Manning Park Mammals

It was a bird blitz, after all, but it was impossible to ignore the fuzzy vertebrates that inhabit Manning Park. Alison and I missed Black Bear, but greatly enjoyed getting to see several others of the park’s mammals.

The largest were also among the commonest: Mule Deer, the bucks in velvet, were omnipresent on the roads in and around the park; alertness paid off more than once as we drove home Sunday morning.

Squirrels were in fine supply, too. Red Squirrels were chattering and trilling everywhere in the woods, and a small chipmunk–Red-tailed? Yellow Pine?–was almost literally underfoot whenever we crossed a patch of rock. We didn’t get to see any marmots, but Columbia Ground-Squirrels, big and cheeky, quite made up for it.

These guys, Clark’s Nutcrackers, and Brown-headed Cowbirds make a great living off the charmed tourists arriving at the lodge; I would never feed one myself, of course, but I did enjoy having them nibble at my fingers for a moment before turning away in disappointment.

On Friday evening we were coming down from Strawberry Flats when I mentioned that the area looked great for Snowshoe Hares; I must somehow, at some low level of consciousness, have seen the one sitting on the roadside a few feet down. We saw another Sunday morning at the misleadingly named Sunshine Valley; it too bounded off before I could get a photo, but the blur I did manage to record shows the creature’s eponymous feature well enough.

Another mammal was even more successful in evading the searching lens. The placid surface of Twenty-minute Lake was broken early in the morning by the wake of a River Otter, seeking frogs and fish and ducklings for breakfast. A classic Cascades sight!