Spring Planting Last year was the year of experimental vegetable gardening, not that we don't have many years of experience but very little of that in Canada. We had three excellent raised beds installed for us by Urban Seedling and stock the beds with seedling vegetables or seeds obtained from the same people. [...]
15 years later This is quite exciting - it looks as if a pair of Carolina Wrens are building a nest in an accessible (to us) site after an interval of some 15 years. We were taking our morning constitutional when we happened to observe the pair buzzing back and forth with nesting [...]
Opened up the waterfall (cascade) in the garden this morning and within five minutes a pair of Robins had already found it, took a splash and then proceeded to haul out wet leaves and chunks of moss which they flew off with to a neighbouring garden where, I guess, they are building [...]
How time does fly — just over a year ago I was inspired by a fine naturalist from England (thanks Tom) who had set himself the challenge of identifying 1000 UK species — birds, grasses, spiders, whatever. I had a couple of exchanges with him was assured that the concept was not trademarked, [...]
If you are not a keen birder this will perhaps not be of great interest - unless you have decided to really take up birding with the start of a new year and wan a target to aim for. Anyway, assuming you plan to read on ... here is what we saw [...]
Garden Birds - November 2020. During this "lockdown and go nowhere" year Bird Protection Quebec have replaced their weekly guided birding field trips with a series of interesting virtual alternatives. Basically, they have been saying, here’s a challenge, go and do it and then tell us all about what you found. For the [...]
Looking to the future - When I was a kid over a half century ago Hallowe’en (it had an apostrophe in it back then) was an indoor party with "exciting" games such as apple bobbing. Nobody actually had these parties but we read about them in children’s story books, probably written pre-war. Sometime [...]
A Project Perhaps? We were walking near home recently, as we do every day to keep things working as they should be, and went along a short stretch of a road separated from the Autoroute 20 (that's the very busy and noisy road to Toronto) by a dense but narrow stretch of trees [...]
West Island Wildlife #1 A new venture ... A 14 page illustrated "webzine" to introduce readers to the amazing variety of wildlife and plants to be found in the green spaces, parks and gardens of the West Island of Montreal. This is the first of what is hoped to become an occasional [...]
Playing with Light I was driving along the lakeshore in town (the lake being a widening of the St-Lawrence River) a couple of days ago about 7:30 in the morning when I was struck by the light on the water. Normally I would have had a camera with me but I was [...]