Mike Bowler

I see that the Mozilla Foundation is sponsoring the red panda exhibit at the Toronto Zoo. The red panda is, of course, also known as the firefox.

More pictures from the red panda exhibit here.

We have annual passes for the Toronto Zoo and try to get there fairly regularly. We went last weekend and again today and between the two visits, got some of the best viewing of some of the animals that we've ever had.

The octopus in particular has always been inactive when we've visited before. Today, it was extremely active and so we stayed and watched it for quite a while. Unfortunately, the lighting is low there so my photos didn't really turn out. The best shot is included here.

Another high-point was in the gorilla area in the African pavilion. They've added a new outside viewing window in the gorilla area and we had some spectacular viewing here. At one point, one of the male gorillas climbed up on the platform by the window and we were literally inches away from him. At this distance, you really begin to appreciate their size. They look large from a distance but it isn't until you get right up close that you really appreciate how huge they are.

Some more pictures on my flickr account.

I wrote last week about an osprey nest that we discovered up on top of the power lines. Chris Celsie sent me a link to this article that explains some of the history behind these nests.


This is a great collaboration between the power company and a group of volunteers focused on saving these amazing birds.

We took the back roads on the way home from my cousins farm tonight and discovered this contraption built on top of the power lines. At the top was a large nest with two birds of prey inside. At the time we didn't know what they were although they looked a bit like hawks. We looked them up in a bird book when we got home and are now pretty sure that they were ospreys.

When we first stopped the car to take pictures, one of the birds took off with some prey in its talons. It looked like a fish but it was hard to be sure. The other bird flew above us for a bit presumably to see if we were a threat. It seemed to decide that we weren't so it flew back to the nest.

We're wondering who would have built this contraption and if it's there specifically for the osprey or if they've just taken over. There were no other contraptions like this on any of the other power line poles so we're guessing that it was there for the birds.

More pictures here.

We moved out to the country last September so this is our first summer in the new house. The previous owners had planted a ton of pretty flowers that we just haven't been able to identify yet like this one pictured here.

I've been taking lots of pictures and putting them on my flickr photostream and have been marking those we don't recognize as "unidentified flower". If you know what they are, please leave a comment on the picture. Many of these are absolutely gorgeous and we'd like to know what they are.

We're slowly looking them up ourselves but any help would certainly be appreciated

The next full moon, set to peak on the 31st, is a blue moon. On average these happen once every 2.72 years so they're relatively infrequent. Hence the saying "once in a blue moon".

More details on wikipedia.

My son and I were outside yesterday looking for animal tracks in the snow. We found lots of rabbit tracks and bird tracks and what might be deer tracks.

The one that really got my interest was what looks like snake tracks coming from the composter and heading towards a clump of trees. If these had been tracks made in the mud during the summer then I would have had no hesitation saying that they were snake tracks. What has me baffled is the fact that it's very cold outside and these tracks were left in the snow. I would have expected that snakes would be hibernating at this temperature and wouldn't be active enough to leave tracks.

This weekend, we have had more (and better) Great Blue Heron sightings than we've probably had all combined up till now. Every time we turned around, there was another one flying by.

We were staying at a cottage in the Kawartha Lakes region (near Peterborough) for the long weekend. The herons were clearly the high point although we saw quite a variety of other birds along with some muskrats and a group of white tailed deer.

Chris Wheeler says "would you blog about how you landscaped your yard to attract so many birds and wildlife?". Of course

We started by deliberately picking plants that attract birds and other wildlife. Edibles such as strawberries, mulberries, raspberries and grapes. Flowering bushes such as the false spirea, trumpet vine and mock orange.

The animals tend to leave the raspberries for me but they eat everything else from the garden. The raspberries are planted at the side of the house so they might be unattractive simply due to location.

Most people who get mulberry bushes get the non-fruiting variety as they don't make a mess. Those ones don't attract the birds however. We find that we don't get much of a mess in any case as the robins eat most of the berries before they fall.

When we plant annuals in the spring, we look specifically for plants that are labelled as "attracts butterflies/birds/etc". We discovered by accident that parsley is great to attract butterflies. There's one specific species of butterfly that loves parsley when it's in the caterpiller stage. Lots of caterpillers means lot of butterflies.

Moving water is really attractive to birds. We have a pond with a waterfall and the birds are regularly coming to bathe in the water. A pond will also attract raccoons if you have them in your area.

We've put fish, snails and frogs into the pond. I suspect that having them will attract more birds but I don't know for sure.

We have about half a dozen trees that provide shelter for birds and this is certainly attractive to them. Although it's hard to distinguish where one tree stops and the next stops, this picture contains a fir, some sumacs, an ash and a katsura tree. All of these are very close to the pond.

I'm not sure what specifically attracts the rabbits but they do come by fairly regularly. We used to get foxes as well but they've moved out of the area as it became built up.

Lastly, we have four bird feeders and one squirrel feeder.

If you're trying to attract wildlife then my top suggestion is to get moving water of some kind.

As I was watering some plants in the back yard a few minutes ago, a spectacular hawk flew out of one of our trees and landed a few metres from me. It looked around for a couple of minutes before flying off with some prey in its talons.

Unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me - this would have made an amazing picture.

I've looked through our bird field guide and I believe that this was a red-shouldered hawk. We get a lot of red-tailed hawks and the occasional marsh hawk (aka northern harrier) but this is the first time I've seen a red-shouldered hawk. Very exciting.

Here's a neat idea to draw attention to the issue of whaling.

We have a lot of ornamental pear trees in the park behind our house. These only flower for a few short weeks in early spring and are spectacular during this time. When flowering, the trees are entirely covered by tiny white flowers so from a distance, the tree looks entirely white. For the rest of the summer, they're a fairly non-descript green.

As you can see from the picture, we're in the middle of the flowering season and these trees stand out from all the greenery around them.

We just got back from an event put on by a local astronomy club. There were a variety of telescopes set up and people there to help us understand what we were looking at.

We got a really good view of venus and it's rings. My wife was able to get a good view of the Casini ring with one of the telescopes.

We were able to get a really good view of jupiter and four of it's moons.

The highpoint for me was seeing a "globular cluster" which is apparently a distant galaxy. This was a very dense grouping of stars in one part of the sky.

Lastly, we were able to get a very high level of detail when viewing the moon. We could actually see mountains inside the craters which was fascinating.

The Washington Post has a fascinating article on why nuclear power is a good alternative. What makes the article so interesting is that it's written by one of the original founders of Greenpeace.


Link from slashdot.

I grew up near the Don Valley Brickworks. When I was a kid, this was a functioning operation that mined clay and created the bricks. Every day at 1:00 they would set off the dynamite and our house would shake.

A number of years ago the brick making operation was shut down and the site was turned into a nature preserve. They diverted a nearby stream to fill a number of ponds and the local wildlife moved in.

We went for a walk through this area today and had a really nice time. We saw quite a bit of wildlife including ducks, muskrats, snakes, turtles, blackbirds and literally hundreds if not thousands of tiny fish. More photos are here.