Through my long lens pretty much all I could see was dust and smoke. There were combines churning across the fields east of Trochu and I could just make them out with my unaided eyes. But the long lens compressed all that atmosphere between me and the machines, making the machines appear as nothing much more than wobbling blurs.

At that point, though, it was getting close to five in the afternoon of this hot, still September day and the smoke and dust had had plenty of time to coalesce. Go back a few hours and it was a different story.

I could already tell there was smoke in the air when I stopped to photograph a pretty irrigation canal east of Irricana. While it hadn't really settled in yet, there was a kind of beige haze around the morning sun and the shadows lacked that crisp look like they often do on a late-summer morning like this.

There was definitely smoke in the air. But it did nothing to diminish the loveliness of the morning.

The morning sun was still bright and the thin smoke added a bit of warmness to it. A young coyote with a skinny tail paused to give me a look from a pasture in shades of green and brown while down the road a flock of iridescent starlings lined a fence beside a pasture. There were Brewer's blackbirds and grackles among them, too, all of them cackling and chirping.

I was watching for combines out in the fields as I drove along but so far there were none. Several of the fields here along the Rosebud River valley had already been cut but there was standing grain as I rolled further north past Carbon and on toward Three Hills. Too much moisture in the fields keeping the machines idle? Maybe.

But I did find combines chewing through a field right on the outskirts of Three Hills. There were three of them working with the grain wagon scuttling back and forth between them as their hoppers filled. I've seen it a thousand times but I always find it fascinating to watch these huge machines.

Heading east from there, though, there was nothing moving in the fields at all. Plenty of standing grain, a lot of swathed fields, too, but no machines. A little strange for such a warm, calm day. Maybe they'd be out later.

In the meantime, I headed down to Tolman Bridge and the nice little campground there.

East of Trochu on the way to Rumsey and points east, Tolman Bridge crosses the badlands-flanked Red Deer River at a spot where the valley widens. Sagebrush and prairie grass line the pastures and eroded coulees -- no grain fields down here -- while cottonwoods and copses of saskatoons, willows, chokecherries and osier dogwood cover the banks of the river.

And it was those trees and shrubs that I was here to see.

I was hoping I might find a bit more autumn colour than what was there but things were still pretty green. Nothing wrong with that, it was still nice. In another week or so, it will be ablaze with yellows and reds.

But in place of fall colour, I found birds. There were the usual magpies and crows, a raven flying by. I even heard a Swainson's hawk screeching. I figured those guys would have been moving south by now.

Same with the warblers but, no, some of them were still around, too. They were hard to see among the leaves but I managed a picture of a young yellow-rumped warbler. The birdsong app on my phone identified a few more, too, including an orange-crowned warbler and a black-throated green warbler. Never even heard of the latter one.

There was a squirrel there, too. I associate them more with the mountains and foothills but there it was, staring at me from between the leaves.

I was still hoping to find a bit more leaf colour, though, so I headed a little ways further north to Dry Island Buffalo Jump to see what I could find. The accessible part of the park sits on the south-facing side of the river valley and the section here where the cliffs flatten out before the final descent to the Red Deer River on the valley floor have copses of aspens growing along the dips where springs keep the soil damp.

Aspens tend to turn colour a bit ahead of cottonwoods and other trees so I was hoping the aspens here might have edged that direction. As I drove along, though, I could see it wasn't likely. Aspens are common here in this transition zone where the grasslands meet the parklands and those aspens were still pretty green.

But I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw as I hit the lip of the valley.

The aspens had just begun to turn but among them were splashes of red and orange from the stands of saskatoons and chokecherries. Willows in the wet areas had turned a soft yellow. The grass on the hillsides was amber and gold while the sage added a hint of silver.

Smoke, now much heavier, obscured the views further down the valley but once I got to the river valley, that didn't matter.

Down here the light was scattered among the greens, reds and purples of the low leaves and tinted a soft green by the leaves overhead. Desiccated saskatoons -- prairie raisins! -- clung to their stalks among the still-green leaves while chokecherries, a little wrinkly but still plump, hung in purple clusters. The buffaloberries were all gorgeously red.

The brightest leaves, as always, were on the dossier dogwoods and their white berries provided a nice counterpoint to the scarlet tones. My favourites, though, were the leaves in transition, the ones that were still mostly green but with patches and streaks of the anthocyanins and carotenoids beginning to show through.

There weren't as many birds here as back at Tolman Bridge but chickadees abounded and the app heard goldfinches and white-throated sparrows as well. No squirrels that I could see but a rustling among the leaves turned out to be caused by a tiny chipmunk that bounced out onto the grass and stopped to eat.

Back out of the valley, the smoke was even thicker now. But far off on the edge of the clear air I could see a dust cloud rising. Had to be combines.

Turned out to be a trio of them from the nearby Huxley Hutterite Colony working a very dusty crop of what might have been, I dunno, lentils? Something very low and with a lot of wild oats that came out the backs of the combines in a dark, gritty cloud.

But at least the combines were going now and I could start to get a few more pictures. Things toughened up a bit as I headed into the next valley to the south, though.

A half-dozen combines were working on various fields but the valley was nearly solid with smoke and dust. And it wasn't going anywhere, either. A truck coming toward me on a gravel road was raising a plume of dust that spread out and hung behind it in the nearly still air. Smoke and harvest dust obscured everything beyond. With my shorter lens I could make out combines in the fields a couple of kilometres away but with the longer lens, they were just greyish blobs.

And it continued that way as I rolled on south.

The combines that I'd seen at Three Hills earlier were done with their field but there were more working between there and Swalwell. Unlike my farming-adjacent days of nearly 60 years ago when combines worked singly and often without the luxury of a cab to keep the dust off the driver, teams of combines were working the fields. A tractor-towed grain wagon ran back and forth between the behemoths allowing them to unburden their loads and keep harvesting away.

But mixed with the smoke, the dust they kicked up made them hard to see unless I was right beside them. I did find one group of them cutting wheat in a valley just south of Three Hills, though, and looking down on them from a ridge, I could more clearly see them doing their mechanical dance.

I spent 20 minutes there watching them mow down the field, the combines moving back and forth across the crop, running in straight, no doubt GPS-controlled, lines in and out of each other's dust. Big trucks were pulled up on the road on the far side of the field awaiting the arrival of the grain wagon that spun in a swirl of its own dust between the combines and carried the harvested grain to trailers that would whisk it away.

Finally, with one last sweep of its hungry maw, a combine ate up the last rectangle of standing grain, inhaling it like me snagging the last Nanaimo bar off a dessert tray. And the field was done.

It was nearly six now and the sun was sinking fast so I headed on through Swalwell and down to the dam where I found a flock of longspurs flying around over the local geese and coots, and then beyond to the Kneehill Creek valley where I had to wait for a pair of combines to pass as they headed for the next field.

There were still summertime birds like vesper and song sparrows around, Swainson's and redtail hawks. Blue herons and pelicans further on toward Beiseker and Irricana. At a pasture back in the Rosebud River valley I found a huge flock of grackles and blackbirds that were grabbing flying bugs out of the air. Through my lens I could see them as bright blobs against the sunset sky.

And then, a few minutes later, just after 7 p.m., the sun dropped to the horizon, a bright yellow orb leaving behind a sky turned orange by the smoke and dust in the air. The combines still roared on even as the dusk turned to dark.

And so did I.

Through the dust and smoke, I headed on back to town.