Today at Kingsford – Northern Saw-whet Owl

While visiting my new favourite property, I heard the sound of a predator being mobbed. It’s a very distinctive sound, the sound of a dozen chickadees going absolutely crazy. Chickadees are big talkers in general, usually keeping up a running chatter amongst themselves when they’re foraging. But when one stumbles onto a predator, they ramp [...]

Infatuation

I’ve become more familiar with our immediate surroundings now that I’ve started going for regular walks with Raven. Although I’ve only walked about a kilometer to the south, I’ve gone about two and a half to the north along our road, and the same distance along a side road that branches off from it. I [...]

Preparing for the winter

I haven’t featured a wild mammal here in quite a while (white horses and new pets count as mammals but it’s a long time since they’ve been wild). Certainly the last wild mammal I remember writing about was the opossum that visited my parents’ feeders last winter. Perhaps not coincidentally, today’s critter has also been [...]

Today at Kingsford – First snow

We got our first snow of the winter this afternoon. A large storm system rolled through much of the northeast, with portions of eastern Ontario, western Quebec, New York and surrounding areas bearing the brunt of it. If it had been the middle of winter we may have ended up with a few inches of [...]

More on Blue Jays

Since Dan got his Master banding permit, we’ve put up a few nets to get a start on some of our planned projects. I mentioned the owl monitoring already in an earlier post. This morning we opened a net that we set up near our feeders. Dan goes into more detail on the purpose of [...]

Today at Kingsford – Blister beetle

Right. So the purpose of yesterday’s post and all those headstones wasn’t actually to ramble on about life and death, but actually to introduce this guy, who I stumbled across in the grass and pine needles among the stones as I was slowly meandering through the cemetery. Its gleaming blue sheen caught my eye as [...]

Life after death

Near the foot of our road, just before where the old gray pavement turns to rutted, packed dirt, there is a small white church. It’s an old church, one of the one-room sorts, seating perhaps thirty or forty people at full capacity. It dates back to the mid-1800s, and is typical of the structures of [...]

The White Stallions

I grew up with horses. My mom got her first horse when she was 16, and there have been horses in her life since. I remember reading kids’ stories such as The Black Stallion when I was younger. We took riding lessons at the local stable, competed in the stable’s beginner classes. We knew the [...]

Today at Kingsford – New at the feeder

I had grand plans for a long entry tonight, on one of three subjects I have percolating in the brewer. However, none of the three happened, for various reasons. One was that I decided, on a whim, to make chicken pot pie for dinner tonight. Of course, anything that requires a crust is a bit [...]

Today at Kingsford – Marbled Orbweaver

I took Raven out for her regular walk this afternoon. I took my camera with me even though it was overcast and threatening to rain, since you never know what you might come across. Thank goodness I did, or I would’ve missed documenting this wild spider. It was walking across the road, and both its [...]