New Years Day Hike in Oshawa

The first of January, the first day of a brand new year, was a gorgeous sunny one. We decided to go back to our old haunts. We had planned to go to Thickson Woods then Halls Rd.. But, after quite a long time at Thickson, we skipped the other, which we had actually been to recently anyway, and we ended up at Whitby Harbour.

Our old apartment was a 10 min walk from Whitby Harbour, and a 5 min drive from Halls Rd. We do really miss that area. If we financially could have stayed in Whitby, we would have. But, Go Train to work for me is triple the cost of Toronto TTC, and property taxes for a condo even, out there, are double what we pay in Scarborough, which is actually now the City of Toronto since the 90s amalgamation. Anywhoo, we decided it'd be nice to head out that way for a change for a New Year's Day walk.

John took out bird food, as there are lots of sparrows and chickadees, not to mention cardinals, Juncos, nuthatches and such in winter that thrive on people helping them out during the long winter. They were out in plenty this sunny day :-)

I even shot a little video of the chickadees, for a few minutes, landing in the little container we had all the seed in. It was quite funny I realized, once we watched it at home lol!

The treat of the day, and quite unexpected, is a sighting of a long eared owl. She/he was sleeping peacefully in a sun spot on a branch in a pine tree. It was a first for us, seeing this type of owl. We saw a lot of Barred owls in 2012, a snowy owl in 2012, a Sawhet in 2012, and the Great Horned owls a few times in '12 and '13 or '14. I took a couple pictures of the owl, watched it for a bit, then left it to sleep.

There were a lot of gorgeous dried plants and little gems as well.

We got quite the surprise at seeing that there is now a gate up in winter, at Whitby Harbour, and you are not able to walk down the pier to the lighthouse anymore. Possibly due to that avid runner who died a couple years ago, we assumed. They also have resurfaced the cement walkway on the pier we saw.

After a quiet evening with finger foods, wine and a movie, it was a lovely fun day to start a new year journey in 2017.

11 Baby Swans!

Yesterday morn, Canada Day, we went for a walk to Whitby Harbour specifically to see if we could spot the baby swans we had seen there a day or so ago. There they were, way out a bit so we decided to attempt to get around the end of the fence, along the rocks at the shoreline. We did this, and got closer. Of Course don't they then come right in to the side of the pier walkway where we could have just stayed and not climbed along all the skanky rocks and shoreline to get to them just 20 mins before lol! However, got a cool shot of some bones on that trek.

We saw the mocking bird as well, and what we think was a fledgling one, as well as getting some up close shots of the sea gulls' eyes.

Playing with Publisher - How We Got Started "Birding"

Lately, have been getting familiar with areas of MS Office Suite that I've not really had any opportunity to touch. One being Publisher. Not quite as great as InDesign but is actually a very useful program for small businesses or personal use for any number of creative project needs. I began with a template that I liked and altered the elements such as fonts, spacing, objects, photos, etc. and went with a theme from our major leisure undertaking, nature hikes. The intent behind this was to play around and practice using Publisher, using a personal theme to do so.

I went with the metamorphosis which occurred in our what began as simple leisure walks to Whitby Harbour in the evenings and on weekends, to what has become a sort of a beginner's interest in birding, over the past year. If I chose to complete the full newsletter template, the table of contents would indicate what specific experiences that further little anecdotal articles would touch on....with photos of course :-)