial for this 1949 movie critter stands for Ethelbert." Know the question?

And what about you? Do you have a coyote story or tidbit? No reference material allowed!

Update: Don't miss all the additional coyote stories in the comments, and there's yet another one at Seasonings of the Heart.

*Yes, I know. If you have livestock, you may think doing justice to coyotes involves a 30-06.

Pretty Maids All In A Row

It's the sort of weather to stay at home by the fire, so I took advantage of the down time and finally gathered all the Yukon wildflower posts from last summer together and linked them under Previous Series in the sidebar. Here they are:

• Still Waiting for Green
• Before the Greening, the Lavender
• Into the Wild Blue
  
• The Blue Belles
• Pretty in Pink
• Hot Pink
• Stopping on Yellow
• Looking Lovely in Lavender
• In the Yellow Palette
• Waving the White Flag

Waving the White Flag

In what I expect to be the last of this year's wildflower series, let's go back and pick some of the little white flowers that got passed over for their more colourful friends. First up is the dwarf dogwood, pictured on the right. This little flower is almost circumpolar in the northern hemisphere (only Europe misses out), with it's range extending as far south as Colorado and New Mexico. If the name dwarf dogwood, is unfamiliar to you, it could be that you know it as the bunchberry instead. That name comes from the clusters of bright red berries that form in the center of the set of leaves after the flowers are gone.

This plant is just a little mysterious. For one thing, the white part we think of as it's flowers aren't flowers at all, but bracts* surrounding the flowers, which are the tiny green things you see in the center of the white bracts in the photo. In addition, the sources for wildflower facts give conflicting information about the dwarf dogwood. Are they native to North America? The answer is yes, they are native around the globe; or no, they were introduced to North America. Are they edible? Well, yes, you can eat the leaves as salad greens or a cooked vegie, and yes, the berries are edible, but they taste like cotton; or no, the Pilgrims made a pudding out of dogwood berries, and the berry pudding gave them all digestive problems. I guess that means we can conclude at least one thing for sure: either this plant is native to North America, or the Pilgrims brought it over on the Mayflower.

To the right is the little mountain avens. This flower is closely related to the yellow dryas featured earlier, and it develops a similar spritely seed plume that ranges in color from burgundy to gold.

This wildflower, too, is circumpolar, and follows the Cascade Range south to the Wallowa Mountains of northeastern Oregon. It's the provincial flower of the Northwest Territories, and in some areas of Nunavut it has an important job helping hunters determine when to hunt caribou. When the little seed plumes begin to untwist, the time is right.

Next up is a wildflower you'll probably recognize right off the bat. Yep, the blossoms below are from the wild strawberry. We have a big patch of wild strawberries in the ditch in front of our house, and right now they're producing berries.

This is a good year for them, too. They have lots of berries, and they're large ones--large for the wild variety, that is. I've eaten a few of them, but mostly they've been eaten first by birds, or neighborhood kids, or our dog, who loves to sniff through the patch until she finds a sweet one.

And she isn't the only animal who loves to eat them. The wild strawberry provides food for a long list of wildlife. Besides many varieties of birds, there are skunks, squirrels and chipmunks, voles and mice, rabbits, deer, and even turtles, who all love to eat the leaves or berries of the strawberry plant.

The only distasteful thing about wild strawberry plants is the friends they keep. They like to hang out with my own arch enemy of the plant world--poison ivy. Not here in the Yukon, mind you, but that's only because we don't have poison ivy. In fact, it is its close association with the criminal plant element that earned the wild strawberry the wild part of its name. So if you live where there is poison ivy, and you like picking wild strawberries, you'll want to make sure you know what poison ivy looks like so you can avoid the misery that touching any part of that nasty plant can bring.

*Don't know what bracts are? They're just leaves that surround and protect the flowers of a plant.

Click on photos for larger view. You'll find all of the previous wildflower posts listed here.

Technorati Tags: wildflowers, Yukon, Yukon wildflowers, dwarf dogwood, mountain avens, wild strawberry

In the Yellow Palette

In the comment section of one of the other wildflower posts, Candyinsierras asked if we have Indian paintbrushes in the Yukon. The Indian paintbrushes that I grew familiar with while growing up in Minnesota had large bright scarlett heads, and we don't have that sort of showy paintbrush here. Ours are mostly yellow, a few are orange, and some call the orangy ones Indian paintbrushes. Perhaps they're right when they call them that, but they're not the same paintbrushes Minnesotans call Indian paintbrushes.

This is not to say that the less showy paintbrushes of the Yukon aren't perfectly nice. You can see how lovely the yellow paintbrush is in the photo from oldest son above. They are very nice, but they don't say, "Hey look at me! Aren't I spectacular?" the way those big red Minnesota paintbrushes do.

