Red wing chorus

Things got off to a bad start because a gremlin had invaded my camera which therefore refused to focus. I’d made all the usual adjustments hoping to cure the problem, but sadly, without result. I was depressed.

Just for fun, I’d looked up the price of cameras recently. A new one is not an option.

It looked as though I’d be falling back on a little point and shoot. Certainly not the end of the world. It really does not matter. But I love taking pictures and I so enjoy the zoom lens, not just for the photos I take, but because I use it to view things that are remote.

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At breakfast I related my sad story to Grant who whistled off downstairs to activate YouTube. It is where he finds answers for almost everything. Soon, I was summoned to bring the misbehaving camera and, following the directions he’d found, we managed to get the thing focussing again.

Grant deserves the credit. The workingof my camera is very involved and I get frustrated and overwhelmed by it. He is more patient.

It turned out that the camera had somehow got itself into micro-mode which I have never used because I couldn’t figure out how to access it. Yet there it was.

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The value of YouTube instructions is that you can stop and go back as many times as you need, which is how we eventually got the sequence of menu moves sorted out.

(It was definitely a gremlin that had woven its way through this to mess me up!)

The new computer sent me searching for help a couple of times, it is familiar enough that by trial and error, I managed to work out some of the changes for myself.

One was the means by which I post video clips on my blog.

(The below was a matter of dragging and dropping the file into Quick Time Player. Couldn’t be simpler, except that when I tried the exact same thing with another file – no way. So this, apparently, is a fluke.)

Grant is very keen on video but I am not good at it. However, one day we came home to a cacophony in the woods:

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Red-winged blackbirds have not been seen around our place since late Spring, but now they were up in the trees making their familiar racket. En-route south from elsewhere, obviously, or perhaps they’d come to collect the little Not-so we’d seen a couple of days before.

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A little brown bird, not-so-much a sparrow. A bronze-headed cowbird. Very few came to our feeders this year and they are a flock bird, so for a single one to turn up was a surprise.

The original Not-so, a couple of years ago, seemed to get left behind when her flock departed for the winter. Then one day a migrating flock of red-wings descended into the trees in the bottom field.A single bird flew up to sit in our hedge and I said perhaps it had come for Not-so.

A foolish notion? When the flock was gone, so was she. And the same was true this year.

(Cowbirds and Red-wings flock together)

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Our little groundhog pal popped out again for another final snack on October 12th, but we suspect this one really was our last sighting until the Spring.

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Just about everyone who is going has gone now, but the chipmunks are still zooming about desperately wherever we look, stuffing their cheeks fit to burst. They remind me of passengers I used to deal with who, when confronted with paying excess charges, unpacked and crammed extra items into their oversized, already overweight carry-on baggage.

Having all too often carried excessively heavy baggage myself, it was hard to enforce rules!

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While mostly we say goodbye in the Fall, we do also get to welcome back some friends who leave us in the Spring.

Grant saw the first chickadee the other day and on Saturday morning (17th) I caught sight of a junco. Are we expecting snow so soon? There’s a good reason they are called snowbirds!

Just scouting for Winter pastures, perhaps.

And we are now besieged by Asian beetles. To me, they look like ladybirds, but they haven’t the right number or pattern of spots. They do bite, but they are mostly harmless. They usually stay around until early Spring.

Having discovered by accident the means to employ micro mode on my camera, I thought I would practice, but my subject flew off.

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