Joy for a deep-freeze day

Today, our temperature is -23°C, with a windchill of -27°C! We are in a deep-freeze, that now looks like it will be here for another few days.

Today, I am again posting just one photo - I have been spending far too many hours researching other websites and posting a few photos to one of them. With the IPERNITY website shutting down at the end of January 2017, people are looking at alternative websites for posting their images. A lot of Flickr people moved over to ipernity, especially in May 2013, many of them deleting all their photos and leaving Flickr completely. I have exactly the same photostream on ipernity as on Flickr (i.e. 12,660 photos) and I do like the ipernity layout and use. Basically, I only use it as another place to store my photos and descriptions, as I just don't have time to comment, etc. Of course, I have my photos backed up on external hard drives, so it is really all the descriptions that I want to back up at yet another place. Far, far too time-consuming to post more than a handful of my photos elsewhere, and I have to admit I am getting REALLY fed up of having to spend so much precious time.

Quite a few people are suggesting the 23hq website, so I thought I would take a look at it yesterday afternoon. Just in case anyone from ipernity (or Flickr) is wondering what 23hq layout looks like, I added a link to my newly created photostream there yesterday. However, last night, I decided to make all those photos private - thanks Pam J! Only about 80 photos (so far?), but at least I have those descriptions backed up.

Of all the websites I have checked out over the last few years, I still reckon Flickr is the best - despite its glitches and the fact that there have been two sudden, overnight major loss of views in Stats (for me, at least, plus some others) since May 2016, which I don't understand. Too obvious to be a coincidence, and I'm not impressed! Of course, the future of Flickr is uncertain, but hopefully that will all be sorted out with a happy ending!

www.flickr.com/photos/annkelliott

Another website I tried ages ago (only 8 of my photos there) is 500px:

500px.com/annkelliott

I like Smugmug and have quite a few of my photos on there:

annkelliott.smugmug.com/

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In Bluebirds, the blue colour is produced by the structure of the feather - there is no blue pigment. "Tiny air pockets in the barbs of feathers can scatter incoming light, resulting in a specific, non-iridescent color. Blue colors in feathers are almost always produced in this manner. Examples include the blue feathers of Bluebirds, Indigo Buntings, Blue Jay's and Steller's Jays."

www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Mountain_Bluebird/id

www.jstor.org/discover/pgs/index?id=10.2307/4077277&i...

On 15 June 2016, I drove SW of the city to check on a few Mountain Bluebirds. I remember that one adult male was a different kind of blue, and I think this bird is the one in this photo. One pair seems to have disappeared. Another nesting box still has babies in it and I was so happy to see that they had not left home yet. One of the babies had its head and part of its body peering out of the hole and I was expecting it to fly at any moment. That didn't happen, though I suspect it will happen either today or tomorrow, which means I will miss them fledging. While I was there, I could see and hear Dad calling. He wasn't feeding them, and I think he was trying to encourage them to leave the nest.

At the third box I stopped at, I had never seen either the female or the male with food in their beaks, so I was beginning to think that maybe they had no babies. Then yesterday, the female was around the nest box and seemed to become excited. She flew up to the high electricity wire and the male flew in to join her, bringing some tasty insect which he fed to her. I like to think that maybe there were eggs in her nest and that one had just hatched. Who knows?

It was a great day for finding rare Bobolinks, too! I saw maybe five of these beautiful birds. They were on the far side of the road, unfortunately, and I wasn't able to get any decent shots. Each time a car or truck went by, the birds took off for a few seconds, but then returned. I drove down the road and turned around, hoping to get a better view, but they had disappeared and never returned. A couple of years ago, on 27 June 2014, I had been lucky enough to spot one just a bit further along the same road.

No owls to be seen on this trip, but I did see a couple of my 'usual' Wilson's Snipes. They almost always give plenty of photo opportunities, for which I am always so thankful. I was already out of the car and when one flew to a fence post just down the road, I slowly walked till I was close enough. These birds can spook very easily, so it was a weird feeling to have nothing between it and me.

Oh, and near the start of my drive, I saw a Skunk run across the road ahead of me! I pulled over and got out, hoping to see where it went down the embankment. Unfortunately, it had disappeared into the long grasses. If I remember correctly, this was only the third Skunk I had ever seen in the wild.