Justfolk's photos

In yesterday's mail, my wife received this from some charity trying with it to guilt her into making a donation. I expect they had no idea they were including a nearly eighty-year-old coin in their appeal. The 1947 Canadian nickel still advertised the British king as Emperor of India and the mint did not receive the corrected dies until the following year. In the meantime, the mint added a tiny maple leaf to the space near the foot of the -7 in the date. So there were at least two 1947 nickels in circulation, with and without the maple leaf. This one shows, rather worn, that tiny maple leaf.

Sometimes I just point the camera and see what it gets. Sometimes I like what it gets. This was yesterday in the neighbourhood graveyard.

This is perhaps a hundred metres from where we regularly feed birds, among them a resident small flock of juncos. So this may be one of the birds regularly fed by us. I'd like to think that.

For a week or so, a half-dozen purple finches have been regulars in our yard. And the males are bright. While we waited for our tea to steep after supper, this guy was outside getting fed. That's a sunflower seed in his gob.

I have had this 60mm macro lens for about ten years. I have never liked it. Resultingly, I've been considering springing for a really expensive macro to replace it. I'd be a fool to do so. And I'd be an even more foolish fool if I did so without spending some time trying to make the best of the macro lens I do have. Thus this picture, of a dead fly I found on the floor under a window. I will throw the fly out soon, now that I have photographed it. Being dead it has some rather unattractive aspects that a living fly does not have, or perhaps a more freshly dead one. I'll keep my eyes open for such a windfall. I do like the looks of most flies and such.

I think this is the European ant that has been around these parts for a hundred or two hundred or perhaps five hundred years. Certainly when I was a kid in the 1950s there were red ants all over the place, and I think the ones picking at the orange I left out for birds are no different. But people get all squeamish these days when they see red ants, calling them "fire ants." Pfft. I am trying to decide whether to buy myself a better macro lens than the one I have, this 60mm lens. I have never liked it a lot but I don't think I have used it to its best advantage either. So I am trying to use it more than I have, before I jump foolishly to buy the more expensive one.

It's not especially warm in our yard this afternoon but the dandelions are overflowing with stuff for the bees and a few bees are there in the bar getting loaded. This one has been in the same flower for a half hour. I don't know if he'll be able to drive home. -------------------- EDIT, a few hours later: I asked a local entomologist and he told me that this is a Sweat bee. I didn't even know such a thing existed a few years ago. :)

Bidgood's Park, about ten kilometres from our house, is a lovely place. This afternoon it was a hotbed of people like me, looking at birds, and a crazier hotbed of birds, mostly eating flies. The swallows are in, and so were at least as many Yellow-rumped warblers, flitting around and looking like they were about to land on people's shoulders. And there were brown birds that I thought were probably Fox sparrows or the like. There were many Better Birders Than I (BBTIs) present. And thus I found out that two of the birds I saw were new to me. An old university friend was there, leaning on the rail of the bridge. He said, "There's two kingbirds right there." And sure enough, I saw an Eastern kingbird. Just like that. I had already taken some pictures of this guy, in the picture. A few minutes earlier, when I had described the bird to another BBTI, he said, "Oh yeah, besides all the Yellow-rumpeds, there are some Black-and-whites and a Blackpoll warbler too." Blackpoll warbler, that is it, methought. This is it.

It was just seven degrees this afternoon with a stiff northerly wind. The sun did not seem to improve the situation much when we walked around the nearest pond to our house. I had heard that there were more than a few new arrivals in the bird population. I kept an eye out for newly arrived warblers. I wasn't disappointed. This Yellow-rumped warbler was bouncing around the edge of the pond, sitting when he could in the lee of bushes and trees, catching a few warming rays.

There is a raven who cruises through the scene at Ganny Cove a couple of times a day. Yesterday he was chased out by three crows who hastily left their peanut-gallery perch for the event. They came back to the peanuts after a few minutes clearly calmed by the action. Or by the victory in chasing the raven away. Or by the sheer bluff. Today the raven was chased away by a gull who got even more excited than the crows. No doubt the gull was calmer later but I don't know -- I lost sight of him. Each time, the raven moved on but he seemed pretty unperturbed by it all. Dogs bark; the train moves on. You know.

A relative of the humble buttercup, this flower is one of the first wildflowers to widely bloom in the neighbourhood graveyard we walk through frequently. And along the banks of the adjacent river too.

I roasted some pumpkin seeds this morning. They are a great snack to keep around. And they are very photogenic. Here they were pushed together in a pile on the parchment paper I'd roasted them on.

John grew up in this house and, with his brother, dug and built the well at the left edge. Elaine, his wife, is the community historian and is between books about the town's early residents. Five minutes after I took this picture I helped John unscrew the glass door-light fixture to take as a souvenir. Comparatively fresh Fujifilm Superia 200 (expired January this year!) shot in my Minolta Hi-Matic 7sii. Converted to b&w in PSP with a neutral colour filter.

I have two garlic beds this year, separated by about two hours' driving distance. This is the one in the backyard in Town. My garlics are all healthily up and some are about 25 cm tall. We are still eating last year's crop but I don't think that will last until this crop is ready for picking.

The junipers are getting frisky. Yeah, yeah. We've been through this before: you call 'em Larch. Or Hackmatack. Or Larix laricina. Or all those other names. They're juniper to me. And they're getting frisky this week. This one was yesterday by the Waterford River about fifteen minutes' walk from our house.

This afternoon felt like the first warm spring afternoon. We walked down through the local graveyard to the river and a kilometre or so along it. Across the river this guy was singing his heart out. I guessed it was a Song sparrow and I am told by Better Birders Than I that it is indeed one. We don't see them often, This is a tiny part of the original frame, so it's blown up and then flattened into b&w. I like it.

We've been waiting since last summer to have three new windows installed. Today was finally the day. And a good day it was for it.

Around here, Forsythia does not have the bad reputation it has in some other climes. It is not nearly as invasive hereabouts as people say it is elsewhere. I planted this one two years ago and it has done well. It's as tall as I am and, today, early May, it is covered in little flowers mostly not yet open. In a couple of days it'll look pretty bright. Being of anthropomorphic bent, I have imagined that the five or six years the plant spent in a pot before I got it in the ground gave it a lot of pent-up growth energy. It was dying to be in the ground and it has taken advantage of it.