Female Brown-headed Cowbird

Rose-breasted Grosbeak - Male

Eastern Towhee in my backyard! How cool! Never seen one of these before!

Jackie it's your birthday!

Jackie it's your birthday!
Happy Birdthday Jackie!
You're one year old today!
YEAH!

   -Love mom, dad, stirling and winston.

Red-winged blackbird calling to his mate.

Male goldfinch calling to his buddies.

male and female house finch at the feeder.

Male and female cardinals on a wire.

White crowned sparrow. Notice the lack of white throat and yellow nares that the white throated sparrow sports. He's cute.

Three male goldfinches feating on niger seed. It looks like they have full summer plumage now. Nice and bright yellow!

Look at the beast in my backyard. He's either a crow on steroids or he's a raven. I'm voting for raven because if they made crows this big, I'd be scared!

Getting "bizzzy" in the backyard!

WOW! Look what dirty spectacle I found in my backyard tonight! Downy woodpeckers mating! (*hee hee*)

Jack & Winston!

Jack and Winston are so cute together!!!!!

Recent Birds in my backyard!

Grackle! I had seven of them in my backyard at once tonight!

House Finch! So Cute!

Northern Cardinal - male.

Blue Jay!

Red-winged Blackbird

Male downy woodpecker

White throated Sparrow ruffling his feathers!

The Detroit Red Wings have been eliminated from the Stanley Cup playoffs!

It's very sad. I'm going to be depressed for 3 days. 'nuff said.

Eagle Eye Cam

Ok, you've got to check this out. A guy in BC has a webcam in a Bald Eagle's nest over 120 feet off the ground. A crazy opportunity to get up close to this amazing animal... complete with sound! http://www.infotecbusinesssystems.com/wildlife

Here's a before and after shot of me editing this image to remove the offending branch. Is the new image believable? What do you think?

Goldfinches in the backyard. They still have their winter plumage (grey/white colour on the body).

So I am home sick .. yet again! It's a new world record. Four colds in 4 months. Amazing really. I definitely need an Immune System Upgrade!!!!! Anyway, to cheer myself up, I took this cute picture of Winston playing in the backyard.

Wolfe Island is a birder's paradise!

S we spent two days on Wolfe Island over Easter and we took the opportunity to break out the camera and see what we could catch on film. First of all, for the record, we saw twenty different species of birds!!! Here's the list: mallards, red-tailed hawk, house sparrow, turkey vulture, Canada geese, tree swallow, red-winged blackbird, blue jay, downy woodpecker, ring-necked pheasant, grackle, mourning dove, herring gulls, common merganser, starling, killdeer, cormorant, caspian tern, ring-billed gulls and, believe it of not, a snowy owl! WOW! Here's a bunch of pics including other non-feathered animals we came across in our island travels.


Lets kick it off with this creepy vacant house!

A ring-tailed pheasant.

Red-tailed hawk. We saw 7 of these birds of prey in 2 days!

A cute garter snake.

Turkey vulture!

Donkey drinking.

I call this one: The Scarecrow.

Two cows.

A Snowy Owl who's not yet packed his bags to move north. What a beautiful bird!

Winston is HERE!

There's a new addition to the family! An 8-week old brindle Boston Terrier. He's sooooooooooo cute.... and he was the last of the 13 puppies the breeder had this spring. His name is Winston. Cute eh? (*giggle*)

He's sooo small!

Here's Winston chomping down on Jack's Pelican!

White-breasted nuthatch at my feeder.

The full moon in my backyard!

The Junco's are here! The Junco's are here! YEAH!!! I saw 12+ in my backyard tonight!

A female Yellow Bellied Sapsucker. I saw her partner as well, but couldn't really get a good pic of him. The difference is that the female has a white throat while the male has a red throat.

The ubiquitous House Sparrow.

Erin, Jack and I went for a walk at RMC tonight after work. Here's a nice pic of Mackenzie Bldg. I work about 3 offices from the clock tower on the 4th floor. My office is at the back of the building though ;-)

I got a shot of a Killdeer in flight. Look at the double black bands on his neck. Unmistakable.

We spotted this big Osprey landing on the flood light for the soccer field. How cool is that! (Remember you can click these pics to make them larger.)

Here he is taking flight! Beautiful!

