GNP Webcam and Google Earth

St. Mary Webcam Image and Google Earth screen capture of the Divide Creek alluvial fan.

An Optical Illusion?
March 11, 2009

Ok, here's a question that keeps coming up. Is the St. Mary Cam level or not? It certainly looks like everything is slanted to the right and the lake is draining off the end of the image. Is it? I'm thinking that it's an optical illusion and that the ground really is slanted to the right there. Check out the light pole on the extreme left of the image. It appears to be perfectly straight up and down. Today there is an icicle hanging off the webcam housing and it too appears to be vertical. It's an odd effect seeing both of those things juxtaposed together.

The meadow out in the view is part of an alluvial fan that has formed by the constant flooding of Divide Creek. Divide Creek flows from Divide Mountain (to the left and out of the webcam image, to the right in the Google Earth shot) through that meadow and connects with the St. Mary River which flows out of St. Mary Lake. In fact, Divide Creek forms part of the park boundary at this location. Alluvial fans characteristically are higher upstream and then fan out and flatten as the soil and gravels accumulate over a broad area. Check out Google Earth and you will see it clearly. For some great alluvial fan images use Google Earth to look at Death Valley...those are classics.

So, back to the image from the cam. I think what we are seeing is a true representation of the view from St. Mary Visitor Center. We see the gentle slope of the meadow, the St. Mary River, which angles it's way past the Going-to-the-Sun Road on its way to Lower St. Mary Lake, and way in the distance the far shore of St. Mary Lake at the base of Red Eagle Mountain.

Thanks to winter and the icicle it makes this puzzle easier to understand!

photo by David Restivo

housing area deer

Cold, Cold, Cold
March 10, 2009

I'm not sure what happened. No sooner do I write a blog about "Hello Spring" and we end up with a brutally cold day. It was 2 below here at HQ this morning on the way to work. The Varied Thrushes from my last blog have been completely silent for the last couple of days. Maybe they were a couple of early arrivals trying to nab the best nest sites. If so I think they gambled wrong. I did see three birds outside the office window today in the big spruce tree. They were hopping around from branch to branch and fluffed out to probably double their size. It was snowing and blowing so hard I couldn't tell what they were...robins I think.

Yesterday as I was doing the evening dishes I looked out the kitchen window and a deer was standing as tall as it could, belly deep in snow, and eating the needles off the evergreens behind the house. You know it's bad when they have to eat those. However they are somewhat protected hanging out in the housing area. I say somewhat because the trail at the end of my street along the Flathead River was closed last week due to mountain lions. Two deer carcasses were discovered along the trail, within a half mile or so of here. Both apparently had been killed by mountain lions. We do have a lot (although not quite as many as last week now) of deer in the immediate vicinity of the housing area, so I suppose it's not hard to imagine that the lions would come and search out some easy prey.

Some residents of the housing area have reported hearing some raucous coyote activity in the evenings. Maybe there's part of a left over carcass of something out there that they are partying over. I haven't heard them yet, but they have kept others awake at night with the yipping and yapping. When it's a hard winter for some animals, it's an easy time for others.

For me, I'm ready for some warmer weather. I'll be in Los Angeles in a couple of weeks taking a bit of a break from the cold. I wonder what it's like in a place with no winter?

NPS photo

Varied Thrush

So Long to the Snowmen
Hello Spring
March 5, 2009

NOTE: When I started writing this, this morning it was just snowing lightly. It looks like a full on winter storm outside right now, but I decided to post this anyway. Maybe this is just temporary...maybe!

You probably have noticed by now that the "Snowball Cam" has been replaced by a second Headquarters Cam. Snowball and friends have melted into the background for the remainder of the winter. They were fun while they were here and a HUGE hit with everyone that visited the site. I even had some great emails regarding the appropriate use of the name snowman vs snowpeople, etc... Many of them were just down-right funny and I wish I could share them here...but for many reasons, I can't. Let's just say that the anonymous nature of the Internet allows for tremendous freedom of speech. Thank you all for the comments, and thanks for your overwhelming support of our little friends outside the building. Now that it's getting into March their habitat needs have changed enough to make their continued survival here precarious.

Speaking of habitat changes, people here have been hearing the haunting call of the Varied Thrush for the last couple of days. It's one of the sure signs of Spring, although I imagine the thrushes are wondering if they didn't get here a couple of days early, considering today's weather outside. The song is a melodic whistle of varying pitches (hence the name) and very beautiful to hear. Do an Internet search for them and you can find a lot of sites about them, some of which have audio files of their calls. One that came up for me in my search was the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

These robin sized birds spend the winter a bit further south in California and west of here in Washington and a bit of northern Idaho. In summer they migrate a bit further east to the Rockies of Montana and Idaho and up into Canada and Alaska.

I haven't heard one yet, but I hope to soon. I always know when Spring is just around the corner when I can wake up to the Varied Thrush in the backyard, singing.