In defense of my ignorance of the proper names for the varieties of Yukon paintbrushes, let me explain that there are over 200 species of paintbrushes, and the majority of those species grow in western North America. That's a lot of species to keep straight, and if you've done any perusing of paintbrush photos, you know there isn't much difference in the look of the different types of paintbrushes. And just to make things even more confusing, paintbrushes of the same species like to mix it up with their characteristics to keep the expert wildflower identifier on his/her toes. One plant of a particular paintbrush species will have a hairy stem, for instance, while it's supposedly identical twin living right next door will have a smooth, freshly shaven stem. Don't you love it when flowers get tricky like that?

Paintbrushes are members of the figwort family, and the colored tips that we admire aren't really flowers at all, but leafish bits. Leafish bits is a technical term, by the way, for something or other. So paintbrushes are not flowers, but flower wannabes that make a pretty good show anyway, and get an A for effort from me.

What you won't see on their report card is "plays well with others." It's not that paintbrushes don't like being with others, but that they like being with others too much. They are like clinging vines in their relationships with other plants, or even more accurately, like the mosquitoes or lice of the plant world. Yes, pretty as they are, they are parasites. They attach their roots to the roots of nearby plants and suck nourishment from them, and they'll die if you remove them from the life blood of their next-door neighbor. That means that if you decide you want paintbrushes in your wildflower garden, it's a mistake to dig up a single paintbrush plant for transplant. No, you must dig up the whole neighborhood with it, so that the paintbrush has the plants it likes to parasitize living closeby.

I've transplanted paintbrushes, and I knew enough to bring the grasses around it along with it, and my paintbrushes did fine for a couple of years, but then died out. What I didn't know is that it's only once a whole colony of paintbrushes is established that you can count on natural reseeding to keep the colony going. With the number of plants I had--three or four altogether--I needed to help nature out a little by reseeding or replanting every year if I wanted to keep paintbrushes in my garden.

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Click on photo for larger view. You'll find all of the previous wildflower posts here.

Technorati Tags: wildflowers, Yukon wildflowers, wildflower photos, Indian paintbrush

Looking Lovely in Lavender

The little Yukon wildflowers in oldest son's photo on the left are commonly called cranesbill or wild geranium. You'd be right if you said they don't look a whole lot like the so-called geraniums you have in the hanging pot on your deck. That's because your bright red potted beauty is not really a member of the geranium family, but rather the pelargonium family, and thus only a cousin to the true geraniums. The family name switcheroo came from a mix-up by botanists in the 1700s, and it's too late now to straighten thing out, so we are doomed to live in a world where the most commonly known geranium is not a geranium at all.

So much for the wild geranium name. The cranesbill name isn't obvious, either, at least not from the look of the blossom. That name comes from the seed head, which resembles, I'm told, the shape of the bill of a crane. You can judge for yourself in the picture below. The seedheads are shown on the bottom.

What do you think? They look like little pirate swords to me, but then I've never seen a crane's bill up close for comparison.

As far as I can tell, any harvesting of this plant is done for herbal medicine purposes only, and then it's used for a lot of problems you'd really prefer not to have. I think I'd rather leave them be and enjoy them for their beauty in their natural setting.

Next up is a dark lavender or blue purple Yukon wildflower that's blooming right now--the mountain larkspur, if you're Canadian, or sierra larkspur, if you're American, or delphinium glaucum, if you want to show off your Latin. And those of you who love Latin might know that the name delphinium comes from the resemblance each flower on the stalk has to a little leaping and swimming purple dolphin.

This particular type of delphinium or larkspur (and there are many types of wild delphinium) is native in western North America from Alaska down through California, and eastward as far as Alberta. It can also be found in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, but there it's not indigenous, but an introduced species. And that's a pity, because it does a nasty number on cattle who eat too much of it. Every spring on the prairies, when the larkspur tends to reach grazing height before the surrounding natural grasses, some cattle will be lost due to larkspur poisoning. It's toxic to other animals as well, like horses and sheep, but not nearly so deadly as it is to cattle, and no one understands exactly why that is.

It's because of it's bad effect on grazing cattle that delphinium glaucum has been declared a prohibited noxious weed in both the U.S. and Canada. That means you can't import the seeds, although I'm not sure what the seed import ban accomplishes, since they are native plants in both countries. If you are visiting any cattle grazing country, though, you'll want to check your pockets for stray delphinium seeds before you go, just in case. You wouldn't want to be accidently responsible for any untimely cattle deaths.

So are delphinium good for anything, besides looking tall and stately and deep purple? As you might imagine, that noxious label limits their use as food or medicine. But they do sometimes get to be a pretty blue ink, which sounds rather exciting, when the juice of their flowers is mixed with alum.

