Scheduled post: Moving day!

Today was moving day! If everything went well (which, fingers crossed, it did), Raven is one happy puppy. The cats, most likely, are not so happy, but they’ll settle in quickly to their new surroundings. It will take Dan and I a little while to get completely unpacked and settled in, but once the last [...]

Scheduled post: Rose Pogonia

On our way into and out of Rock Ridge, we walk along the edge of the northern section of Rock Lake, where it joins up with Lilypad Lake (both my names). In the centre of this area there’s a largeish bog, complete with Black Spruce and other more northern bog specialties. For the most part [...]

Garden beetles

We’ve hit the moving crunch. Our moving truck is booked for Tuesday, though I plan to call tomorrow morning to see if we might be able to pick it up at closing tomorrow, instead of opening on Tuesday (it’s all the same to them, as far as rental potential – they don’t lose any business [...]

Families from Maplewood

We’re off to Rock Ridge tomorrow for visit number three, and I thought before I collect more MAPS photos I should post what I had from Maplewood Bog earlier this week. It’s a nice break from packing, too, which is well underway. A few dozen boxes are already filled and stacked against the wall, awaiting [...]

It’s a bug-eat-bug world

Over the last few weeks I’ve collected up quite a number of photos of predator-prey interactions in the invertebrate world. I’ve been doing a bit of “housecleaning” in my computer’s file folders, going back and revisiting photos I took at the beginning of June and trying to sort things out into some semblance of an [...]

Chickadee chicks and moulting mom

We were back to Maplewood Bog today for MAPS visit #3. We’d got 20-25 captures on each of our first two visits, and were expecting something similar today, perhaps a handful more as some young start to fledge and move around. Imagine our surprise, then, when our day-end total finished up at 45 captures, more [...]

Monday Miscellany

I never did get around to posting any photos from our most recent visit to Rock Ridge, with the exception of the unboring beetles. That’s not for lack of any, however. I’ll probably recycle some of last visit’s photos into the post on our next visit (tentatively scheduled for Thursday, weather permitting). However, I’ll also [...]

A sneak peek at the new home

Back in April I mentioned that our landlord had decided to list his house. We got the news a couple of weeks ago that it had sold, and that as of the end of the month we would be moving out. We investigated a number of places in the area, but for one reason or [...]

Today at Kingsford – Field Sparrow fledglings

As I was walking back to the banding station after opening my half of the mistnets at our MAPS visit Tuesday morning, I crossed some juniper habitat that we don’t usually pass through during the course of the day. Within moments of stepping onto the granite rise I had two very upset, very vocal Field [...]

Unboring boring beetles

A few days ago I had a great string of beetle sightings within about 24 hours. It began with the beetle shown above. We had a couple of friends from back in Toronto for a visit, dropping in en route to their cottage north of here. We’d set up some chairs on the deck, a [...]