Notes From a North Western Ontario Backyard – August 2018

Hello again!

It’s been a few months since I’ve done a post here and I apologize for that.

My spring season began in May with a vacation throughout southern Ontario, including a wonderful stop at Bird Studies Canada in Port Rowan! Unfortunately, it also included a breakdown of my lens (Tamron 150-600mm). I lost a days’ photos when they came out black because the lens & camera stopped recognizing each other. Finally got my lens back in mid July, good as new. Grateful for warranties!!

Next, as you can see in the following 2 photos, I had a bit of a computer issue for a couple of months. It still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me what happened but one day in June, I had been working on photos that I had uploaded that morning. All was well. That evening however, when I went to look at those photos, I discovered to my horror, that my ENTIRE photos file was GONE. Not just accidentally transferred to Trash where it could be restored …. the file was no where to be found on the ENTIRE COMPUTER. Just GONE with absolutely no explanation of how it could have happened. Of course, I was mortified as I had been lazy in transferring photos to the external hard drive so that file held 6 MONTHS worth!

My husband, bless him, did his very best to recover as much as he could for me. He discovered a little program that would recover every jpeg. file it could find. This turned out to be a blessing and a curse! The program found *4200* jpg. files and I had to go through almost every single one to find keepable photos. Many were just thumbnails, unusable, but every once in a while, I’d get lucky & find a folder of full sized photos.

It took me 2 months to go through everything. When I was finally done, my husband formatted my computer as it was on the verge of a total collapse. Sigh. I have no idea what all I lost but I was actually able to salvage a fair amount. Now I need to go through THOSE files and get things organized again. That will likely take another couple of months to complete! Anyway, here is a sample of what my poor computer looked like during this mishap.

 

 

 

So! For the rest of this post, I’m going to show you some photos from this past month. My husband & I purchased a new fishing boat this spring so we’ve spent a lot of time out on the area lakes & rivers which has been very therapeutic! Many photos are from our latest trip and many photos are just from my backyard. Here we go:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now, onto sightings in my yard. It’s been a veritable Bird Nursery around here this past month or two. So much fun! Along with tons of Purple Finches & Goldfinches, I’ve had:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And lastly, a couple of critters that are not of the feathered variety. I was absolutely tickled last week to discover not just 1 but *2* White Lined Sphinx Moths on my Phlox! They were here about 9:15 pm one evening and they allowed me to easily get within about 6 feet of them. Incredible creatures!

 

 

I also discovered this furry fellow on the underside of a sunflower leaf last week. It was only there about 2 1/2 days, then disappeared.

 

 

So that’s the latest update from here. I will genuinely try to keep up with regular postings now that summer is …  *gulp!* … winding down. Warbler season is starting to kick in so hopefully, I’ll have more on that next month. Thanks so much for viewing!