I am an inveterate keeper of lists of just about everything other than train numbers (you need to have grown up in England in the fifties to understand that) - but mostly lists of birds and plants that we have seen and enjoyed. After over 20 years of wildlifing around the western end [...]
We spent this sunny morning wandering in the arboretum. The leaves have barely started to appear until the last day or two and so the forest floor is covered with ephemeral species flowers and simply glorious. It will only be like this for a week or so now and the weather forecast [...]
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 [...]
Snow - then a brief marginal thaw - and now cold again with ice. Only a week though to the winter solstice after which the days begin to lengthen again on the way to the return of spring. Before that, however, we have January and February and serious winter days ahead. [...]
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 [...]
HOSTAGE TO FORTUNE The sole point of this post is to make sure, by making a public commitment, that my current project is actually going to be completed on time. After 23 years just looking at wildlife in this region and after the daily species blog posts I published for a couple of [...]
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. [...]
Around the edge of the garden is a quite dense thicket of bushes and trees where the outdoor staff, the "Wild Things". do whatever it is they do. Just every now and again I venture in there to see what's happening and to collect the rent. [...]
Looking about you and learning about what you see About a week ago we wrote about our participation in the Nature Conservancy Canada “Bioblitz” during which we recorded all the species we saw in a five day period in our garden and the nearby roads and parks. The total came to 217. We [...]
I am not a person who appreciates, or usually understands, poetry beyond Ogden Nash and the Horatio on the Bridge sort of thing. But there are exceptions. Many friends and readers of this journal will have noted that I enjoy wildlifing on my "patch", which is to say I like to go [...]