One of our most enjoyable activities each year is spending the winter servicing and filling the bird feeders at the local bird banding station and recording the birds that are in the season when the nets cannot be put up. This year we started a bit earlier than usual after the first decent [...]
** Perhaps a few too many posts here recently of multiple, featured photographs ... henceforth they will be displayed in a single post that's quick to scan and only takes one click to open. In Town Tonight The Baie-D'Urfé town hall lit up for the 2018 Winter Solstice [...]
“December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers. But there were cats.” – Dylan Thomas, A Child’s Christmas in Wales That sounds all very nice, were DT not to have spoiled the image by then going on to write “Patient, cold and callous, our hands wrapped in socks, we [...]
Blue Jay Blue Jays are like teenagers, always flopping about and shouting. They also like very much to take regular baths and showers and as we provide a heated water bath for them in cold Québec winters, how could this smart fellow refuse the opportunity. Metadata Copyright © [...]
Right at the very northernmost limit of their range, two Carolina Wrens are settling in for winter in a garden west of Montreal. A serendipitous snatch of hand-held video. ** The first Wren appears from behind the dark chain-mesh feeder at about 12s and the second flies in to join it at 30s. I [...]
"Mine, All mine!" There are two Viburnum bushes near the house, one a native species and one a horticultural cultivar. Usually the berries stay on the bushes through most of the winter as although to us they look bright and juicy it is evident that most wildlife only resort to them once all the [...]
Feeder filling at the MBO Every winter at about this time we take a weekly "shift" at the nearby bird banding station (no public access so we can't share the location) to fill bird feeders and see what's about. Today was the first outing of the year and the coldest day with -15C (or [...]
Snow and some very good birds Apart from a few photographs of birds and flowers there hasn’t been much keeping up to date here with notes about the garden and its wildlife but now we have fully entered winter with a couple of decent snowfalls and a minus -18C night forecast before the end [...]
Snack time The red berries on the Viburnum bushes are being eaten early this winter ... with some of the outside staff putting in excess energy to reach them. EXIF data Copyright © All images are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada (CC BY-NC-ND 2.5 [...]
It's been snowing ... Mid-March in Montreal we wouldn't expect anything else - other than that friends from milder climates are sharing pictures of green grass and spring flowers while our brave clump of snowdrops that was standing tall yesterday is once again (third time) buried from site. Nevertheless, it's been a beautiful morning [...]