Mr. Shiny Shell: TURTLE stretched out on log

See how little it takes to make me happy? A shiny-shelled turtle lazing on a log is all I need. I have recaptured the sense of wonder I knew as a child, when I would spend hours in nature and never get bored. I would have been enraptured with all the wildlife I am privileged to see now - just a few minutes'  drive away, and we're practically in the wilds of B. C. To have  a bird eat out of my hand - I never would have dreamed!

💥SWARMED! Nasty blackbirds on Burnaby Lake💥

I could do worse than to be swarmed with blackbirds. The pickings have been extremely lean this summer, with maybe 1/10 of the usual number of flocks or even singles or pairs. There has been a modest return in a couple of places. The back yard, replete with food and watering stations, attracts only a sprinkle throughout the day. I don't know what has happened. There has been a serious outbreak of avian flu, which may well be the COVID of the bird world. So I try to make do with what I have. This video is from a couple of months ago, but things are even more sparse now, with no blackbirds flying down at all last time we were there. This comes in a regular, consistent pattern every year, and at this moment the adults are still feeding the juveniles, which are well out of the nest and mostly capable of feeding themselves. So I'll have to wait for the next feeding cycle. We also get a "massing of the blackbirds" every single year, with dozens and dozens of them hiding in the bushes, barely visible, making an incredible racket. THIS happens every year, too. Birds think with a single mind, but right now their mind seems to be elsewhere. 

💛FLUFFY LITTLE DUMPLINGS! My best duckling video EVER

Haven't seen ANY birds for ever so long. The back yard is deserted! I've complained about this before, so I'll shut up now, but I honestly do not know what is going on, because everywhere we go now is virtually deserted. The neighbors across the back fence folded their tents in the night and disappeared in the weirdest "move" I ever saw. One day they were there, shouting and smoking pot with the dog yapping and strangling, and now the place looks scoured and abandoned. This seems to indicate sketchiness, because moving typically involves lots of hubbub and yells and boxes and vans and general mayhem, and there was NONE of that, not even by professional movers. What breaks my heart is that their two cats are gone, too - daily visitors to our yard, a sweet ginger and a handsome tuxedo. Both gone, along with all the birds. But here I have a record of just a few ducklings, the only ones I saw this year. What is going on?

🦆SYNCHRONIZED DUCKS!🦆

These parallel dabblers really surprised me! I could even hear their busy little bills dribbling and drabbling in the delicious muck. I'm not sure what this is called, really, because "dabbling" actually means dunking their heads under, asses up, to dredge food out of the water. This is more like nibbling. I love how you can actually hear the mucky little sounds they make. I've never seen a mated pair act exactly like this, pretty much mirroring each other, with the odd little tiff as they stake out their own square millimeter of muck. Ah, nature!

💥💎Diamonds on the Water💎💥

A dazzling moment on Como Lake.

Where peaceful waters flow

A cormorant on Blakeburn Lagoon!

Turtle rescue - BY TURTLE!

There's something uplifting about this.

Deer crossing a river

A few notes. These are not "deers". They are deer. The splashing of the river is about half the video, so if you can't get the audio to play please click to go full-screen with it. Just a few seconds of loveliness.

Elk and rainbow: Sunwapta lake

Bird in the bush

One of my more poetic nature videos. I shot this from very far away, through a window with a screen in it, but it lent the video a fey, almost mystical quality. Well, maybe. It's pretty wobbly, because I had a hard time keeping the bird in my sights and even had to edit out a big chunk where I lost it altogether (which is why I substituted music for my "fuuuuuck"s on the sound track).  I am not sure what bird it is - perhaps a robin, with that fat, rounded body, or a varied thrush. At one point it appeared to be asleep, with one foot drawn up.

Sometimes it strikes me with a shock of surprise that all this was out in the yard for the past thirty years, and I paid not the slightest bit of attention to it. Now, suddenly, a wonderland has opened up for me. What else am I looking at and not seeing?

Ghost moose of Sweden

World's cutest frog!

"Oh my God!" Northern lights of Norway

This will give you hope

Let's wait for spring

On a day in which the world seems to have gone to crap, let us focus on more lifeward things.

The stag in the cathedral

This is worth watching on YouTube because it's high-res enough to watch full-screen. If you do, you will feel that you are there in the cathedral. It's eerie and very beautiful. The stag moves as easily and naturally as if he's at home in the forest. I'm not sure of the circumstances of this because there was no narration. Let us hope he walked out of there and found his way home with the same grace and ease.

Goosey Goosey Goslings!

Here they come: those wacky, tacky Screaming Frogs!

As an addendum to my Raise Giant Frogs nightmare post of a few days ago, here is a phenomenon of nature which I hitherto knew nothing about.

When you startle a frog, it screams.

Sometimes it sounds like a prolonged cat-yowl, or a balloon with the air slowly leaking out of the opening.

One wonders at the purpose of the scream, but it would seem to be either self-protective (the people in this video aren't necessarily being very nice to the frogs, and in some cases are actually provoking them) or a general alarm to the whole frog-pond. Human alert - whoop, whoop!

I never knew frogs screamed before, or that frogs could play video games, lunging at screens that have rapidly-moving buglike images on them. Clever? Yes. . . but not TOO clever. Frog might swallow the whole damn thing.


http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Itty-bitty, fuzzy-wuzzy ducklings: DUCKLINGS ON LAND!

Part 2 of our Duckling Adventure! The fluffies preen themselves on shore.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm