Justfolk's photos

Although I know the crows have a few other human friends, and anyway they'd look after themselves well enough in the wild, I often think about how we've created a community of dependents outside our door.

What's wrong with the younger generations, anyway? Time was, in my day, you'd never see a rat out before dark. And they don't even slink away anymore when they see you. Nowadays, sheesh, it's like anything goes.

I was brushing my teeth when I looked closely at a black spot in a little pool on the edge of the sink. There was this bug, apparently dead. With the corner of a paper towel. I retrieved her and examined her with a flashlight and a magnifying glass. And of course I took a couple of dozen pictures, none of them very good. I was testing the focus-stacking software on my camera but that was no big success. This picture was not focus-stacked. And although it was under the magnifying glass (and thus the two lightspots in the upper right) I was shooting at this point through the plastic side of the glass. My 60mm macro lens can get in pretty close on its own. I think it is a tiny ichneumon wasp, no more than 3mm long from head to arse tip. Where she came from in the first week of December I don't know. I say "she" because at least in some of the other shots I can see her ovipositor sticking back from the rear end of her body. I like finding bugs. But really, in this case I just like the picture. [And . . . maybe it wasn't an ovipositor at all, but a leg shoved off in a strange position. Oh, who knows?]

Yeah yeah. It's an old joke. I bet if you searched on the Internet, there'd probably be thousands of photos so-titled. A mere shadow of myself. But it's still mildly amusing. I suppose it's what they now call a "Dad joke," funny to aging men, but partly because it's not funny to most. Oh well. I'd stept outside this morning to see if there were any oddities among the half-dozen chickadees bouncing around the yard. There weren't. But there was this shadow. :)

The bright sun was melting the snow off the neighbour's roof, at least on the far side and sending waves of steam up into the sunlight. So I tried to take a picture of that. This was a failed attempt because the autofocus suddenly shifted to the nearer branches and the steam cannot be seen. But I liked the failure since it threw a bunch of bright spots into bubbly out-of-focus stuff. I had not held the camera straight, so I turned it a degree. I converted it to b&w. Et voilà!

This was one of two or three Orange-crowned warblers, drab birds, that appeared this morning with a very bright Wilson's warbler. A while back I made a list of birds my wife and I had seen from our backdoor since moving into this house in 2001. This one is the latest addition, bringing the list to 47. Not bad.

It seems the end of November is a good time for warbler strays into our yard. This morning this fellow showed up with two or three Orange-crowned warblers in tow. I've never seen the Orange crowned ones before at all, but the Wilson's have been here before, at least in summer.

The present lot of neighbourhood crows seem pretty content to come down to the nuts before I even step back into the house. I haven't grown tired of them and they haven't grown tired of the nuts.

Well, that's the way it is. Here is a purple finch, not the adult male sort, and she's facing the waxballs she's been stuffing her maw with. It's over three weeks until the celestial season of winter, but the winter birds are showing up outside our window.

A flocklet of purple finches, about ten of them, arrived this morning, staying for ten minutes to feed on the black sunflower seeds and, here, the white waxballs. Or snowballs. Or Symphoricarpos albus if you are tickled by the Latin. This was one of the males. With his gob all waxed up symphoricarposly. Or albanned. Whatever.

This is the upper end of the pond that is nearest to our house, about a kilometer away. It's a nice walkabout. It's still a fairly quiet November though and the fall colours are still around.

The view from the back door a few minutes ago. A little dwy of snow was passing by, and it dropped about a cm of snow on our deck, and obscured the moon.

Today's lunch guest, a Downy woodpecker pecking at the bark in the big European poplar tree outside the kitchen door. And finding something to eat there. We're starting to see the winter birds. The first three goldfinches arrived at the sunflower seeds a couple of days ago. And the pigeons have found their way back to us too.

I've said it before. There are new beers appearing on the market that are designed for people who don't like beer. Or so I think. It's not as odd as it sounds. When the buyers of beer all know what kind of beer they like, it is difficult for any brewery to increase its sales, or for new products to get in on the market. So they target the people who don't like beer, and thus aren't buying any. They produce beers that don't taste like beer, call them beer, and hope that the market will respond favourably. Thus this local product, from a pretty established though small brewery. This brewery does make good beer but they keep changing their recipes and product names. This newish product is apparently a very well-loved beer among the people, mostly younger ones, who don't drink normal beer. It is a cloudy beer, much like youngish homebrew, so it requires being poured into a glass in a single pour. Far worse than that venial sin is the mortal sin of tasting like it was mixed with grapefruit juice. Yechhh.

We went for a walk this afternoon on the closed-to-traffic Priest's Road and this is what we saw. The clouds moved off to the east and now, a few hours later, the night sky is perfectly clear. I think of November as the gloomiest month for weather but today contradicts that sense.

After supper last night: bernlaws, sternlaws, siblings, and spice, together for a family scowlery.

For a few days early this week a group of about forty robins (that's "American robins") were flying around our neighbourhood, travelling southwest in the morning and coming back to the northeast in the afternoon. With each passover, a few would drop out of the fluttery flock and hang out for an hour in our yard where there are dogberries galore (American mountain ash) and a few apples. The robins like both. Here, on their way back in the afternoon a couple of days ago, they perched high up in a neighbouring tree to rest in the scant sun. Every year, a few robins hang out around here through the winter, but it is rare to see this many together much later than now. Any day now (maybe yesterday or today when we were not around) they'll join some larger groups and plunge into the southward migration.

By mid-autumn on clear days, the early morning sun shines into our kitchen. Sometimes I can see myself as I move around. Here I was sitting with the camera on my knee. My shadow was on the wall and it reflected on the fridge door. I didn't hold the camera plumb, and instead I turned the picture a few degrees. I like how the picture looks as I imagined fifty years ago how someone my age would look. I don't really look that crooked; the camera ages us. Doesn't it?