We no longer keep detailed birding "lists" just for the sake of keeping lists, but we do keep records to track what happens where and when through the seasons and year by year. Today is New Year's Day 2020 - and time to record how many birds were seen in our garden during the [...]
Sparrows are perhaps my/our favourite birds. From the point of view of nostalgia I would say especially the House Sparrows that I grew up with but otherwise one of the great things about living in Canada is the number of other sparrow species (most of them more strictly Buntings, but we won't go [...]
Bruce Spanwing Moth A couple of days ago we saw a pale moth flying across the garden - late November, snow on the ground, temperatures around zero or below - and shrugged as it flew away. This morning we got a closer look at it, or a relative. I am reasonably confident that [...]
Living with Wildlife Not infrequently after looking at a plant or bird picture that we have shared here or on Facebook people ask if they can see our "wildlife" garden ... not everyone lives close enough to book one of our guided tours so this is what (part of) it looks like on [...]
Mr Toad There are nine species of frogs in Quebec and just one toad, but it's the toads that we see most frequently. Very handsome little chaps. EXIF data Copyright © All images are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada (CC BY-NC-ND [...]
A quiet week in the garden with several cold nights, very cold nights to make everything keep its collective head down. Nevertheless, signs of approaching spring with birds such as the American Crows and Northern Cardinals making obvious signs of looking around for mates and nesting sites to make more American Crows and Northern [...]
7 January 2017 A moderately cold week to start the new year with a great dollop of heavy, wet snow followed by freezing rain in the middle of the week so that the snow cover is rather crunchy and sitting on a layer of ice. It will be doing what it is supposed to do [...]
It's the beginning of february and the air is going to be cold and crisp for some weeks to come - but the sun is getting a little higher in the sky each day and you can actually start to feel some heat in its rays when there is no wind. The garden squirrels really [...]
Every December the "Friends of the Morgan Arboretum" hold what is loosely known as a Winter Solstice celebration, mostly intended for short people and their parents. There are games, seasonal films, craft workshops, hot chocolate and cookies and a guided walk (led by the good folk from the Sparroworks) to see if the Chickadees will [...]
This is a bizarre week - outdoors the sunshine and the temperatures are more like late June than the first week of May and we are already watering less than drought tolerant plants in the garden. Right on time though, the Devil's spawn dandelions are springing up all over the lawn and claiming hours [...]