This an advance notification ... some months ago I mentioned that I am working on a project to write and publish a book currently with the title of “1001 Species” – an illustrated natural history of a small town" It's coming along quite nicely and I hope to have it out in [...]
Hudson Christmas Bird Count (Route 2) 2021 This is probably the 20th year that J and I have done the annual Christmas Bird Count centred on Hudson, and all but the first year we have censused the same route. It's unusual in that there is far more driving than walking - not a [...]
Temperatures have been up and down like a yo-yo recently and after a bit of snow last night this morning was one of the warmer times so the snow was giving off "snow mist" with a white hazy fog amongst the trees when we went out to see birds. A late lurking Tufted [...]
The beginning of December brings with it our return to winter birding tasks - tasks we spend all summer, especially during the too hot months, looking forward to. Regular readers will know that these duties involve weekly (weekdays for us, a couple of friends do weekends) visits to the nearby bird banding station [...]
Computer Translation ... of a sort I am more and more coming to appreciate the wilder shores of the Facebook computer language translation system ... so much more fun than relying on Google to do the job. They discover brand new and unrecorded species every day. Here is the original French : [...]
Since the start of the Covid restrictions far away in early 2020, Bird Protection Quebec have had to replace the regular weekly, guided field trips at weekends with a series of innovative and interesting “virtual” field trips. This weekend past participant birders were invited to do a Big Sit. In a Big [...]
Warbler Soup! The waterfall earned its keep today with six species of migrating warblers plus a warbling vireo. Shortly after luncheon there was a terrific commotion on the header pool of the waterfall with between 15 and 20 small birds frantically competing for the chance to splash in the water. They splashed around [...]
Looking about you and learning about what you see About a week ago we wrote about our participation in the Nature Conservancy Canada “Bioblitz” during which we recorded all the species we saw in a five day period in our garden and the nearby roads and parks. The total came to 217. We [...]
Early in the week we decided to take the now three month old EV for a longer run to see how the batteries behaved under greater stress than going to the supermarket involves. We crossed into Ontario and spent a happy half day walking the trails in the Cooper March nature reserve. We [...]
Baltimore Oriole As most people know, to attract a Baltimore Oriole to your garden you are supposed to put out fresh fruit - a half orange being a classic meal for them or maybe some grapes. This immature male arrived and obviously had not yet reached that page in the How to [...]