A day of Spring gifts – swans and aurora
Although I’m not nearly finished showing you the Arctic trip, it’s Spring and the weather is wonderful, so there are other things happening that I also want to show you. I probably wouldn’t have posted about our outing to photograph the migrating swans yesterday, but then as I went to bed an aurora show began, and being able to combine those two things in a single day made it very special.
Cathy and I had a meeting in town yesterday morning, and I took all the gear I needed to go on a swan hunt right after that. I called a friend and asked if she wanted join me, and getting an answer in the affirmative, we hit the road at about 1:30. I suggested that we drive the Carcross-Tagish loop, as swans and caribou were both possible. The first Prairie crocuses have started to appear, so we might even see some of them, which is always a big deal to some of us.
At 2:10 we were on the Alaska Highway, had passed through half the caribou range and were nearing Jake’s Corner, where we would turn onto the Tagish Road.
The Tagish Bridge was intended to be our first stop, and while there were hundreds of swans as expected, most were far away, and the closer ones were not in good positions to photograph, being partially hidden by the shore ice.
Almost 30 swans are visible in this photo, most on the ice on the far shore.
We decided to walk along the shore ice to get in a better location, watching very carefully for any sign that we might be disturbing any of the swans.
When we reached an area where brush along the shore allowed for a somewhat I hidden approach, I walked through it, and this was the swan’s reaction – or lack of. They all went to sleep on this beautiful warm afternoon 🙂
Sleeping swans aren’t great photo subjects, so we went back to the truck and continued on. The next photo looks down the river from the bridge.
At the west end of the bridge is a recreation area, and there was one active swan very close to it, so we stopped in there, greeted by the common bum shot 🙂
Those views are always eventually followed by ones like this…
Right at 3:00, I took a final photo looking down the river and then we continued on to Carcross.
There were a few swans on Nares Lake at Carcross, but a south wind meant that there were none at what is often the best viewing location, the footbridge. So, a couple of photos looking up Lake Bennett and we headed home. Although the swan photography hadn’t been great, we did get to spend some time with the majestic birds, and it was a sunny, warm and scenic drive, so all in all a fine afternoon.
As I was going to bed just before 11:00 last night, I checked the sky as I usually do, and there was an odd shape/light. I thought it might just be a jet trail, but could also be an aurora starting, so put on my aurora lens for a test shot, as the camera defines aurora light better than our eyes do. At 10:54 I still wasn’t certain what it was.
Just 3 minutes later, the pattern had spread, and it was clearly an aurora show starting, so I posted on my Aurora Alert group, as none of the other 4,201 members had noticed it yet.
The aurora grew and got brighter fairly quickly – the next photo was shot 14 minutes after the first one.
The aurora was also shifting position to the northeast and lower to the horizon, so I moved from the back deck to the driveway, which isn’t a particularly good shooting position due to wires and the neighbour’s security lighting.
One last photo at 11:21 and then I went to bed. I saw on the Alert group that it returned at about 04:00 this morning, but with the night skies getting brighter and brighter now, this might have been my last aurora show of the season.
This is post #1,574 since the blog opened on April 25, 2006, and those posts have a total of 24,380 photos.
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As you said a fine afternoon. Even though I am reading the post a month later, the beauty of that scenic drive to see the swans… so nice! Other than your many fine posts with auroras, do you have any other interest in the night sky? (and thinking NOT during the warmer months with all the extra light in the sky during normal awake hours)
Yes, I love the night sky and have many star photos, with the Milky Way of course a favourite subject. They don’t show well in blog-sized images, though, so I rarely post them here. Here’s one post, though, from 7 years ago – https://explorenorthblog.com/night-sky-photography-fun-stars-milky-way-and-glow-sticks/
Thanks!… and those last few photos, impressive and even more being on a compact sensor camera? My son’s newer iPhone took a few 80mb night time shots of the Milky Way… hard to share them, but like with the Aurora they see things we do not see as much.
Absolutely great! Powerful Nature! A combination of 3 if not 4 attractions. Somehow white swans (I’m always curious when is the best time to see them on the March Lake at Swan Haven/ as April too early and Nov too late for regular tourist activities), white mountains along the half white road and blue and green skies with “dancing lights”. So it is like animate nature – birds, inanimate nature – as the mountains and something I between- Aurora Borealis. Plus the 4th one: Yukon. Glad you’ve shared. Good to see and read. And still waiting for the Arctic Adventure. Thank you.
Thank you – I’m glad you enjoyed it. Unfortunately there are no swans readily visible during the tourist season, as they’re in their Arctic summer residences – from the air during the summer, you can see that each far-north lake has a pair of swans, except large lakes which may get more.