Justfolk's photos

Brown creepers are a rare visitor to our feeders. In fact I never saw one in twenty years. But, a week or so ago, one showed up, and it showed up again today. They are not rare in these parts. I think they usually spend their time in the woods.

Two days ago it was warm enough on our deck for the house flies to come out and stagger around. Then last night about eight cm of snow fell. Flies, they can't win for losing.

Just a sliver of itself, Day Two of the new moon, a few minutes after the sun had set.

I was about to throw out the mesh bag some oranges came in when I thought I should make a berry bag out of it for the birds. We mostly get seed-eaters and suet-gorgers, but now and again there are frugivores. The bag's been up for two days and I have seen no sign of anyone at it yet. I can wait.

I'm a fan of well-expired film. This film was twenty years expired when I put it in my Rollei 35TE last fall. I finally finished it, got it developed this week, and picked it up today. This was the first frame, well, after a half frame that wasn't focussed. It's probably the best frame on the roll, too. :) It was some variety of Kodak 400 film -- "Max versatility" was part of its name. I shot it at around ISO 100 -- one stop extra for each decade, a rule for C41 film that works more often than it doesn't. I was waiting for the tree-chipper truck to move into traffic so I took a picture of its arse. ____________ EDIT, later: I should have mentioned that I have another version in which I "fixed" the white balance. but I like this warmish one better.

About this time last night, down the street at the mail boxes. Then overnight we had about fifteen cm of snow that turned to rain. March weather.

In the cold late winter rain outside our kitchen window, this guy, presumably male, is approaching the other pigeons, presumably females, puffing up his neck, cooing constantly and whirling dervishly next to them. Clearly he's got one thing on his mind. But they pay him none of their mind and just fly to another perch. So far.

We've lived in this house twenty-two years and have been watching the bird life outside our kitchen door that whole time. But we never bothered to keep a list, I mean a List, until a few months ago when we calculated that what visited us that day was Number Forty-two. It took three months to see Number Forty-three: a Brown Creeper yesterday afternoon. I saw enough to identify it, but not to get an especially good picture. Pleased just the same.

I think the best placename in the whole of St John's is Wash Ballocks, right at the bottom of Signal Hill. Some old charts, maybe as an attempt to avoid the suggestion that you'll get your bollocks washed here if you're not careful, wrote the name as "Wash-Ball Rocks." That's not much different, really, but it at least offered the polite suggestion that, say, cannonballs were in the water. Yeah yeah. This was yesterday afternoon, before the wind pushed the pack ice into the harbour.

I went to Fort Amherst, at the mouth of the harbour of St John's, this afternoon to look at the long spit of northern ice coming south. It was a good five km offshore where I was, but it was right into shore at Cape Spear. That is what this picture shows, Cape Spear, about six km from where I was, with the ice pushing up against the landwash. Many bays are filled now with these broken pans of ice, each up to a couple of metres thick, but with almost no icebergs among them yet. Today, I saw a few bergy bits, pieces sticking up perhaps four metres or so, but they might have been just pans turned on their edges by the pressure of the ice behind them. Probably not proper bergy bits. Every day we are hearing reports of two very dangerous things. One is the scattered polar bear coming ashore from these passing pans, and looking for a meal. The other is crowds of people foolishly jumping up on the bobbing ice coming ashore, while the sea heaves underneath them. I saw neither this afternoon.

I was an archivist for 21 years, and was involved in archives in various ways for twenty more years afterwards. I knew Burn Gill when he was the only person in our province with "Archivist" as his job title. Burn's been dead twenty years. In that time he has had two archival buildings named after him. This one houses the city's archives. I was walking by it early this morning. The parking lot was empty, so I think no one was there yet.

I walked past a baseball diamond this morning. There was not very much colour in the original picture but I stripped out what there was anyway.

A couple of nights ago, sitting reading in a favourite chair, I spied myself and my surroundings reflected in the window.

Apparently not a *true* underwing, the "Large yellow underwing" has no trouble holding its name. The upperwings, here beneath the underwings, are plain browns, while the underwings are a bright orange, with that striking black bar. I never saw one until recent years. They are a recent invader of these parts. I mistook this fellow, based on his orange upper side, for a European skipper. But I have been corrected. I took pictures of both the up-side and the down-side but I particularly like this one of his underside aspect. He was dead when we found him sitting inside the door of the fireplace. He'd probably been there since autumn, though we had used the fireplace a few times. Where he was was warm enough to dry out but not hot enough to burn. A kind of Limbo. The very vestibule of the inferno.

After hearing a bump against the side of the house I came downstairs to see this through the kitchen window. It was already too late to save the mourning dove, so I watched for a minute and then closed the blinds. I checked back now and again. After the hawk was gone, I went out and cleaned it up. I could have left it for the crows. But it was too close to dark and I think I would have just invited some neighbourhood rats to a feast if I left it. A friend tells me her father used to call bird feeders "hawk feeders." Of course he was right. And who am I to distinguish among the birds I feed?

The city has no name on its official maps for this lane, but a few generations ago it was called Kearney's Lane, at least partly because, in the 1800s, a boat-builder with that name built a boat in a shed a few hundred feet beyond the top of the lane, and took it to the salt water through the lane with less than an inch to spare on the sides. Bets were laid and winnings paid. The buildings have changed since then but the width is probably similar. This was this afternoon, in 2023. Even fifty years ago, when I was a young fellow, such "lanes" were called "coves" because they had still recently given access to the harbour. Today this lane ends at a paved road at both ends. However, only a hundred feet west of it, beyond these buildings on the left, is "Steer's Cove," a short dead-end street that is mostly parking spots.

I was finished making supper and the buzzer had buzzed, so I was in a hurry to get something of the conjunction I saw out the window as I went past it. It was Jupiter and Venus, being swallowed by clouds and going down behind the neighbour's house. So I grabbed this shot which I am pretty pleased with. My wife held the curtains back for me. It is through three layers of window glass, but not bad. If you zoom in, you can see three moons of Jove: Callisto, Ganymede and Io. And you can imagine, if you will, that you see the ovate phase of Venus. Maybe. Maybe not. And then we ate supper. The clouds moved in and the planets slipped further down, and they were gone.

This was three hours ago when they were all in the sky still. If they are not all set now, they are down below neighbours' houses.