Previous related posts:

• Still Waiting for Green
• Before the Greening, the Lavender
• Into the Wild Blue
  
• The Blue Belles
• Pretty in Pink
• Hot Pink
• Stopping on Yellow
  

Technorati Tags: Yukon, yukon wildflowers, wildflowers

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Both photos by oldest son are clickable for larger viewing.

Stopping on Yellow

Here are two of the yellow coloured wildflowers you might see if you visited the Yukon right now. On the left is one little yellow arnica flower. As you can probably tell from the picture, it's closely related to sunflowers and asters. Yes, it's another member of the largest family of flowering plants--the composite family. This particular variety of arnica grows throughout the western mountains of North America, from the Yukon down through northern Mexico.

A web search for information on this wildflower quickly tells me that it is best known for it's use in herbal medicine. It's one of those "external use only" plants, rubbed on the skin in hopes of soothing all manner of owies--scrapes, bruises, sprains, muscle pain, chapped lips, irritated nostrils, acne, burns, sores, and eczema. And apparently, (Move over, Rogaine!) applied to the scalp, it will make your hair grow. It has the potential, it seems, to be one of those cures that is worse than the disease, so you may want to think twice before using it, especially up your irritated nostrils. It should come with a little warning sticker that says, "May produce severe inflammation."

On the right is another yellow wildflower. I know it doesn't look yellow in the photo--and the photo, by the way, is what it looks like right now--but it was yellow just a little while ago. It looked like this, and that's why it's called the yellow dryas. I don't know what you think, but I like them better as a little hairy fruit than in yellow flower form.

Dressed in their light lavender silky robes and golden crowns, their surname dryas seems quite appropriate. Dryas, as you know if you're up on Greek mythology, was the son of King Lycurgus, and thus a right royal myth prince. Unfortunately for young Dryas, his father went just a tad loony one day and mistook his own son for a patch of ivy and killed him. So in this young prince's memory, someone named these little whippersnappers dryas, because, I suppose, it would be next to impossible to mistake them for ivy. Unless you were loony.

Previous related posts:

• Still Waiting for Green
• Before the Greening, the Lavender
• Into the Wild Blue
  
• The Blue Belles
• Pretty in Pink
• Hot Pink
  

Technorati Tags: Yukon, yukon wildflowers, wildflowers

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Both photos by oldest son are clickable for larger viewing.

Hot Pink

We are now well into the fireweed period of the Yukon wildflower season. In many places, fireweed is seen as more nuisance than asset, and there is good reason for that. It grows throughout the northern hemisphere, and there is nothing that can compete with its ability to take over when other species are wiped out, like when there's a forest fire, for instance. So its common name is a well-earned one, since it spreads after a fire exactly like a weed.

But its mauve beauty makes it too lovely for the weed label, don't you think? Here in the Yukon, we treasure the fireweed, giving it the honor of being the official territorial flower. If you were to drive up the Alaska Highway during July, you couldn't help notice an abundance of these tall pinkish flowers growing along the sides of the highway.

In the photo above, snapped by oldest son in Kluane National Park this past weekend (click for larger viewing), only the blossoms along the bottom of the stalk are blooming. The blooms on fireweed start at the bottom and move upward toward the top as the summer progresses. Yukoners say that when the blossoms reach the top of the fireweed, summer is over, and that's a fairly accurate statement.

I've been told that honey made mostly from the nector of fireweed is especially delicious, but I've never tried it, so I can't vouch for that. Some people pick the very young shoots and leaves of the fireweed to use as salad greens or a cooked vegetable. I haven't tried that, either. I have tried fireweed tea, which is made from the dried leaves, and I found it rather bitter.

I think I'll skip the harvesting and continue to enjoy them for their simple pink beauty.

Previous related posts:

• Still Waiting for Green
• Before the Greening, the Lavender
• Into the Wild Blue
  
• The Blue Belles
• Pretty in Pink
  

Technorati Tags: Yukon, yukon wildflowers, wildflowers, fireweed

Pretty in Pink

After the blue wildflowers come the pinks--the wild roses and the fireweed. The fireweed isn't blooming enough for good photos yet (although I did see some just starting to bloom during my dog walk last Thursday), but the wild roses are in full bloom.

They're pretty and pink, but if you've ever walked along a wild rose lined trail, you know the very best thing is their perfume. I'm betting many of you have smelled them, since they grow all across the northern hemisphere in the boreal forest, and as far south as New Mexico in North America.

Another good thing about wild roses is that they're edible. For grouse, hares and small rodents, they're an important food source, and some of the bigger guys, like deer and moose, enjoy nibbling on the tender plants as well. The rose hips (or berries) are consumed by bears, rabbits and beavers, and they provide food for the birds in the winter when many other food sources are gone.

Have you ever eaten a rose hip? They taste like a very seedy little apple. You can pick them after the first frost--a touch of frost brings out the sweetness--and use them to make rose hip jelly, which is surprisingly tasty, especially with a little added lemon juice for tartness. And it'll be the prettiest jelly in your pantry, I promise.

