Farms, Wind Farms, Golden Eagles, and Cemeteries
The explorer John Palliser, while traversing portions of the Canadian prairie in southwest Saskatchewan and southeast Alberta, concluded that the land around him was essentially uninhabitable. Depending on the time of year it was too hot, too dry, too windy, or too cold for successful human habitation. The area became known as the Palliser triangle, and against the good explorer’s advice, it was where my great grandparents, Emil and Julia Erickson, established a southwest Saskatchewan homestead in 1910.
Despite the meteorological forces aligned against them, my ancestors were successful. Their first good harvests were augmented by high prices for cereal crops during World War I, and the operation continues today under the stewardship of my uncle and cousins. “The farm”, as it has come to be known in our family, and the land around it—short-grass prairie where it’s not cultivated, millions of acres of wheat, barley, canola, lentils where it is—have always been special to me. To an inexperienced eye the landscape can look bleak and uninteresting, and the climate can be all the things John Palliser warned of, but if you spend some time and care to look around you will see it bursting with life. I have seen countless geese and sandhill cranes as they migrate south for the winter, snowy owls and great horned owls, noisy, whip-smart magpies, deer and pronghorn antelope, foxes and coyotes, skunks and porcupines, ringneck pheasants, sharptail grouse, hungarian partridge, and one majestic golden eagle.
The eagle encounter happened about 25 years ago, before the first of our children was born. It was the early part of a return journey from the farm to our home in south Louisiana. We were driving back to Calgary and had crossed over into southeast Alberta. The highway dipped into the valley of the South Saskatchewan River and then climbed gently past the coulees and breaks that cut the valley walls. As the road crested and the endless prairie shimmered in a warm fall sun I saw something out of place in the corner of my eye. There were no cars approaching so I turned my head to identify what I’d seen. As my eyes focused I immediately hit the brakes. Irene was reading.
“What’s wrong?” she gasped, and braced for an impact.
“No,” I said. “It’s nothing. Well, not nothing, but there’s no danger. I just saw this bird. This huge bird.” I pulled the car to a stop on the shoulder of the road and turned in my seat so I could see out the rear window.
As she turned her head she said “why would you stop for a bird?” And then, “oh.”
I put the car in reverse and backed slowly along the side of the road until the feathered giant was directly to our right. “What is it?” she asked.
“An eagle,” I answered. I could see a hooked beak and tapered neck. “But I’m not sure what kind.” Having once been involved in the rescue of a juvenile bald eagle that had fallen from its nest I thought perhaps that’s what it was. But a juvenile bald eagle, though brown like the bird we observed, has a mottled, teenage, unfinished look to it. This bird looked richer, mature, golden.
It sat on a fencepost weathered white as bone. Sagging barbwire drooped to either side. It faced away from us, but its head was turned to give a profile. The wind pushed from behind it and caught in its feathers, lifting them in gentle waves. It was a rich, burnished brown and the sun gave it golden highlights the color of a wheat field just before harvest. We could see one fierce eye that viewed us, earthbound humans, with what seemed a mixture of boredom and contempt.
“I think it’s a golden eagle. I’ve never seen one before. I’m going to try and get a picture.”
This being the time before cell phones I slipped out the driver’s door and retrieved our 35mm camera from the back seat. I took a few pictures, but I remember being disappointed in them. Without a big lens and a tripod they didn’t capture what we saw: the size, the beautiful color, the prairie wind lifting its feathers. I was sorry to drive away, but we had to get home.
We’ve driven through that same part of Alberta many times since that encounter. Until this year, not much changed.
Side note: Highway 555 between the hamlet of Jenner, AB and highway 41 near the Saskatchewan border is as close to the definition of the “train station” as depicted on the hit television show “Yellowstone” as you are ever likely to find. There used to be an RCMP depot in Jenner but it’s gone now. To the south of the highway is a vast air weapons range that extends almost all the way to Medicine Hat, a small city on the Trans-Canada highway. It is the Palliser Triangle the way John Palliser himself imagined it—devoid of any human habitation whatsoever. The Red Deer River valley is a short distance to the north and its remote coulees are accessible by any number of dirt roads that lead to it. If you need to get rid of something, this is the place. If you have a sports car you need to exercise, this is the place. Just don’t do your high performance driving at night. There are deer and antelope everywhere.
