Those are sandhill cranes Thomas. They were passing over only on 9/11. They occasionally drop onto the gravel bars for some grit and leave tracks that look more like small dinosaur tracks than bird...
The butterfly is interesting also. It's a Comptons Tortise shell and they've only been in Alaska since 2002. Unlike other lepidoptera, they hibernate as a complete butterfly by crawling into cracks in trees and houses and come back out in spring. I know of one guy who flushed ~1500 of them out of his attic late one fall. I have a couple come out in mid winter just about every year and fly around inside the house. I put out a sugar water feeding station on the windowsill, which they seem to like but they never survive long, unfortunately. I found one north of Nome in 2006, which is the northernmost and westernmost known Alaskan occurrence so far. They are the only butterfly still flying around here for sure. I had two working my campsite while I was hunting. They liked my cooking area and spent some time lapping up spilled rice cooking juice and roosting under the little side table on my chair and following me around the riverbed. Pic below is one of them mopping up rice juice... now if I could only train them to work on the dishes...
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01-20-2015, 04:40 PM
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