The wild rose is also known as the prickly rose, but not by me. Why concentrate on their one negative attribute when they have so many lovely ones?

Previous related posts:

• Still Waiting for Green
• Before the Greening, the Lavender
• Into the Wild Blue
  
• The Blue Belles
  

Photo by oldest son. Click on it for a bigger view.

Other recent wildflower posts: A Sparrow's Home has a display of PEI's wild lupines, which come in both blue and pink.

Technorati Tags: wild flowers, Yukon, wild roses

The Blue Belles

As promised, here's a photo of the other blue wildflower that's blooming right now. Yesterday I called it tall lungwort, but that's just one of it's names--the one that makes it sound most like a deadly disease. I prefer to call them languid ladies, because they look like Victorian southern belles in ball gowns, don't they? Yesterday as I tried to get this photo, they were not languid at all, but were energetically dancing in the wind. Perhaps there was a ball I was not invited to.

The tall lungwort are also known as northern bluebells or chiming bells. I like the name languid ladies best, since I grew up calling harebells by the bluebell name, and I'm not about to stop now. Harebells grow here, too, but I haven't seen any yet this year. They bloom, I think, a little later in the season.

If you like eating wild plants, you'll be happy to know that as a member of the borage family, these girls are edible. You can add the little ladies to salads, and, no, they don't taste like chicken! They taste like fish. The leaves can be steeped for a delicately fishy tasting tea, as well. At one time, the tea was thought to be useful for treating lung diseases. And now you know where the lungwort name cames from.

Technorati Tags: wild flowers, yukon, tall lungwort, languid ladies

Into the Wild Blue

The lavender of the crocuses is gone, and we're now in the blue period of the seasonal wildflower show.

The flowers on the right are wild lupines. Texans call their wild lupines bluebonnets, which sounds so much more descriptive and interesting, doesn't it? They've given these beauties the honor of being their state flower, too.

Lupines are legumes, which means they are related to peas and beans and peanuts. Each one of those little blooms on the stock grows into a pea pod like seed packet. You don't want to eat the seeds of these legume pods, however, since they contain a bitter poison.

Another blue wildflower blooming now is Jacob's ladder (below), named for their ladder-like leaves. There are places on my regular dog-walking trail around the subdivision where entire hillsides are blue with a low carpet of blooming Jacob's ladder.

I have yet another blue wildflower blooming in the yard--tall lungwort (Don't worry, it has much better names than that, too!)--but I don't have photos yet, so I'll post photos and a little description of it some other day.

What comes after the blue period? Next up is the pinks, which I would expect to begin blooming within a couple of weeks.

Previous related posts:

• Still Waiting for Green
• Before the Greening, the Lavender

Both photos are by oldest son.

Technorati Tags: wild flowers, yukon, Jacob's ladder, lupine

Before the Greening, the Lavender

The first real sign of spring's new life in the Yukon is the lavender of the little pasque flowers.* People here most often call them crocuses, but while they do look a little like crocuses, and they come first thing in the spring like crocuses do, they're not really crocuses. It's their early spring flowering that is the reason behind several of the common names for this wildflower, like May Day flower, Easter flower and spring crocus. The word pasque itself, of course, refers to Easter or the passover.

The Blackfoot Indian called these flowers napi, which translates to "old man" in English. If you look at the photograph above (snapped by my son, by the way), you'll can see why they found this name appropriate. More officially, however, they're called pulsatilla vulgaris, which makes them sound a little naughty, but vulgaris simply means they are the vulgar (or common) form of the pulsatilla family, the family so-named because of the pulsing that these flowers do in the spring wind.

And they aren't called common for nothing. You'll find wild pasque flowers across western North America, from Utah up through Alaska and as far west as Illinois. They prefer prairies as their habitat, and two prairie places--South Dakota and Manitoba--have declared the pasque flower their official flower. Here in the Yukon, you'll find them mostly in clearings of wooded foothills.

Sometimes people try to transplant these little beauties to their home gardens, but more often than not, this doesn't work. These are plants that prefer their soil hard and untilled, and the soil of flowerbeds is just too soft and cushy for them. My neighbor managed to grow a couple of wild pasque flowers in her wildflower garden, although she had to wait several years before her plants flowered. Because they don't grow well in cultivated soil, there is some worry that as more and more land is tilled for farmland in the prairies, the pasque flower may eventually disappear altogether from the grasslands there.

However, since most of the areas where crocuses grow in the Yukon are no good for either farming or building, there's not much chance they'll die out here. The biggest enemy of the Yukon pasque flower is enthusiastic children. Little girls, in particular, can't resist them, and love to pick them to bring home to their mothers by the ice cream bucketsful. At least that's they way things went at our house.

*The green in the photo is the evergreen bearberry plant.