As I was saying, our journeys from Calgary to the farm have looked the same for near on three decades. This year however, as my son and I turned right onto highway 555, there was something different. Just east of Jenner, north of the highway, there are windmills as far as you can see. It’s a new installation. None of the blades were turning. Some of the windmills were still being constructed. Augmenting the giant turbines were a few football fields worth of solar panels. Maybe there are more solar panels scattered through the installation but these were all I could see from the road.
From a distance, I wouldn’t say that wind turbines are ugly. When you can’t hear them their form and movement evoke an elegant simplicity that is unfortunately at odds with the inefficiency, expense, and complexity they add to a modern power grid. From a distance we may not think of the massive amount of steel, cement, plastic, copper, oil, and diesel fuel involved in their manufacture, transportation, and operation that in their absence could be used for something else of value to humanity.
Up close their size and scale become apparent. The landscape beneath them is fundamentally changed. The vistas are not the same; there is industrial noise where before there was only the rush of wind, the fluting of meadowlarks, coyotes yipping. Vast prairie becomes vast industrial park. If our goal is to tread lightly on this earth this doesn’t seem like the way to go. And truly, one of the first things I thought of when they came into view was that beautiful golden eagle I had once seen on a fence post not far down the road. Would one of its descendants be so unlucky as to be chopped in half by a turbine blade as it soared on a prairie wind, eyes riveted to the earth searching for an unwitting rabbit? Given that annual estimates of Golden Eagle mortality from wind turbine strikes have ranged as high as 100 plus in the Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area in California it’s hard to imagine it won’t happen. For an entertaining read that contains a side plot on the wind industry and what might transpire should a few too many protected raptors not make it through the killing fields may I recommend “The Disappeared”, which is book number 18 in the fabulous series of Joe Pickett novels by C.J. Box.
Just one of the fundamental problems with all wind and solar installations is the medieval level of energy density, which necessitates the use of huge tracts of land to produce electricity at a scale that matters. Increasingly, as documented by Robert Bryce in this essay at Real Clear Energy,
rural communities are rejecting the transformation of the landscapes that are their homes and their livelihoods. It is often written that communities on the margins will suffer the worst effects of climate change, and that “climate justice” demands swift and radical transformation of our energy systems. The inhabitants of farms and small towns are often as much on the margin as anyone, and for them, and for the Golden Eagles, the transformation itself is an injustice.
One of the things we always do when we visit the farm is take a side trip to the Portreeve cemetery. Portreeve was the pioneer village closest to the farm and the place where my mother and grandparents attended school. When I was a young boy Portreeve still had a small general store and a few other businesses, but it was already dying. Today there is a grain elevator, a small building that houses the post office, and one occupied house. An old wooden skating rink is falling in on itself. Most of the houses are gone. Hedges that were once trimmed neatly fill the old town lots with gnarled foliage that looks like twisted grey bones when the leaves fall in autumn.
The cemetery is on the edge of the town and kept neatly by a few individuals who are descendants of the original homesteading families. My great grandparents are buried there, my grandparents as well. There is a headstone for my father who grew up on a farm in a different part of the province but who grew to love this farm as if it were home. There is a grave for my cousin Andrea who died tragically at a young age. And there is the whole pioneer history of the area—the original homesteaders who broke the sod and built communities, their offspring who served in World War I and World War II and took over the farms when they came home, and now the generations that have shepherded their vocation through the drastic changes of the modern world. Our time there is solemn but uplifting as we acknowledge the achievements of our family and friends and the love and meaning they brought to our lives.
We visit in the fall. When we hit it right the sky is a perfect blue, fainter at the horizon, deeper above, unblemished by even a wisp of cloud. Sometimes we hear the wind as it brushes the tops of the short prairie grass. Sometimes a flock of sandhill cranes croaks musically overhead. The windmills along highway 555 in Alberta are not so far away. I hope they never make it across the border.
image by Steve Crowhurst from Pixabay