Even the woodpecker owes its success to the fact that he used his head. —Author Unknown Continuing with the theme of occasional “Naturally Speaking” accounts of species you can encounter on the West Island of Montreal I am going to introduce a another bird. Botanists and entomologist friends of mine need [...]
Do you know just how varied is the wildlife on the West Island in Winter? West Island Wildlife is an occasional webzine. It is FREE and fully illustrated, and has the intention of introducing readers to the surprisingly varied wildlife and native plants to be found on the West Island of Montreal. Following the [...]
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 [...]
Montée Biggar Bird Sanctuary Getting away from the garden this morning I visited a new bird sanctuary in southern Quebec that has been purchased by my very good friends at Bird Protection Quebec (declaration of interest - I was on the board for ten years, President for three and still run the grants and [...]
You will be receiving this on Christmas Eve … whether you pause to read it immediately is another matter but whether you do or not Jean and I wish you all, gardeners, wildlife gardeners or just occasional visitors, all the best for Christmas and the days and months that follow. Apart from one faithful [...]
Last Sunday overnight rain turned to snow by Monday morning. Not much, but the first of the winter and well distributed with the remaining leaves carrying small loads of snowflakes … the leaves were still on the Acer japonica (now almost gone at the end of the week) and the white snow on red [...]
A mostly sunny and unusually warm week turning to cloud and some rain on occasion. The seed in the feeders has started to go down again due to the resumption of feeding by the usual suspects such as Blue Jays, Northern Cardinals - lots of them - Black-capped Chickadees and House Finches, the latter [...]
As the weather cools down (thank goodness) the first tints of autumn are beginning to appear and many leaves are starting to look tired. We have a large bank of mixed dogwoods on the southern edge of the garden and it is full of juvenile Song Sparrows, Purple Finches, House Finches all searching for [...]
The Gardeners are back from a superb week’s birding on Grand Manan (if that sort of thing interests you there is a short series of posts with photographs of birds and the like at http://www.greenbirding.ca). Anyway - here we are in the garden again and in the short time we were away things have [...]
At the beginning of the week we became aware of the first of this summer’s Cicadas, all “sawing” away in the trees. Very much the sound of summer for us. We are being visited by juvenile Purple Finches coming to the feeder quite regularly with their parents and by themselves. We had to move [...]