There’s always been a fair bit of wildlife at the cottage, but this year there seems to be more birds than past years. And there’s a new species in the neighbourhood: a family of Eastern Phoebes. Sayornis phoebe is a species of flycatcher and these have made a nest on the mast of our sailboat that’s hanging under the eaves of the cottage. (Needless to say, we’re not doing a whole lot of sailing right now.)

The map in our bird book indicates that we’re within the summer range for the species, but this is the first time in the roughly 25 years that my parents have owned the cottage that we’ve seen them. Being flycatchers, we’re quite happy to have them around and hope that they’ll return next year.

There also seem to be many more members of Sitta carolinensis, too. The White-breasted Nuthatch is not a newcomer, but this year there’s a lot of them flying around.

And, as always, there’s a plethora of red squirrels and chipmunks, all of whom have realized that there’s absolutely no need for them to forage and fend for themselves because the humans in the neighbourhood are quite happy to provide a virtually infinite amount of sunflower seeds for them to squirrel away (small pun intended).

My parents feed these critters around 20 kilograms of striped sunflower seeds each summer. (They don’t like the black sunflower seeds and will literally turn their noses up at them.) The amazing thing about this is that there isn’t a field of sunflowers because though they go to great lengths to hide the seeds, they don’t remember where they hide all of them.

I got together with friends that I’ve known most of my life – one of them since I was kindergarten-aged. We had a BBQ at one of their houses and then headed out to Kanata and took part in the festivities there. As in past years, there was a carnival with rides for the kids, so we spent some time there – I even took one of the munchkins on the ferris wheel at her request, which was a lot of fun for both of us. To say she enjoyed it would be an understatement. There was also a booth that had a pool full of rubber ducks swirling around and a merry go round, both of which presented great photo opportunities.

As it got darker we made our way to a higher vantage point to watch the fireworks. I had my Canon SD850IS with me, so I took a lot of long-exposure pictures. I didn’t have a tripod, so I had to brace the camera or hold it steady.

A couple of people have asked me how to take pictures of fireworks recently, so I thought I’d share some of the tricks I use. And at the end you can see my results. 🙂

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