Red Pole Tuesday

These guys are more than borderline cute! They are also always very hungry!

 At times it seems like I was feeding about 60 of these. There favourite food is black oil sunflower seeds.

I gave up trying to photograph these on the wing. They don't fly in straight lines. Maybe I will have to stake out their flight path. My motto is " If you don't succeed the first time, Give up". 



Just kidding. I will persevere!

Digging Out....Again!



Yep, we got dumped on again! It is not as if we had enough snow before, but we had to get more about 25 cm. I had my snow blower up for sale in the summer, but now I am happy I still have it. This is the first time that I have had to use it in the three years in town.

It was a mess! Fortunately we did not have to go anyplace this weekend, other than Church. Daphne was not impressed!

 

Fun and games!

The River Again!

The day was a little warmer with temperatures around the freezing mark. My friends the Common Goldeneyes were still around swimming in the current and diving for food. They appear to have over wintered well. They are one of my favourite ducks.  

The Eagles were still hanging out in the tree andwere kind of watching Daphne. Unfortunately they were in sleep mode and unwilling to fly.

They sure are majestic in their manner, like don't muss with me!

These two seem to hang out together. Whether they will be a nesting pair we will see.

We have enough snow now that travel in the bush requires snow shoes and a lot of effort. It appears the forecast for the next two weeks is good and I can get back out looking for other critters.

Have a great weekend!

Down the Road Again...

 It is fun to be out and about! You might call it
 " 4 wheel freedom" . Even when the snow is so deep you can never catch those pesky rabbits, it is fun

It is even more fun when you come home and get snuggles from the youngest Grand (Pumpkin)Child.

The two of them bonded immediately!

Daphne was very spoiled (even more than normal) by

the time the eldest son and family left.

It was a short, but happy visit


Here is the rest of the family!

Eagles

 

 This is kind of a bomb of Eagles. There were two of them hanging around some open water on the Athabasca River. It was very cold -30C and they were conserving energy.

At the end you can see three ducks in the river that were watching the eagles that were watching them

I almost got a good photo of a Pileated Woodpecker that was hastily vacating the area. Unfortunately, even 1/1600th of a second did not stop him in flight.

The photos will bigify if you double click on them

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Great Day and a Revert to a Previous Time

I was asked on Friday if I wanted to go riding! Did I? You betcha. The weather was at my limit for this activity, -15C, or 5 F for you non-metric types. It was also very windy so we experienced several startles, but no unplanned dismounts, which is good. I don't bounce as well as I used to.

After about an hour or so we called it quits. Other than almost requiring a crane to get me off Monte, and being quite stiff the next day, it was a great ride!

Thanks, Michelle and also for the picture.

Yes, We gut Dumped On!

 The last 24 hours have seen a very heavy snow fall, the largest of the year. At first light, the deck, BBQ etc looked like this.

 The bird houses were slightly stacked up.

 Here is our Damsel out helping the neighbors out. She lives about 4 houses down.

The front lawn is getting slightly overloaded


The back yard even more so.

I have a snow blower in the shed that hasn't run for 2 or 3 years. The problem with it is being buried in the shed. I think tomorrow I will dig it out and see if I can get it running just in case next weeks  snow forecast is right and we get more of this

Man, spring is only 7 weeks away and I can hardly wait!

Red Poll Wednesday

It seems that we are inundated with Red Polls this year. I am afraid that the photos were taken out the window because it is just too cold to go browsing around the outdoors.

They are definitely hungry and seem to like the black oil sunflower seeds rather than the striped ones.

 I like the red cap on top.

 Some are absolutely brilliant with the colours and stripes

 Others are more drab, but still very pretty.

Odds and Sods

 Here are a couple of pictures of the Athabasca River in its frozen glory. It is very cold out today.

Even so, it is very pretty to look at.





Daphne was quite content to lie on the deck next to her best friend.








This fellow was quite the handsome guy. I have no idea who he belongs to, but I remember how wild the horses used to get when we rode up to them. Quite often we would have a mini-rodeo on the road until we could persuade the horses to go past.

Then again, there was

 this little squirrel just sitting on a roll of barbed wire enjoying a snack.

Reminiscing

Well. it was a bleary type day, dark,half raining, and half snowing. I wore Daphne and myself out on a 5 mile walk through the bush yesterday, so after a brief walk and play at the Dog Park, we headed for home. What to do? What to do?

I couldn`t find anything on TV so I started browsing some of my PVR items.

Remember the  Group?

Improvements!

 It was a great day with the temp actually getting up to +4C . Time to take the dog out for some exercise.

We took the camera and did about 4 klicks looking for wild life, but found nada.


Not even a bird was to be found,

We wandered along some bush roads for about an hour. It was a great time out. Quiet, Peaceful, and warm



 I have to put out a couple of photos from the front window, just to show that all the birds are not frozen.  


This Hairy Woodpecker had
just finished at the suet container.
 The Pine Grosbeak similarly had pigged out on the sunflower seeds

The little Red Poll was so fat it could hardly move.








This guy enjoyed getting his photo taken. At least it seemed so!

It should be possible to bigify the pictures