Snowbirds out my window

Well,

I discovered one good thing about living in the city, Snowbird practice. For the labour day weekend at the CNE the Snowbirds are doing an airshow, and this morning they were practicing above the city, so I got out the long lens to play. Watching them was very cool, but made me feel kinda sick.

I like the twists in the clouds

This was completely by accident, on my part, not the Snowbirds Im sure.

This is my favorite one, you can see the clouds in the upper part of the photo where they had done the same maneuver a few minutes ago (giving me time to get the camera)

Tough Parenting

Hey all,

Here is a nice little sequence of photos I captured of a Chipping Sparrow fledgling and a parent. It was on the ground chipping away, begging for food

The female parent returned with a small moth, which was guzzled quickly, and of course the fledgling still wanted more.

When it realized it wasnt going to get anything else with this trip

It did a nice wrestling move on its mother. Parenting is difficult for birds apparently

a decent shot of the gaping maw

Return to nature

Hello all,

I'm sorry that I have not recently updated this blog, sitting in my apartment looking at the classifieds does not help my creativity. But, I spent a few days up in Bracebridge so I was able to wander around getting a few photos. Its always nice to get back to the nature that Toronto doesn't provide (unless by nature you mean the very interesting crazies that live here).

Heres a pretty good one of a toad I found in the woods. After the fact, I was pretty angry at myself for not seeing the leaf in the foreground that gives the right hand corner a greenish blur. But hey, Im learning, and maybe you wouldn't have even noticed had I not pointed it out.

Similar to the Chipmunk photo posted earlier, I think this is a text book picture of a Red Squirrel (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus). It froze in terror for a few minutes, which allowed me to play with the settings on my camera

A damselfly, I wish I could have brought out the colours in the eyes a little more, they are bright blue (if you cant tell in the photo)

Tomorrow I will post a nice sequence of a sparrow fledgling I found that was putting its mom to work.

Ultimate Frisbee Nationals

Yesterday, My husband and I headed to the Ultimate frisbee National Champs at Sunnybrook Park in Toronto. My two cousins from Vancouver were on two teams from BC, so we came out to show some family support. I had fun playing with my 70-300 lense and catching some of the action on the field. Enjoy

My cousin Julie's team was called Backbone, here they are in the first game we watched

Pretty serious stuff

My cousin Julie, waiting for the kick(flick?)-off.

My cousin Jordan, team "Vortex", in her game

A sliding catch

We also got to watch some of the other games going on, some of the mens teams were pretty crazy

I took some time to watch "Furious George", a very impressive mens team

Julie in the semifinals

Backbone lines up

Backbone won their semifinal game, to play in the finals against "Dirt", a team from Toronto. It was a awesome game (despite all the foul calls).

Those frisbee shorts give bad wedgies apparently

The game was awesome! It was 9-13, Dirt only had to score one more goal to win, I was down on the field and they were totally sure they were going to win. But Backbone fought back, made some awesome plays and scored 5 points in a row to win the game! The best comeback ever! Congratulations on a great game Backbone!

Hot in this apartment?

The past few weeks after Gaspe have been nothing but job searches (if any of you know anyone that needs 1) A PhD student to work on vector-borne diseases or 2) A vector biologist, please..let me know :) ) . I haven't had the camera out much (nothing but smog in Toronto anyway!) but I busted it out today to convey the stuffy hotness that is our apartment, as demonstrated by my cat, Sphingidae. She's still alive, I promise.

Mont Albert and the end

The next morning, we were treated to the best weather we could possibly imagine for the climb up Mont Albert (except later in the afternoon, it rained, but whatever). The climb was rated as being for those in good physical condition and between 6-8hrs long:we were in for quite a ride. I got a fair number of photos, and I don't think Ill post them all here, remember you can see all my photos at www.flickr.com/photos/biting_flies, take a look!!

There were quite a few streams rushing down the sides of the mountain

Well, we'll skip right to the top of Mont Albert, since it came rather quickly in comparison to the rest of the climb back down. It was perfect weather for grabbing a few photos, with nice clouds and blue skies. The top was very rocky, and kind of tundra-like

The climb down was a whole different story. We did a loop, which was a great idea because we got to see the other side of the mountain (which, despite what any bear may say, was totally worth the climb up). We followed this path along to the edge, and then down we went.

The boardwalk through the trees was very cool, all the trees are stunted

And then came the rocks, and they would keep coming for the next 2-3 km

We were high enough that there was still snow on the peaks

This is one of my favorite photos from the trip, I think I've managed to capture gravity quite well. Thanks to Erin for climbing out on the snow!

This was a woman making her way down the slope with walking sticks. I was quite impressed at the number of people attempting this climb, by this point in the trip I was starting to question my climbing abilities (and the integrity of my knees).

For those of you non-french speaking folk, this sign says "the descent down this slope if very long and very difficult"

Pardon my French, but no shit.

Alex makes his way down

I love the colours in this one

This photo was around the bottom of the slope, from here we still had 6km to go. And here comes the rain.


The rest of the hike was rocky at times, and other times very muddy. All told, it took us 7 hrs for a 17km hike. We all felt it the next day. There are plenty of other trails around the park with lesser difficulties. It was a great place to visit, hike and camp in and I hope to go back there again.

The next day involved biking through the rest of the park and back to St Anne du Monts to pick up the other car. We packed up and started the long drive back home. By this point I was too tired to take more pictures, so Ill end the blog story here. It was an tiring experience, but one well worth the energy. If you ever get a chance to go to the Gaspe peninsula, your in for a treat. The people are friendly, the food is good, and the scenery is great (when its not raining, I think we just had bad luck with that). Thanks for reading everyone!

Into Parc National de la Gaspesie

We woke up all cosy in our hotel beds and were greeted with fog and pouring rain. Because we had gotten behind in the distance travelled, we decided to drive the girls to the start of the hyway which lead to the national park. I stayed behind and did a load of laundry at the local tourism bureau which turned out to be the worst 3 hours of the trip. The tourism guy was a lonely man, I guess he doesn't get too many people coming through there except to use the washroom. So, it was a long 3 hours of slurred English (he spoke mostly french but still tried) and pictures of him in hockey leagues as a kid and his father in the war. Wonderful. But soon, Alex came to rescue me, and as I fled to the outside, I got this photograph. I've converted it to black and white, to give it an older feel (actually, probably didn't look much different 80 years ago)

Driving to the national park with Alex was fun (stopped at a Tim Horton's for some delicious, aka not-instant, coffee, Joy of Joys!). When we got to New Richmond, the weather suddenly cleared up and it became a beautiful sunny day. As we were driving we came across a stack of bikes and clothing, so we pulled over to find the girls

They were down by a river having lunch

We started planning our hike for the next day

The camping at the park was great, Erin cooked up some dinner

And taking advantage of the nice weather, we hung just about every article of clothing out to dry
The next day we planned to hike up Mont Albert. The weather was going to be perfect, and I was going to get some totally awesome photos! Look forward to them tomorrow :)