My first Canadian lifer was the Red Bird, the "Devil's Bird", the Northern Cardinal. Here is a short tale of our first encounter as the kettle boiled for morning tea. (Drawings and photographs are my own) In an earlier post I wrote about the first bird, a European Dipper, that [...]
A Pretty Nice Little Town Baie-D'Urfé is a pretty nice little town to spend time in. This evening the Citizens' Association coordinated a switching on of the lights event focused on a gorgeous Winter Tree set up in the Fritz Park bandstand. In the past week several of our neighbouring towns have [...]
Built in 1705, still occasionally a working windmill on the eastern tip of Ile-Perrot just across the river from home. It's unusual in being a fortified windmill with narrow slots in the walls to shoot back at attacking Iroquois ... whether they did attack I can't say but there was a fear of such [...]
A couple of weeks ago a knowledgeable friend (thanks Ron) drew my attention to a tall and mature Cottonwood tree growing beside the local cemetery. Way, way up high he said “it looks like there is a birch tree growing out of a crack or fork in the main trunk”. Finally we got [...]
This is the first of what will probably be a very occasional series of posts, mostly forming a lifelong, personal wildlife memoire. Sightings that are personally meaningful, or scientifically important or which simply have a fun story attached to their finding. One day it may merge with others into a collection in [...]
It took a lot of organisation to ensure that the first snowfall of the winter came yesterday, just one day before our first weekly duty session at the MBO (bird banding station). Along with a couple of friends who do the same on another day of the week, we will be regularly visiting [...]
Introducing Favourite Artists I have read that the basic arts of drawing are no longer much taught in a number of art schools and in the ones that do still offer the subject, it is just one option amongst many. A shame - a great shame if this really is the case. I [...]
The clacks went back this weekend ... darker afternoons for all.
The All Hallows Flower Count A quarter century ago when we still lived in England we used to record how many plants were still in flower at Christmas. In Quebec that’s always going to be zero but in recent years J has taken to making an annual list of the flowers still [...]
Remember - we are always being watched ...