Happy 2016!  We will soon be looking forward to spring, warm sun, soft breezes and May flowers. I have been thinking back to the seasonal changes of other years in our area of the Okanagan Valley.

Each year a new family of Coyote puppies shows up in the Powers Creek Valley. I have searched for their den repeatedly, always without success and I think that it must be somewhere in the northeast part of Glen Canyon Park, in an area that was most recently added to the park - land that has been untended for some years and has become an impenetrable jungle of wild blackberry vines 

Each summer the first high-pitched puppy yips and howls comes from that area, as the pups get old enough to join the Coyote chorus. But I have found an area near the creek where the puppies often come to play. It is a cleared area of sandy soil under a shady bower of Douglas Maples, between the creek and an old fallen cottonwood tree. Like a child’s sandbox, there is a hole to dig in and a stump on which to play “king of the castle”. I have been collecting short videos of their play for a couple of years and Mark has just linked a number of these into a longer video:

I hope you enjoy it (It has sound).  

Lars.