Justfolk's photos

We have three rhododendrons. The earliest is a languid, fragile plant but it shows off a lot of its pinkness every year. Most years it gets hammered by rain. Luckily the rains we had a few days ago were before its blooms opened. So it is at its peak this morning.

It was almost midnight last night and I had come by to pick up my wife from an evening with "the girls." That's their term, girls, not mine, and they know what they are saying. I have known almost all of these women for over fifty years. The one exception I have known well over forty. They know what I'm like and they asked for a picture. Of course: I had a camera in my pocket. I asked for a scowlery but I was only partly successful in getting it. Nice picture of old friends in any case.

It's been grey and dingy here for weeks. It was easy to miss this an hour ago but, just before sunset, I noticed the light outside was not just brighter, but also coloured. I went outside where everything was bathed in pinks and oranges. Neighbours were coming out, some with their tea cups in hand, to marvel. And then the rainbow appeared in the other direction. And then it was all gone.

This bird seems to have no natural fear of us human beings. He also has no natural pride about begging for food.

That starling who is so friendly with us, posing with some Berberis behind him.

We were sitting in the warm sun, soaking up a day when the weather was forecast to be grey and ten degrees but turned into twenty degrees with sun. This starling kept dropping by to stare at us in the face, probably wondering when the feast of peanuts was going to be laid out. Eventually we laid it out.

Another one of the Yellow warblers we heard and saw this afternoon.

Fifty years ago, the ground around Mr Mundy's Pond was a kind of post-industrial nightmare with big chunks of metal and concrete and dumped construction materials lying around. There are still signs of early 20th-century foundations but largely the area has been cleaned up, with plenty of mostly-native trees growing in along the paths. There are even trouters around the pond (though the trouter we spoke to said he doesn't eat the trout he catches). And the birds love it. This afternoon (besides the newly arrived sparrows disappearing into grasses) there was a small flock of Yellow warblers, mostly in the more secluded area on one side, but also on the more open and windy side, too.

It is often said that we, here on the island of Newfoundland and especially on its East Coast, are susceptible to long stretches at this time of year of wet foggy and cool weather. "Three-week fogs" some of us call them. We're in one now. In that sort of cool dark weather, the flowers do slowly get squeezed out of their plantworks, but the pollinators, like bees, need something warmer than day-in-day-out six-degree temperatures. Today for a few minutes it got up to fourteen degrees (plus change), and the fog lifted long or high enough for the sun to cast vague shadows. The bees were out their gates. This one was face and eyes into the pistabeds by our house.

This moth was on the outside of a window in last night's rain. I got this picture, of his/her rather more-than-usually-intimate side, from inside the window. I was not inclined to go outside in the wet and dark to try for a more formal shot. But not knowing what his upper-side wings looked like means I have little hope of knowing what he/she was. Oh well.

Today we have had a guest in the bathroom sink. He keeps to himself and we try not to dislodge him with splashed water. Apparently he is nocturnal so overnight he'll probably move somewhere he can find more food. I think he is a yellow sac spider. If you look closely you can see his eight eyes. I do not know enough spider anatomy to know what the two bulbous black shiny bodies are below his eye. But I think they may be his pedipalps, held a little like a boxer holding his gloves to his chest.

I was in university before I heard any other name for these things than “carpenter” and I still call them that. I know people who call them “boat-builders” and “builder-boats.” And some who say “sow bug.” I was much older than university age before I found out they are closer relatives to lobsters than to bees. This one was crawling up the clapboard on our house this morning

It has been raining for days and rain is expected every day until nearly the end of meteorological time (that is, the forecast on the government website). The weather lifted a little for a few minutes today and this was the view from the back door. Well, sorta. This is two pictures poorly sewn together. If you look closely at the suture, don't mention the scar tissue.

We're at peak grape hyacinth today in our driveway. But I was reluctant to get down on my belly, so I relied on the back screen of the camera. Thus my native lack of plumb is even more noticeable in this picture.

He was wondering whether to get down to retrieve his peanuts.

I shot this on a roll of twenty-years-expired Fuji 200 film, the first shot on the roll, and taken in March 2023. Then my Rollei 35TE sat almost unused for a year before I finished it and had the film developed in April this year. It's a film end (or beginning) and thus the fireworks on the left.

Another one of the (probably) newly arrived warblers hanging out on the river I walked along today.

We walked in the four-degree, grey weather this afternoon down the Waterford River, along the old railway track, just about to the harbour. Along it there is a stretch of birches, spruce and fir overhanging the river and there was a flock of at least two kinds of newly arrived warblers -- yellow and yellow-rumped. Herewith, one of the latter, leaving little doubt about his name.