My parents sent me a few pictures of the damage around the cottage up at Golden Lake. Fortunately, our cottage was fine, but our neighbours’ properties have a lot of downed trees. Apparently, the neighbours saw a waterspout on the other side of the lake and there are unconfirmed reports of a tornado touching down in the area.

These are on our neighbour’s property:

Some poor U-Haul trailers at the storage place across the highway:

If you look closely, you’ll be able to make out the branches caught on the power lines that caught fire when the power was restored. A few seconds after my mom took this picture the line breaker on one of the poles blew with an impressive “bang!”. The firemen then put the flames out and stuck around to make sure that the fire didn’t flare up again.

A tip o’ the hat to my mom who took these photos.

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.