Erin, Jack and I went for a nice long walk at Lemoines Point this morning. It was a little chilly but the sun was shining. Lemoines Point is jusy waking up from its winter sleep. 

I got attacked by a flock of black-capped chickadees at one point! One landed on my head, another landed on my camera lens .... too funny! They are soooooooo cute! Here's one good shot I managed to get. 

Jack is so cute sitting on the rock. He's very dirty after his long walk though! 

Where has the Actionhamster been?

My apologies for not writing more often but things have been busy and topsy-turvy! (Is that a word?) Anyway, here’s a brief update:

1. Erin and I caught a communal cold and we were both laid up for 3 days. Jeez. I hope that the last sickness I have to go through. It’s been a bad three months for me virus-wise!

2. The strike at St. Lawrence College is over so I’m back to teaching.

3. The insurance money from our break-in has come through so Erin and I have had a bit of a shopping spree. Replacing the laptop, buying monitors and replacing all the stolen camera junk.

4. On the topic of buying camera junk, I bought a sweet D-SLR: Canon 30D! Droool!!!! If anyone wants to buy me a birthday day gift for May 15th, consider getting a gift certificate to Henry’s camera shop. I have a things on my wish list that I really want to get to complete my camera setup (i.e. macro lens, 2x teleconverter and filters).

5. Erin and I had tickets for the Matt Good concert Sunday night and unfortunately it was postponed due to health. I guess Matt had a bit of exhaustion. That’s too bad.

6. We’ve done some housekeeping in the fish tanks. We gave away 7 brown hybrid cichlids and picked up 2 orange/pink hybrids, 1 auratus and two babies (1 keyhole and 1 firemouth cichlid). So the fish tanks look much different today that in the past. If I can ever afford to buy a macro lens, maybe I’ll try to take a picture of the fish someday. One day I also want to upgrade the two 29 gallon setup to one 100 gal setup. But that’s $1,000. Not a priority right now ;-)

7. Our floor hockey team is solidly in 4th place, but our last game of the season (this Wednesday) is against the best team in the league (not fair that we’re playing them twice this season!!!), so we’ll probably finish in 5th place in the end. Out of 8 teams. Not great, but not bad either. The free nachos make it all worthwhile though haha!

So there’s the brief update.

-Eric

Very crappy two weeks!

Hello loyal readers. There hasn’t been a blog update in some time because to tell you the truth I’ve had a really crappy last couple of weeks and I haven’t really been up to writing much. But in the interest of my most excellent readership (*grin*), here’s a recap.

Erin and I got broken into. The robbers beat the crap out of Jack. The bastards took him out of his kennel so that they could beat him with a crow bar. What losers! Jack suffered cuts to his face and was bleeding from the nose very badly. After three days he bounced back well and he’s his old self again now two weeks later. The good thing is they caught one guy. Turns out he confessed to doing four B&E’s in the last month. The police have been wonderful and have done their best to investigate this case. They will be pressing charge of animal cruelty on the arrested person as well. That’s one good thing. Special thanks to all our friends and family who have been supportive in the last couple of weeks. Including Julie who rushed right over immediately to lend me her camera so I could take pictures of the big mess left behind. All my cameras were stolen of course. We’re now going through the hassles of insurance claims…bleck!

So, the next thing was to put in a security system. We got three quotes and chose Falcon Security Company. Their product best met our needs. I don’t want to have that awful feeling of coming home to a ransacked house and a half-dead dog again! It cost about $1600 to put in (first year of monitoring included) and it did decrease my house insurance premium more than I expected: 20% reduction. That’s a bit of a bright side there.

During one of the two days that I was home while the security system was being installed, Utilities Kingston came to swap out my gas meter. They also came to give me some bad news. The venting on the outside of my house for the furnace is now not up to code. It’s called B-vent and its Bad News! Risk of carbon monoxide leakage is high on these crappy set ups. I had my furnace inspected by a Heating Contractor and it turns out the furnace was on its last legs. Heck it’s a Coleman! They make tents not furnaces! So the old furnace has to go. In with a new high-efficiency Bryant 90i…. it’s a beauty…. But it hurts to pocket book. Ugh. So I am definitely bleeding money this month. Holy smokes! I need to win the lottery to pay my debts ;-(

So there’s my crappy update on my crappy last two weeks. I hope the next two weeks are as good as the last two were crappy. I wish!