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Introducing Marimo!

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2016

This is one of the more unusual birthday gifts I received this year:

A glass jar with rocks, a bit of sea fan and something in a bag. First we put the rocks and fan in the jar and filled with tap water:

Here’s the weird thing in the bag:

It’s a ‘marimo’, a type of algae native to certain lakes around the world that grows into ball shapes. He was to live in our jar!

After a quick washing:

We put him in the jar:

Where he floated! The sheet that came with him said this was due to the water ph and oxygen content, and marimo would change his depth depending on such things.

After about a week though, he has settled on the bottom like he would in a lake:

Marimo needs almost no maintenance, prefers low light (no direct sunlight!) and can apparently live (and grow) for decades. The perfect plant for a cat household!

Posted in Garden, Home, Nature, Pets | Comments Closed

Wildlife XI: Return of the Robo Camera

Monday, September 14th, 2015

This time I left the camera out for about 6 weeks, and it took a staggering 800+ photos. Incredibly the batteries still had 30% charge left after all this time (which included a series of extremely hot days). I’m really pleased with this camera overall.

Looking through all those photos for hidden gems was a bit of a drag though, since about 775 of them had nothing of much interest 🙂

Let’s start with the squirrel shots for mum:

Doing a quick tail comparison tells me the first and last shots are of different squirrels, which is entirely likely given the number of them living around here. The selfie shot is funny isn’t it?

You can see I switched the position of the camera after the first month. This was to catch a very particular target on film, but I’m sad to say I failed. I’ll try again though, and I’ll leave you in suspense as to what I’m after…

The rest of the shots were of the usual cats:

Exactly two (consecutive) frames of a deer:

A bunny:

This creature I am having trouble identifying (but is most likely the fluffy white cat):

And a few shots of possum bums (and no I’m not joking).

Still no foxes. Still no ground hogs. Still no wolves, bears or even bigfeet.

The search continues…

Posted in Animals, Garden, The Unknown | 2 Comments »

The Fair

Sunday, August 30th, 2015

Once again we visited the Duchess County Fair. It was great as usual, and here’s a list of ten things we saw:

1) Lots of rides! They were a little less dazzling after what we’d seen in Hamburg, but I still cursed my craven sense of balance that prevents me from riding them these days!

2) Prize winning wheat! Nearby were sunflowers about 10 feet tall!

3) Delicious fair food, absolutely worth the incredibly inflated prices! $9 for a cob of corn and some lemonade? No problem 😉

4) This amazing first-prize winner of the 7-10 year old ‘non kit’ Lego assembly contest. I kid you not, this was indeed the blue ribbon winner:

5) Some extremely sporty sheep!

6) A legion of Minions!

7) Fine, fine art:

8) Porky the giant pig! Enough sausage for 1000 people! Two 100 pound hams! (No we didn’t enter to see what was probably a sleeping pig)

9) A baby cow, born only minutes earlier:

10) And last but not least many animals for KLS to feed. She was scared of the camel because of his teeth, but he turned out to be a gentle (slobbering) fellow 🙂

Posted in Animals, Crafts, Garden, Miscellaneous | 1 Comment »

Wildlife Camera (Part 10)

Wednesday, July 29th, 2015

It’s been a while, but once again it’s time for some snaps from our backyard wildlife camera! I dusted it off a couple of weeks ago and put it out on the back patio facing away from the house on an angle. Here’s the first shot on it:

If you think that’s me carefully placing a feeder in shot to attract animals… well I’m guilty as charged!

There were about 90 shots on the camera, about 45% of which were like this…

…and another 45% like this…

Yes that’s me mowing!

The other 10% were very interesting though. Let’s get the squirrel shots out of the way first:

We saw chipmunks (and birds) eating from the feeder as well, but apparently they are too small or fact to trigger the shutter so there were no photos of them.

However it seems the feeder wasn’t just popular with the squirrels and chipmunks. Here’s the night photos (click on them to enlarge):

Strangely I don’t think this is the cat we usually see in our yard. I bet Yossie and Emi know all about this visitor 🙂

That’s a deer, hiding behind the first bowl (which is full of dead branches yes I know and I will clean it up soon!)

That one is a real mystery. It’s small and sleek and probably dark-furred. Could it be a rat? I think it’s too big for a mole (which we have seen in our backyard before). Any ideas?

A possum! And the first clear shot I’ve got of one on our camera! I wonder where he lives?

Another first: a skunk! A little one as well, probably a baby. This is not surprising to us, since we’ve seen skunks in our yard before (even a mother and two babies a couple of years ago), but this is the first time I’ve caught one on the feeder.

These night shots surprised me because of the variety and because in every case there was only one of each animal. There were however a few shots with no visible animal and I wonder if there were things lurking in the dark beyond the range of the sensor that had triggered it. I fiddled with contrast on some of them to explore with no luck. Perhaps it was just the wind?

I love using this camera and the excitement of looking at the photos. I’ll be putting it out again this time for a month or so 🙂

Posted in Animals, Garden, Home, The Unknown | Comments Closed

Snow Day

Monday, February 2nd, 2015

KLS and I rarely keep up with the weather forecast, so we were a bit surprised to hear last night that a blizzard was incoming.

It hit us hard today, and along with the foot+ of snow came incredible cold. Below -15C at its worst!

Both our workplaces closed today, so we just stayed warm inside while the snow came down. But eventually the driveway had to be cleared, so we went out…

Even with four layers on top, two pairs of pants (!) and two pairs of gloves it was still brutal outside. I can’t remember it ever snowing in such temperatures, and since the snow was heavy it took me a while to remove it all.

KLS mostly stayed warm inside!

It’s been a very snowy winter so far, and I don’t doubt we’ve got a lot more to come. I usually enjoy removing it, but I’d prefer it were the temperature a little closer to freezing!

Posted in Garden, Home | 3 Comments »

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