Chickadees

We have a chickadee family in a bird house right on our kitchen windowsill!  I think there might be four or five little chicks in there and they are so incredibly cute!

Mom and Pops work hard every day to keep them well fed and make sure their nest is clean and tidy.  It's all so fascinating to watch them work so hard every day.  It will be a bittersweet when they all fly the coop... I hope I can capture some more images before then :)

Albany, New York

As they always say, "Better late than never!"

Robert had a post-doc interview at Albany Medical College in Albany, NY around October 13th and I took the chance to accompany him to see a city I've never seen before.  Lucky for him, I drove all the six hours there so that he could catch up on his reading and review for the interview.

We arrived at the Hilton Garden Inn with an hour or so to spare before his dinner with his potential fellow post-docs.  I was planning to get comfortable at the hotel and do some research into what I wanted to do the next day while Robert was going to be at his day long interview, but shortly after Robert left, he called me and said I was invited to come to dinner, too :)  And so Robert and I and his potential fellow post-docs all went out to dinner.   I don't recall the name of the restaurant we went to, but it had an eclectic vibe and had an in-house brewery.  What I do recall is that I had French Onion soup - one of my favorite soups, ever - and it was very delicious.

The next day while Robert was on his day-long interview at Albany Medical College, I decided to tour a little bit of Albany's Empire State Plaza.  It was raining on and off and some very scary looking clouds were rolling in, but that didn't stop me.  

My first stop was the 42nd floor of the Corning Tower, where I got to see beautiful views of the city below, the Hudson River and the storm rolling in.

Random Animal & Bird Facts

I'm actually volunteering right now at Reinstein as I am typing this out.  I had work from 5am to 10am and then came in at 12:30 until 4 to volunteer.  Whew!  Long day!!

I'm reading Critters of New York: Pocket Guide and I've discovered some really interesting new facts.  I'm so excited about them that I just really wanted to share.  So in now particular order, here they are:

• A beaver can chew down hundreds of trees each year.  One family of beavers may consume as much as 2,000 lbs of bark in a single winter!
• A red fox can leap 15' in a single bound.
• A moose can store over 100 lbs of food in its stomach.  It has weak eyesight and has been known to mistake cars for potential mates.  Males attract females by making wallows (patches of muddy ground where they urinate).  Yuck!!
• Muskrats create a V-shaped wave as they swim and that's how you can distinguish them from other critters. 
• The Virginia Opossum has 50 teeth, more than any other land mammal on this continent.  (We humans have 32 teeth.) 
• The Northern Raccoon, contrary to popular belief, does not wash everything that it eats. 
• The Eastern Gray Squirrel can hide 25 nuts in an hour.  It usually finds 4 out of 5 of the nuts it buries.  They can smell a nut buried beneath 12" of snow.
• The Red Squirrel is very territorial and occupies a range of 2-5 acres.  It's also called fairydiddle, boomer, pine squirrel and chickaree. 
• The male and female Red-winged Blackbirds do not migrate together. 
• The Eastern Bluebird has tremendous eyesight and is capable of seeing an insect 100' away.  The bluebird will generally return to the same nesting site year after year if it is properly maintained.
• The Northern Cardinal is very territorial and has been known to attack its reflection in windows. 
• The Blue Jay is very aggressive and often scares other birds away from feeders.  It's a very bold bird and commonly taunts and mobs birds of prey such as hawks and owls.  It also raids the nests of other birds and eats their eggs and young. 
• The Common Loon has solid bones (unlike the bones of most birds which are hollow and lightweight), which helps it to dive to depths up to 150' in search for food.  A loon's legs are located so far back on its body that it has great difficulty walking on land so spends most of its time in the water.
• The Great Horned Owl can eat nearly 1,000 mice each year and is one of the few animals that will kill skunks. 
• The American Robin occasionally uses anting to rid itself of lice and other parasites.  It positions itself near an anthill and allows ants to crawl all over its body.  Robins must turn their heads from side to side to look at things because their eyes are placed far back on the sides of their heads. 
• The average lifespan of a Snapping Turtle is 30-40 years!

I hope you enjoyed these random tidbits of information :)

The Dog Days of Summer...

I'm not going to go into the commentary in any of these....... I just want to post up a compilation of photos that I've taken over the past couple of weeks of things we saw and did.

I hope you enjoy!

Charlie's Canoe and Allegany Adventure

So we decided to go on a little canoe adventure.  It was initially going to be just to two of us - Robert and I - but Charlie got to go, too.  Robert was fiercely resistant to the idea of Charlie going.  His reasons were #1: Charlie would be whining all the way there; #2: Charlie would be whining relentlessly in the canoe; #3: Charlie can't swim; and #4: Charlie would just be an overall pain in the A$$.

But, Charlie hardly whined on the way there, hardly whined in the canoe, he DID know how to swim and he wasn't as much of a pain in the butt as we had expected.  He was a good boy!




Beautiful blue skies with just the right amount of happy clouds :)

Fishing, Nature and Ducks!

