Well, I guess we here in Saskatchewan have been allotted one good month this year for weather, and it was September. Almost as soon as the calendar flipped over into October the winds blew up, it clouded over, and got cold and wet. Really wet. Several of the turnouts at the barn were under water (again) and it takes a fair amount to do that. Today we had a small amount of sun for a bit, but the rest of the week looks fairly gloomy. I've already logged a couple of cancellations of planned photo shoots, one for a client and what was to be our second attempt to find the ghost town that eluded us last time. We did get enough of an idea of the terrain and lack of roads in the general area to know that we don't want to try this on anything less than perfectly dry surfaces, so that hoped-for outing on Saturday didn't happen. Maybe next weekend, although someone today mentioned the "s" word (that would be snow) as something that might occur on Saturday, so maybe we'll be out of luck again. Too early in the week to believe forecasts for the weekend to come.
I thought for a while there I'd have to post more Nelson photos since with the cold and wet I certainly wasn't generating any new ones, but things got quite active on the photo front yesterday and today so as usual I had to pick and choose which ones to cram into my limited space here. I will try to sprinkle some of the Nelson ones in here and there as time goes by.
First shot is one that I created last week when the weather was too rotten for outdoors activity. I think I started out editing summer horse show shots for clients (a seemingly endless task that I have been pegging away at for quite a while) but I got distracted while wandering around in the computer and ended up with this as an end product. I got the horses and chariot photo a couple of years ago at Spruce Meadows, and blended it with one of my beloved night sky visuals and a photo of Stonehenge supplied by my daughter. Sadly, her camera (formerly my camera) was misbehaving for the entirety of their trip to England and northern Europe this time last year, so I have to be creative in my use of the shots she has shared with me.
We have two family birthdays a few days apart at the end of September and beginning of October, and for the last few years have had a combined birthday outdoors breakfast at a nearby small lake and provincial park. It was a bit chilly and soggy on Sunday morning when we set off for our destination, but not actively raining, so we carried on with the plan. A group of us met out there and a good time and good meal was enjoyed by all. We are gradually evolving our strategy for this outing and may eventually, given enough time, actually have everything we require in the way of foodstuffs and equipment. I've gone so far as to start a list so there is some hope, assuming I can find the list when the time comes.
Shots two and three were taken during the course of this outing. In shot two, Arrow the grand-dog is demonstrating her tree-climbing style. If Bill, her owner, asks her to do something, Arrow will always try her best to comply and usually gives it a darn good shot, even if, as in this case, it's not something that dogs were designed to do. She actually got fairly far up the trunk a couple of times before gravity and lack of momentum brought her back to earth. She's a dog with a lot of "try" in her.
The annual breakfast area is also the home of the chickadees that have been habituated to hand feeding by the local birders, so one of the things we try to remember to bring is bird seed. We got all the way through our fire-building, cooking, and eating of breakfast without seeing or hearing a single chickadee, when towards the end of our stay finally a couple appeared. Mark (grandson whose hand is featured in shot four) barely got his seed-laden hand up to horizontal when the first chickadee was right there. After that we had lots of them, some happy to hand feed, others who preferred the piles we had put elsewhere on the site. This is always a fun feature of the breakfast morning, and I'm pretty sure the chickadees are happy with it too.
Shot four is Sandhill cranes feeding off the post-harvest grain left in the fields. We saw field after field of them all the way out to Pike Lake on Sunday morning. Usually it's huge numbers of Canada geese in these fields (we did see a few of them as well) but this year was striking for the crane population in evidence. Most years I only ever see a few each spring and fall, generally when I am at the stables, and they are always passing over very high up in the sky. I was thrilled to see so many, although it would have been nice to have been able to get closer (not really a realistic hope since these are wary wild birds that get shot at) and to have had a bit more light. Many were doing the "crane dance" as you can see in this photo. A pair will suddenly leap straight up in the air with wings unfurled, a fascinating thing to observe.
Final shot is one of many I took in our yard today, as we were inundated with large quantities of grackles. Again, lighting wasn't the best and for many shots I was shooting through the living room window (which at least I cleaned a while back specifically to optimize my "through the window" bird photography) so they aren't the best quality. I did sneak out onto the back deck a few times for more direct shots, but as with most other birds, they are too wary to get very close to. Thank goodness for the bold ones like the bluejays, chickadees and nuthatches that will tolerate a photographer in fairly close proximity.
I was very interested to observe the group behavior of these grackles, who seem to be quite a combative lot. The big fellow who was planted in the feeding dish (which I had to refill about three times over the course of the day) was defending it against all comers. The female to the left was allowed to get relatively close, as was the youngster on the right, so I think they were a family unit. Certainly no-one else was allowed on the table while he was feeding, and even these two had to be very submissive or they got chased off as well. One interesting thing with the grackles was that while they were very aggressive with each other, they tolerated the sparrows without any comment at all, and conversely, the sparrows, who usually flee at the drop of a hat, were quite OK with moving amongst the large grackle flock. Strange.
