It is the middle of November and the dock at Moody Point has been pulled for the winter. So that is the end of Kayaking from here because the shoreline has environmentally sensitive plants and we are not allowed to launch from shore.

I documented the ten fall Kayaking trips to Shackford Point. It was remarkable how different each trip was. I guess I will just have to sit around the house and mope until spring.

There is just nuttin to do and nuttin evah happens at our house. So I set up a time out stool in the Living Room and spent a couple hours meditating on my misfortune. Would you like some Whine with that?

I choose the stool because it was far enuf away from the feeders to be unobtrusive and high enuf to look down on the feeders. I took a little over three hundred pictures during the couple of hours in time out. Even so I didn’t see several species that I expected/hoped to see. Although I saw two species I didn’t expect.

Pine Siskin

We don’t usually see the Pine Siskins at the feeders, but there they were. It was a pleasant surprise.

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Ruby Crowned Kinglet

The next surprise was a new species for me: Ruby Crowned Kinglet. We are on the fringe of their summer breeding grounds. We are close to the winter habitat boundary. It will be interesting to see if they over winter here. I would love to see them in their breeding colours.

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Chickadee

I was looking at my pictures and I was wondering what was going on. (My first mistake?) Most of the Chickadees I was getting pictures of did not have the white breasts I was expecting. These tended to have some brown melting into white. I was wondering if there were sub species differences. I learned that there are potentially three species of Chickadee that could pass through here but only the black capped chickadee is endemic. There is the boreal chickadee that resides North of us and the Carolina chickadee that is South of us. It can be hard to tell the black capped chickadee from the Caroline chickadee. One sign is that the black capped chickadee has the white stripe on the wing. There also exist hybrids between the two. This is a rabbit hole I didn’t need to go down. On Google Images I see black capped chickadees with both white and colored breasts. So I guess that this is simply normal variation within the species.

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The chickadees tended to grab and go, so it was a challenge to get pictures as nice as I would like. This would argue for a new camera with a faster lens. 🙁

Titmice

The titmice also did not cooperate with the picture taker as they also were grab and go feeders.

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Nuthatch

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Rose Breasted Nuthatch

The Rose Breasted Nuthatch is slightly smaller than the Nuthatch. We tend to see fewer of them.

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Red Bellied Woodpecker

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Bluejay

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Cardinal

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Mourning Dove

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Geese

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House Finch

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Goldfinch

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Crows

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English Starlings

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SQRL

The bane of the bird feeders.

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Fun with Food

Breakfast used to be called the most important meal of the day. I suppose I need to unlearn that as they haven’t been able to substantiate that claim with hard evidence. In our house, Sunday is pancake day. The difference between pancakes batter and waffle batter is a couple tablespoons of vegetable oil, so starting with pancake batter it is possible to make either. The consensus in our family is that waffles are better because they can be made more crispy and hold more fruit and syrup.

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The rest of the week, breakfast is al a carte/ make your own.

Friday night is MINI BYOB, trying to maintain some normalcy in these crazy times. I usually make cookies or brownies for the festivities.

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Sometimes cookies are not enuf.

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We have been trying to be careful and since the second wave of COOVID has started we haven’t been to a restaurant or done carryout. We really wanted sum Chihuahua Fajitas and decided to try to make our own. So if we had a contest to see who could dirty the most dishes, I would be a contender.

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We made enuf we had some for leftovers:

We don’t have fancy meals every day, some days are just meat and tater days.

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Fun with Benji

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So we are stuck self isolating at home while the second wave of the pandemic rages across the country. No more Kayaking until the spring. Fortunately Benji keeps us busy and makes us go on long walks.

We continue to muddle along. I have the time out chair and the bird channel to keep me entertained. I should spent more time learning the new tools for photo editing.

Stay safe.

Mark, Wink and Meg