Robert, my father-in-law Frank, and I went on a tiny little fishing expedition a couple of weeks ago.  It was during the week when NYS waived the fishing license requirement.  We were all looking forward to a "beautiful, warm, sunny day".  Satellite imagery showed not a single cloud in the sky.  However, we were met by ominous looking rain clouds, cold, gusty winds, and some fine drizzle.  Of course, all that unpredicted weather went away as soon as we left and it turned out to be a beautiful, warm, sunny day after all.

We didn't catch much on our expedition - just a couple of little perch - one of which swallowed the hook.  I wasn't expecting to have any fatalities...  but Frank told me that it was all part of fishing :(

I learned a very important lesson from Frank that day... I learned that "fishing is about a jerk on one end waiting for a jerk on the other."

Through the Fog

Robert and I debated a couple of choices for our Saturday early afternoon trip.  Choice one: a drive to the Tifft Nature Preserve, which we've been wanting to go to for a while; or choice two: an outing with our dog Charlie to the UB bike path.

We decided on Choice One, so off to Tifft we went.  It was really foggy when we got there and I thought it looked so amazing.  I'm not a morning person so I've never really been able to experience fog, but I got lucky this time in that it was rolling in around noon.  My kind of time frame :)  It was surreal walking through the fog... I felt like my eyesight was blurry or that my glasses weren't the correct prescription.  The fog completely subsided after about two hours and then it was nothing but sunshine.

We ended up spending at least four hours there... and yet didn't get to see ALL of the preserve.  We'll have to go back there again.  We saw so many different kinds of birds - many we have never seen before.

It felt so unreal at times that there we were, just south of Buffalo on a *relatively* tiny patch of land, and we were seeing things like the Indigo Bunting, the Yellow Warbler, the Blue Winged Teal, the Magnolia Warbler, a House Wren, the Eastern King-bird, the Common Yellowthroat, a couple of Ospreys, many Orioles, several different types of swallows, various sparrow species, and several other bird species that we haven't ever seen before.

It was a little sad leaving the preserve because we know we won't see many of those birds outside of it.

My post isn't complete without some photos.  Unfortunately I wasn't able to take any photos of any of the "exotic" birds we saw because of the limitation of my lens and because they were so swift!

















A female red-winged black bird.






House Wren.


 

It turned out to be a beautiful day and we were both in awe of the abundance of wildlife we got to see.  It was definitely worth our time and we look forward to going back there again :)

We still ended up taking Charlie out for his walk to the UB bike path after I got out of work on Sunday.  He was thrilled =)

So I finished the semester off with a BANG!  I had a heavy course-load of 19 credit hours - but my hard work paid off.  Five A's and two A-'s, so altogether a GPA of 3.88!  I'm quite pleased :)

Thanks for reading!

No More Teachers, No More Books!

Well at least for a few months ;)

My blogs are not complete without some photos, so I wanted to post some that I've taken this spring of things I find interesting, beautiful, or both!

Just some spring blooms...

I think of Dinosaurs when I think of ferns..

At the surface of the sun.  A bittersweet dandelion in my yard!

White columbines in my garden:

I think my neighbors think I'm crazy... always walking around with a camera and taken pictures of their trees and flowers.

My black tulips..

Baby grackle in my neighbor's forsythia bush!

Dancing daffodil!

Chipping sparrow.  A very common sparrow that has a distinct  "chip chip" song it makes.

Balancing act at Reinstein..

Sunbathing chipmunk.

I like the simplicity of this shot.  Actually, I was trying to capture the bokeh of the sparkling water behind these branches, but the bokeh was too bright and big.

I've heard cat birds all over at Reinstein all the time but never personally saw them.  I was quite happy to finally see one, even though it was trying its best to stay concealed.  Once the shrubs completely leaf I won't be able to see anything.

Snapping turtle - basking in the sun!  I think snapping turtles look so ancient..

This blue jay was eating a snake up in the tree!  It was really high up so I couldn't get a decent shot, but you can still make out part of the snake dangling from the branch.  The day we saw this blue jay, we saw many more... more than I've ever seen in one place at one time.

Thanks for reading!

After the Rain

I love how things look after the rain...

I really hope it doesn't hail a lot this year like it did last year... I'd like to see all my spring flowers grow and bloom.

April has turned out to be quite the tumultuous month this year!  So much rain and crazy weather patterns.
There's this one creek I pass by every day on my way to/from school... And I always make sure to pass it because I love looking at all the wildlife there.  For the past couple of weeks I've seen many geese and ducks there - and some were actually nesting.  But with the crazy amount of rain we've had the creek swelled and rose so high recently that I think the nests were destroyed :(  That has made me tear up quite a few times...  Knowing that those poor geese were so helpless against mother nature.  But life goes on.  One way or another they move on.  

We've had a "tornado watch" here last night!!!  One of my few recurring nightmares actually involves tornadoes!  I've never experienced a tornado and I hope I never will, but I can't help but be afraid of them - at least in my dreams.  I think last year WNY actually had a couple of tornadoes that weren't huge or anything but they did do some damage.  

Anyways, school's almost over and then summer break will begin :)  I got a summer job working at the Garden Center at my local Home Depot, which was something I specifically applied for in the hopes that I would have a fun summer job working with something I'm passionate about :)  And my plan actually worked!