Hello again & Happy New Year! I’m hoping the series of photos I’m going to post here can help bring you some smiles during these difficult times of pandemic, lockdowns and mid winter blues. I certainly don’t have large numbers of individual birds coming to my yard but I do have a fairly good assortment coming around, including two winter/seasonal rarities for me: a Western Meadowlark and a White Throated Sparrow. The sparrow isn’t TOO far out of the norm here ….. it’s always possible to see sparrows of some kind here in winter ….. but the Meadowlark is a WHOLE other story. I’ve never seen ..read more

Hello again! Wow, it’s been a really quiet season here up until just recently. I had my feeders put away in late spring, after FeederWatch season ended and for about half of the summer due to worries of Avian Flu. I put one or two feeders out in late July and have 3 hanging feeders out now plus the platform. I also have 3 hummingbird feeders out around the yard. Birds have been quite slow in returning to the yard but activity is picking up a bit. I now have Purple Finches, Goldfinches, Song Sparrows, Chipping Sparrows (EVERYwhere!), Downy Woodpeckers, White Throated Sparrows, Chickadees, Red B ..read more

Hello again! It certainly has been a long winter. We still have over 3 feet of snow in the backyard with some banks nearly 10 feet tall around town. It’s JUST starting to melt some the past few days but winter & spring will be battling it out for at least another month yet. I haven’t done a whole lot of photography this winter, mainly because it’s been a good old fashioned winter, meaning lots of near -40C & tons of snow! On the plus side, my feeders were much busier this winter than the past 2 winters combined. Not huge numbers of birds but steady daily activity with a couple of inter ..read more

Hard to believe 6 months have passed since my last post. Guess I’ll put that down to a combination of the general craziness of 2020, plus the expected laziness of the summer! I thought it might be nice to publish a few photo albums from April to now, so this one covers early spring when the first migrant species began to return here in Calgary. As always, many of the new arrivals are waterfowl, with greater and greater numbers showing up as the amount of available open/unfrozen water rises. Foremost among the early arrivals are the Common Goldeneyes (although some do over-winter as well), with ..read more

Hello from my backyard! It’s been quite a long time since I posted from here (since March ’21!) … sorry about that. I wasn’t feeding the birds much this past summer because of bears in the area. Then, in late summer, my yard was hit with a Trichomoniasis outbreak for the first time ever and I had to put all feeders and birdbaths away for nearly a month. I just put the feeders back out about a week or so ago and the birdbath just went back out a couple of days ago. I will be watching closely for sick birds again as freeze-up nears. This post will be a sort of catch-up for the summer & fall ..read more

Hello again! Wow, I can’t believe it’s been 4 months since I released a blog post. I sincerely apologize for that but I do have a reason. Believe it or not, most of this winter has been absolutely dead quiet in my yard & I’ve really had nothing to talk about. If you’ve watched the webcam here at all, you know what I mean. Until into January, there was virtually nothing to see here. I have NEVER seen a winter like this in all the years I’ve been feeding the birds. I have had a high count of only 5 Pine Grosbeaks and a high count of only a dozen Common Redpolls where I would normally expect ..read more

Hello, hello, hello! Wow, it has been a good long while since I’ve posted here but this has been an UNREAL year for me, as I’m sure it has been for many of you. After my last post in February, my best friend got very ill in late March (not Covid). She was in the hospital battling a severe illness for 2 weeks before she lost the fight. This was a nearly-40 year long extremely close friendship. To say I was devastated just doesn’t cover it. I lost my drive, my enjoyment in life … I avoided so many things I used to love for so long … birds, photography, writing. When fall came around, I finally h ..read more

Having found some spare time over the past week or so, I’ve managed to go back through this winter’s image files and process my highlights from the last few months. First and foremost among the highlights, and a recent encounter, was this drop-dead gorgeous male Varied Thrush: He was as skittish as he was handsome and I was only able to get a very few shots that I was happy with, but one is enough! A day-long road trip though the foothills west of Calgary in late December yielded disappointingly very little wildlife, nevertheless it was pleasing to see a few of the local characters such as sev ..read more