Thursday, June 4, 2015

BACKYARD VACATION

My favorite backyard critter is at the back left of this photo, my hubby.
Rob and I recently had a two week "stay-cation". Other then a couple full birding days we spent the majority of our time in our favorite place, the backyard. With Meadow's pasing in April, both of us were pretty emotionally spent and didn't feel like being far from home. Time in the backyard was the perfect place to heal.

We made Meadow's Weigela Bush a memorial to her. It bloomed while we were off. 

This was our first vacation without Meadow, and she loved being in the backyard, so she was greatly missed, always will be. But, we had lots of company during our time out there and made some new friends.
 
Our backyard plays host to a variety of regular birds and critters, but there are always those few special ones that get named and you look forward to seeing. The following pics show who we spent a lot of time with during our time off. 

We have a raccoon, who pretty much like clock work, mid afternoon strolled into the yard to have a drink out of the bird bath, eat a peanut or two under the bird feeders, and then climb a tree to nap the rest of the afternoon away. We call her "Momma", and I'm sure we'll be seeing her little ones any day now.
What? Do I have something on my face?
Getting a drink or washing her hands.
Time to sleep!
Quite the position for such a deep sleep.
We noticed a Blue Jay around with no tail feathers, and he got named "Stubby". He quickly trained me to place peanuts in other spots for him when the peanut ring was running low on the bird feeder pole.
He could fly fine, even without his tail feathers.
"Angie, I'm going to need another peanut over here!"
Of course Pierre was around almost daily for food and affection from Rob.
Some of the many squirrels that make our backyard home are braver then others, and "Hoover" quickly learned who to make friends with. He liked to hang out under my chair when I was outside, when he wasn't busy chasing other squirrels away from the food source.

His tail was shorter than most, that's how I recognized him.
He stayed pretty close to us when we were outside.
Probably the most interesting daily visitor we had everyday was a Canadian Swallowtail. Now, I don't know if it's normal to have a backyard butterfly, but we had one, everyday, all day while on vacation!! I swear it even followed me to Loblaws one day, as it almost flew into me on the walk home! I half jokingly started calling it "Mom".

An all day, daily visitor while on vacation.
I've missed these guys this first week back to work. I've seen all of them a couple times after work for a few minutes. I know both Rob and I are looking forward to spending most of our summer weekends in the backyard we happily share with them.

1 comment:

WendyCarole said...

How lovely to get such nice visitors to your back garden. :)