Inalienable Rights (and Geese)
Winter Bird Duties Recommence
It took a lot of organisation to ensure that the first snowfall of the winter came yesterday, just one day before our first weekly duty session at the MBO (bird banding station). Along with a couple of friends who do the same on another day of the week, we will be regularly visiting [...]
The Best Gardening Story (today)
By chance I happened across this short tale of failed gophercide. Enjoy, there is much truth in this little tale (Facebook does have its uses - sometimes)
Small Town Biodiversity
IS THIS THE ‘MOST BIODIVERSE” COMMUNITY IN CANADA For a five day period that took in last weekend we took part in a Canada-wide “Bioblitz” organized by the Nature Conservancy of Canada and the Canadian Wildlife Federation. We (and our little town of Baie-D’Urfé) came within a whisker of being the top [...]
500 … and a change of pace
500 days ago I set myself the daily challenge of identifying and then sharing at least one different species of bird, insect, plant etc that I could find locally. Yesterday the number reached the 500 mark. My intention is to double that and reach at least 1000 species but no longer will I [...]
Electric Future
Saving the planet, one electron at a time About six weeks ago now, we got rid of our very low mileage (kilometrage?) Honda Civic with only 16,500km on the clock after four years driving in exchange for a spiffy all-electric cross-over Hyundai Kona. We get 460km out of a battery full of electrons [...]
Wild Garden Record
We get a number of requests from interested gardeners wishing to see our developing "Lo-Mow" ex-lawn. Accordingly this year, as visiting and seeing in person is still not wise under present circumstances, we are creating a page on this website devoted to seasonal changes. In essence, every week or two we will add [...]
Scientific Stamp Collecting
I am reading and enjoying a fascinating memoir at the moment. If you'd like to read it, look for "A Curious Boy: The Making of a Scientist" by Richard Fortey. The author is a contemporary of mine, just a couple of years older, and was a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in [...]
Winter Duties Start Again (Birds)
Best time of the year Well - almost :) Faithful followers of this journal will recall that we spend three to four months each winter visiting and walking around the nearby bird observatory in the snow and deep cold to top up the feeders and to take a census of what birds [...]
Communicating the Value of Things
I’m just getting into a collection of essays ("Vesper Flights" - Helen Macdonald) by a Historian of Science at Cambridge. I was struck by this paragraph from her introduction. "What science does is what I would like more literature to do too: show us that we are living in an exquisitely complicated [...]