Marooned in the wilds of rural Canada, reader Diana MacPherson nevertheless takes great wildlife photos of the creatures in her yard. Here are a sparrow (Passer domesticus) and some chipmunks (Tamias striatus). Sadly, I’ve lost the notes, and am no good at anthropomorphizing, but remember that the sparrow displaced the chipmunk from its seeds.
I remember Diana said that this one looked as if it got a bitter taste from licking the deck:
And from Stephen Barnard of Idaho, “A trumpeter swan (and some mallards)”. The swan is Cygnus buccinator; the mallard is Anas platyrhynchos, which you should know by now.
A lot of people around my area consider squirrels to be a pest but chipmunks not to be. It makes me scratch my head. A couple of stripes is all that differentiates “urban pest” and “cutest little critter ever?” Really?
Like JAC I like’em both, though I will admit to having the same preference for the wee stripey versions. 🙂
Smaller, cuter and my generation grew up on the cartoon antics of Chip ‘n’ Dale.
“Marooned in the wilds of rural Canada”
sigh …
Diana’s chipmunk must be hardier than the ones here in Sudbury. Or perhaps our weather is colder. The ones who feed on my window sill have gone into hibernation it seems. The squirrels, chickadees and blue jays still visit. Not to mention ravens who will detect any peanuts thrown out on the driveway within ten minutes!
Ten minutes? Man — what a bunch of slackers.
Mom’s hens will detect peanuts before you can even finish opening the door to the patio….
b&
My chippies have been waking up from torpor. After the snow fall they haven’t been. I should have left some seeds out today since with the warmer temps, the one chipmunk may have woken up.
But I am in southern Ontario not far from Hamilton Ontario. I like to tell people in Waterloo or London that I live in “the sunny south”. 😀
.. in the same sense that I live in “sub-tropical Aberdeen”.
VERY sub-tropical.
Almost 60F ( 15C) today! Sounds like a hurricane outside tonight.
I was driving in it & it was horrible!
Glad I didn’t have to after about 1:30.
Lotsa trees down here, & some power outages as well. (Since I’m in SW MI, this wind sounds awfully widespread.)
Totally OT, but we just discovered that we could get Barcelona soccer on a channel we actually get already (and we don’t subscribe to any sports channels). Sat we taped Barcelona vs Sevilla and just watched it tonight. My man Messi scored 3 goals, the 2nd of which took him two over the previous record for total goals in La Liga (Naymar and Suarez (the Chomper) got the other two, and Alva(?) did an “own goal” – Sevilla scored nada). We only plan to follow Barça, but were thrilled to have such a great first game! ( My friends would be gobsmacked that I actually have gotten taken by soccer at all…)
It was a wonderful game!
Vamos barca!:-)
Si, vamos Barça y Messi! The commentator was raving about Leo’s “steering mechanism”, which is a great way to put it. Sunday at Valencia.
Sunday is gonna be tough, but hopefully Valencia’s form will keep dropping. Can’t afford to lose more points atm.
Champions League tonight!. 🙂
Trying to keep it to just Barça. Too many other fish to fry🎏⚽️
No worries. They’re already through to the next stage, so tonight is a bit of a resting opportunity.
It’s not being broadcasted on danish tv so I’m stuck with a shoddy p2p connection….barca leading by two….all is well. 🙂
Who scored?
Suarez 1
Messi 2
…and still 25 mins left.
Hattrick Messi!
He’s stacking up on records.
Woo hoooooo! ( and it seems The Chomper’s been refraining from chomping, fortunately)
😀
He’s gonna crack sooner or later….
It’s a massive cold front. I use Intellicast on my iPad – it gives you the same data professionals use. These heavy winds were all over. It is still windy here but the heaviest seem right over top of the great lakes.
So now I get lake-effect wind to go along with the lake-effect snow…
As I was driving into the cold front today, the temp dipped by 4 degrees! I’m surrounded by the damn lakes. No matter what way I drive, there will be a lake effect of one lake or another.
But at least we usually don’t get the lake effect that Buffalo gets.
No, I used to when I lived about 45 minutes West of Buffalo though in Stoney Creek. That was the good times of the 70s when in snowed like crazy all winter.
That’s when I moved here from California – late 70s – tons of snow. I often wondered what the heck I was doing up here, but I’ve grown to love it (mostly).
Hope it’s finished for recycling day tomorrow..
I think it’ll be done by tomorrow. My recycling was done today but the containers didn’t get to blow away. I oddly didn’t get a headache until this evening. It was very faint but I took a pill anyway as I was waiting for it to show up & I knew what it was going to turn into!
Last tuesday was also windy and our recycling bins are full of our upwind neighbors’ stuff from last week.
Generator was on for a couple hours here. I realized I didn’t plug in my external hard drives & hub to a UPS too. No wonder I get errors on my drives & need to reformat them!
Sub
I miss the captions. The cringing ‘munk is funny though. Mmmmm, old, baked wood!
Great shot of the swan giving a nice soaking to the Mallard. snicker, snicker. Though I realize the Mallard is behind the swan and perhaps didn’t get wet after all. The ol’ 2D photography problem.
I believe the captions were as follows:
1) Nah, it’s a tree (there is a similar photo where the chipmunk’s mouth is slightly downturned so it looks like it is dreading something. In that one, the chipmunk asks “Is that a hawk over there?”
2) I didn’t caption this one – just shows the chippy peeling a sunflower seed.
3) I have a cunning plan!
4) Yuck, this deck tastes sour!
Thanks for the LOLs!
To me the first one was pensive; and the last (chipmunk) reminded me of Muslim prayer. Perhaps I spend too much time on this website… 😉
“passer, deliciae meae puellae”
Thanks Catullus! 🙂
I suspected you’d like that, Diana.
Although given where the poem was composed I suppose the sparrow in it was probably Passer italiae, rather than Passer domesticus.
I often wondered if the Romans called everything “sparrow” and it really just means “little bird”. I think the Greeks had a habit of doing that. They even called ostriches “sparrow camels”: struthokamelos 🙂 Everything is “sparrow” with the ancients!
Yes, I wondered about that too. I don’t know that an actual sparrow would make a particularly desirable pet. Wouldn’t a grand Roman lady have preferred something a little more colourful?
Like we birdwatching amateurs referring to “LBBs” (little brown birds).
Or more commonly, IME, LBJs. Where J = jobs.
A different kind of picture: My area’s bald eagle pair are back and are now tending two eggs. facebook.com/Southwest/FloridaEagleCam (I hope I did that right). They’re local celebrities.
I think the swan at the back is peeved at getting splashed. It looks like it’s saying, “hey!”
Psst, Diana–there’s only one swan…
The duck, I meant the duck! 🙂
Could be a swan in disguise.
’twas once an ugly duckling…
Are you sure you didn’t mean the rabbit?
Well, it could be a rabbit.
with those big feathery white ears sticking up
Methinks it is like a weasel.
It seems kind of woozely.
and isn’t it at the front?
LOL
No, there’s a lady mallard behind the swan getting splashed. There is a mallard at the front too but the peeved one is in the back.
I was waiting for Diana to post something, so that I could ask her if she’d seen this cartoon.
That’s funny though I think we do have some panicky media because bad ideas have a way of oozing up here & I’ve heard words like “big government” being used on said panicky media (usually print media).
Beautiful swan, Stephen. I like the way that one tertial shows on the left wing.
I am constantly amazed at how pristinely white most white birds & animals stay!