Mid-winter moth sighting

Speaking of hibernating insects, last night when I went to brush my teeth I discovered this little guy on the wall. The last time I saw a moth was probably back in November; generally speaking they’re not the sort of bug you expect to be out and about in mid-winter. So I was a little [...]

A visit from the queen

The temperature today was an incredibly balmy 8 degrees Celsius. This was a one-off, however, because a cold front is supposed to roll in tonight and tomorrow is forecasted to be -10 oC (I shouldn’t complain; today in the Canadian prairies it was -50. Before windchill). Still, the warm weather was nice. I wasn’t the [...]

Colour-coding chickadees

Edit: This post was recently included in the 69th edition of I and the Bird, a blog carnival focusing on, you guessed it, birds. You can check out the full edition at Living the Scientific Life.

Yesterday afternoon Blackburnian and I went out birding in a tract of woods near Paris, Ontario. It wasn’t a large [...]

Frost feathers

Yesterday morning when I got up there was frost on the windows in the den. Only the den, for some strange reason; even the neighbouring washroom’s window was frost-free. I would attribute the frost to the old, single-pane windows of the farmhouse, but other rooms have the same windows. Even stranger, the two windows had [...]

One amongst the redpolls

I had the coolest experience today. Just after lunch, I took a break from scraping old caulking off the sides of the bathtub in the washroom my parents are renovating to wander outside with a new close-up lens (really more like a filter, or a magnifying glass) I picked up today for my camera. I [...]

Woodpecker wuz here

While out hunting for fungus last week, I happened to notice quite a number of trees with woodpecker holes. The absence of foliage on the plants provides a much different view of the forest (or other habitat). Things that are usually obscured are now exposed. Sometimes it’s not that the thing was obscured, but rather [...]

Birds in your backyard

Following up on yesterday’s post about bird irruptions, I wanted to talk a bit about attracting birds to your own yard.
One of the great things about living in the country is that you can put up a birdfeeder. Well, true, you can put up a birdfeeder just about anywhere, but you’re not going to attract [...]

Winter bird irruptions

I have more to add to the winter colours theme of the last couple of posts, but feel like a change of pace today. I haven’t done any posts yet about birds, which is a little surprising given that birds are really my primary interest in nature (first birds, everything else second). So here’s a [...]

Fungi of the winter woods

So back to those itty-bitty mushrooms. The tree was actually the first one my mom and I had stopped to examine the lichen on, and it was fairly unremarkable for the most part. There were little patches of blue-gray foliose lichen up and down the trunk in the first five or six feet from the [...]

Winter colours

Winter is a time of year that most people tend to think of as very monochromatic – whites and grays, perhaps a bit of blue, and maybe some green from the conifers. And, on the landscape scale, this is probably reasonably accurate. However, when you start poking around, you can turn up some fabulous colours. [...]