Notes on Nuthatches

A new visitor has appeared at my feeder during the past week – a sharp-beaked, red-breasted nuthatch with a body shaped like two stout cones placed base to base. This nuthatch, with its rufous-t...

Black-capped Chickadees: Sweethearts of Canadian Birds

During Vilis’s and my year-long sojourn in Australia in 2010, I sometimes grew homesick for our home in Nova Scotia. At those times, surrounded by brilliantly-coloured parrots and lorikeets, I i...

Winter’s Subtle Beauty

At 9 a.m., snowflakes fluttered down in thin confusion, no longer yesterday’s dense, wind-slanted sheets of dry, white precipitation. Diminished residue of a vast snowstorm that yesterday swept ...

Balmoral Grist Mill and Animal Movement in Snow

This morning, beneath a sky overcast and still (the lull before the snowstorm forecast for tomorrow) I walked to the Balmoral Grist Mill, a heritage building dating from the late 19th century and loca...