We'd planned to join up with the Kettle River crowd tomorrow/tonight, but Nola's done something to her back. It's minor, but backs can be funny. So we packed as for a few days' comping and drove to Kate & Lisa's place in Kelowna. They're right on Okanagan Lake, next door to at least one orchard. I'm outside on the side patio right now; it's early morning and I'm surrounded by hordes of birds.
Surprised two quail coming out of the house & watched them run up the path and out a gap in the fence. They made surprised quail noises for a long time after.
Went swimming in the lake yesterday evening after we parked and unloaded. The water was cold, but nice. Lisa has been home a week on leave; she goes back to her job early Monday morning. They're taking samples of soil & plant life, especially forests, in the northern part of the province, to supplement & correct aerial surveys. She showed us photos, beautiful scenes of mountains, green rolling valleys and rivers, all with no roads or power lines and certainly no houses. The bears own it all.
She told us a story of flying out to one section, where the ground cover was too bushy for the helicopter to land them, so they winched one fellow down with a chainsaw to clear out a landing spot. Meanwhile, the rest of them flew off to wait on a nearby hill. They didn't realize that he'd left his walkie-talkie behind in the copter.
After about twenty minutes, they flew back to see how he was getting on. He'd not cleared much at all, but was waving them to come down anyway. They circled him, trying to figure out what he was after; they couldn't land yet and he must've known that, they thought. But they could see him alternating between waving at them and brandishing his chainsaw toward some brush. They got closer, and he put the saw down for a moment, hunched his shoulders so that his arms hung slack, and shuffled a bit in place before snatching up the saw again.
The folks in the copter stared at him and at each other, then almost all together got it. There was a bear down there.
So they sent the winch down and got him aboard again. He was covered in sweat. He told them the bear had begun circling him as soon as the helicopter had left, and that he'd bluffed it with the saw, but that had been becoming less and less effective. They crossed that spot off the list as too dangerous and went somewhere else for the survey.
Another time, she said they were checking a section from the air and counted five bears, one being a sow with cubs. That section went right off the list entirely.
Right now I'm on my third cup of coffee and watching the colours change on the lake They're shifting between lavender to bright sapphire and back. Very high cloud cover which will probably burn off.
(I've just been buzzed by a curious hummingbird.)
