Justfolk's photos

This is our eighteenth spring in Ganny Cove and yesterday was the first visit we have had from whiskyjacks, a.k.a. grey jays. Two arrived, a parent and child, methinks, since the smaller of the two would sometimes turn to the bigger with gaping maw, expecting food to be dropped in. The food was some broken-up nuts we got for them from inside. Although they haven't visited us before, we have seen them in the area, and they are always interested in people. These guys had no trouble jumping on my hand. Pleasant visitors. And much more subdued, not to mention quieter, than their garish cousins the blue jays.

I saw this eagle early this morning checking out the cove under our house. I took a few pictures at the window and then, rather under-dressed, went to the deck to take some more. But I disturbed him and he lazily flew off.

In a thick fog and a light drizzle, weather she would have appreciated, my old friend Virginia was buried this morning. She was 94 when she died last week. At the funeral were almost entirely relatives: cousins, nieces, nephews, and the children of nieces and nephews. The priest, 81 years old himself, was her second cousin. After the box was lowered by hand into the grave, one of the nephews (in his sixties) said, "This is the first time in sixty years that anyone has been buried in this graveyard the old fashioned way." A murmur of agreement went around that she would have approved.

My old friend Virginia Dillon died this week at 94. She'd lived a long, active and thoughtful life. When I took this picture six or seven years ago, she was recovering quickly from a stroke. She was still hopeful that she would move back home from the care home she was then resident in. But she never did move home, at least not for very long, and she died in her room at this care home. Here she was showing me -- in fact she gave me -- her official graduation portrait from May 1956 when she got her first degree, a BA (Ed) which allowed her to advance in the job she already had -- a schoolteacher. Ten years later, she went back to university and got an MA, writing an excellent thesis, still read widely, on Irish linguistic holdovers in the folk speech of the stretch of coast she lived on all her life. And thirty-odd years later still, I started recording her memories, something I did for the following ten or fifteen years whenever we could get the chance. I have archived well over a hundred hours of those recordings. I hope to publish something based on it. Virginia had a steel-trap mind, and a prodigious memory. I have often thought of her as a modern Irish bard. She never wrote poetry, nor sang, but she was a receptacle for oral history like no one else I have known, and a storyteller of top quality.

No more than a hundred metres from these two, an adult duck was paddling along with a half-dozen ducklings in tow. These guys seemed to want nothing to do with them.

Many people here in Newfoundland call any yellow bird a Yellowhammer. Some only call this one, the Yellow warbler, by that name. So today when I was trying to get a picture of this bird, a man ambled by and asked "What are you looking at -- a dead bird? Ha ha." My wife said, "No, it's very much alive." And I said, "It's a Yellow warbler, a Yellowhammer." "Ehhh," he replied, "they're not supposed to be here! The whole world's upside down!" And he walked on. I didn't think there was any point in saying that Yellow warblers are supposed to be here, and they generally show up around this time of year. This one was my first one for this year. By the way, the -hammer in Yellowhammer has nothing to do with hammering, so the local guess (which I've helped propagate!) that the name really should belong to a woodpecker is wrong. In fact, the suffix -amer is an old Germanic one referring to buntings specifically and sometimes to birds in general. In Britain, I understand, the name Yellowhammer refers to the Yellow bunting. When British people came here, 400 years or so ago, they brought the name and applied it to whatever yellow birds they could find. The North American Yellow warbler was the main beneficiary of the donation, though not the only one. (That's just like how the North American robin got its name, by the way.)

Summer is here. It's June first today and this was my first sighting of a Yellow warbler for the year. I saw a Yellow-rumped warbler a few days ago. And birders locally have been seeing a half-dozen other warblers in the past week or so.

Here is what the Forsythia looked like this afternoon when I'd finished getting it in the ground. The ground sloped a bit so I got some sturdy rocks from a near-by road-side rock-cut to build that end up a bit. I dug a hole about 60x60x60 cm (like nearly 2x2x2 feet). The hole got filled with rotted leaves, lots of compost, and the cleaned soil. I used a few of the stones I pulled out to make the big rocks more sturdy against run-off. We'll see how good a job it is in a few months.

This morning, I started to get this Forsythia in the ground. But I didn't get that far. It's been a couple of years in a pot and it's not, as they say, thriving. But it is producing a few flowers. Maybe tomorrow morning I'll actually get it in the ground.

In spring, the junipers (a.k.a. larch, tamarack, hackmatack, Larix larix, etc.) are at their prettiest. Here, today, I was looking into the growing heart of one.

This pigeon, perhaps on a negotiating trip to plead for a renewal of food resources (I've given up feeding them until winter arrives again), put up with my approach until I might have picked him up, and then he flew off.

Bog myrtle, Myrica gale, is good for nothing but good looks. But folklore has it that the Norse used it for hallucinogenic pleasure. They didn't know what is known now -- that the compounds that get you off are also carcinogenic. Not worth the buzz.

The bigger one, on the right, was singing while the smaller one listened. And then he (she?) started preening the smaller one.

Beside a path we walk, hanging on a small fir tree, was this handleless, Christmas-decorated tea strainer. One never knows what one will find.

A path we walk regularly follows the route of the old railway track, torn up forty years ago. It backs on hundreds of private homes' back gardens. This patch of lungwort, Soldiers and sailors, was blooming yesterday outside the fence of someone's garden. The patch was about two metres across. My wife thought it might have spread by roots under the fence. But lots of people dump good flower pots and soil over their fences, and I suspect this patch got started so. In any case, it's a pleasant sight for walkers, if not for the livyers on the other side of the fence.

Walking on a quiet, fairly winding path today, suddenly there was a loud buzzing sound in a cloud of dust on the path and this motorised toy car came zooming up to us. And then the car spun around and went back as we saw its owner come around the corner, controlling it with his cell phone. It was a little like Bugs Bunny's Tasmanian devil. And, being about five times as old as the owner, each of us jumped a bit.

This was part of what went into supper this evening. I took the original recipe forty years ago from a low-fat-healthy-recipes cookbook but it has evolved in that time: I no longer do it much like the original recipe. Instead I have to follow the recipe's meanderings, since it keeps changing. I never know where it will go next. But it's basically seared chicken in a wine-and-yogourt sauce, with herbs and garlic. And shrooms and onion. Mmmm.

Our municipal parks staff have taken to making up a signs imploring visitors Seuss-style to stay out of the flower beds. But this Editor-head sees a need for a few hyphens.