Justfolk's photos

The first red crossbill to visit in a couple of months. Last winter we had flocks of them almost every day.

Two purple finches (male and female) and a goldfinch.

The goldies are greenish, and the purples deep rose. Why they're called what they are called, there's no one who knows. ------------- This was during today's blizzardy snow storm.

I "saw a ghost" in this graveyard one night about 45 years ago. I was walking home from work and, as snow swirled around, I kept seeing the outline of someone ahead of me. Long story short: it was my own shadow on little dwies of snow that kept blowing up twenty or thirty metres in front of me. I live on the other side of the graveyard these days and this view is only about fifty metres from my window. We went out tonight for a short walk before a snow storm hits tomorrow.

The view from our back door a few minutes ago, with a bus passing in the street.

I went out and shovelled a half hour which was enough to make a path for the woman who will deliver the paper in the morning. And I took a picture looking up the street.

I was trying to figure out whether I would go out to shovel now, before the freezing drizzle starts, or wait till morning. I still don't know. In thinking about it, I took this picture from an upstairs window. I got a reflection I didn't expect.

This fellow was running around the bathroom sink unable to get up the steepest part. So I laid a sheet of toilet paper to act as a ladder and he scurried up. Then he ran to the edge of the counter, where I got this picture, and he jumped. He seemed to be happy on the floor. I left him alone then.

The full moon has been up four hours or so and here it's arcing through the neighbours' tree.

Some pretty the starlings are.

There are a lot of reasons I took this picture. I like truck's arses to begin with. I like all the wires. I like the half-shot of Stockwood's bakery which closed (after like seventy years) about five years ago. I like this intersection: a photograph someone took of the line of utility poles (we used to call them just telephone poles) in this intersection was published in the local university student paper when I was seventeen; the image has come to mind every time I am in the neighborhood. Here it is again. I had the camera's white balance accidentally set at "Incandescent." That fact and that I was shooting through a car windshield made the picture gaudily and garishly blue. Converting it to b&w hid some of that error.

Yammering on about something or other.

We were in the car long enough today for it to warm up. Despite it being minus ten degrees C on the other side of the glass, this spider was stretching his or her legs and looking around as if to find something to pounce on. After we turned off the car, the spider probably went back to hibernating. It's minus twelve out there now. Brrr. He/she was tiny; excluding the legs its body was about three mm long.

This was a few minutes ago, just up the street from our house. Five cm of snow are forecast for tonight.

I found some frost (and some hairs) on the car window this morning.

My aunt Shirley, on the right, left home for Boston just past her twentieth birthday in the early 1950s. I was just a couple of years old. She came home every few years on visits, and we always enjoyed each other's company. She died last week. From the 1970s until Peggy's death in 2015, she and Peggy were partners. Peggy was my aunt by common-law marriage. Here, while we were visiting them in Boston in 1995, my wife borrowed my Canonet and took a picture of the three of us. It is one of my favourite pictures of them, and only partly because I am squeezed in between them: I love the looks on their faces. Peggy and Shirley died on the same day eight years apart. They both would have liked that fact.

There are two, sometimes three, flickers that have pretty well exclusive access to our suet. They easily scare off the smaller birds like juncos and chickadees when they are in the flickers' way. But today, after sixty-odd cm of snow, a phalanx of starlings, each nearly as big as a flicker, were trying to get at the suet. This flicker was having nothing to do with their usurpation. He made himself look big, with a dangerous bill and lunged at them. The starlings didn't reciprocate much, but they weren't put off by him either. They'd just shuffle in closer from the sides and above, and drive him into another frenzy. Finally, there were just too many starlings for him, and he left the scene.

While shovelling my path this morning, I saw a landscape I had not seen before.