are back on the Waterton grasslands this summer, moving across native fescue within sight of Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump — the cliff where Niitsitapi hunters drove bison for at least 6,000 years. These are managed animals now, not the billions that once darkened the plains, but they stand on the same ground and eat the same grasses their ancestors knew.
This week brought confirmation of in the same landscape. The presence of both predator and prey — the old megafauna guild, reassembled in compressed form — speaks to what restoration can accomplish. The ecology is not what it was before the fur trade and the slaughter; the numbers are modest by historical standards. But the guild itself, the functional whole, is no longer absent. The grassland is beginning to remember what it held.
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The threespine stickleback, a small armored fish common in these creek systems, is a reliable prey item during this period. It is a shallow-water fish, quick, but it holds in predictable places: slack water behind boulders, the inside bends of the channel, the margins where current slows. A kingfisher that has hunted a stretch of creek for several seasons knows these spots. It works them in sequence, checking each one, moving on if nothing shows, returning later. The hunting is methodical in a way that is easy to overlook if you are only watching for the dive.
The light is long right now, and the kingfisher uses it. Hunting begins early, before the air warms and the surface glare builds, and continues into the long evening. On a clear day this close to the solstice, the bird has more usable light than at any other point in the year. Watch the snags and low branches along the bank. The kingfisher will be there, still, watching down into the water, and the creek will be moving underneath it.
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along the riparian edges, a
browsing nearby, a
heard at dusk. Ordinary prairie and riparian life, appearing to do fine. But that's only as far as anyone can currently see, and on this landscape, seeing only half the picture has never been enough.
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