One of the must do tasks for New Year's Day around here is to total up the number of species of birds that we have heard or seen in or from our garden during the preceding year. The garden list for 2021 topped off at a gratifying 76 different species of birds. [...]
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 [...]
In Baie-D'Urfé, and in other similar towns blessed with lots of trees, we often speak of the importance of our trees. This extract from an excellent book about urban nature, speaks to that understanding and explains why providing small, replacement trees ("oh, they will get big in a few years") are not [...]
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 [...]
Approximately this date but taken ten years ago at the end of the road - resurfaced from the archives. Never throw anything away, one day it will be of use. Last night there was a pretty violent wind storm with gusts up to 100km/hr and power outages all over the province ... thank goodness [...]
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 [...]
Some simple suggestions ... Faithful readers of our posts will have gathered some ideas about how to attract wildlife to their gardens over spring, summer and early fall but now winter approaches and what do we do with all those native plants still standing tall? The neighbours are starting to look askance. [...]
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 : [...]
Dark-eyed Juncos As the temperatures start to fall towards zero (a few days yet) and the cold rain falls we are beginning to see the first arrivals of birds form the north that usually spend the winter with us. Today there was a flock of over a dozen Dark-eyed Juncos busily working [...]
A Carolina Wren Although we see them every year now, the Carolina Wrens are still uncommon, not to say rare, around here. Last winter we had two (at least?) on our feeders almost daily and in the spring a pair nested in a flower pot on our front porch and fledged a [...]