A few more rappers…

Some of them do sound like that, with their “hawk, hawk, hawk!”. After nearly two years of hunting birds in Manitoba, I have come to understand that birds are plentiful. Unlike the birds I have seen in Europe, although the places I lived were not really made for birds, I admit. Getting any bird here is fairly easy, just point your camera

Bald Eagle

off the balcony or pick it up when you’re lazily sipping a beer in the back yard and you’ll get a bird. But to get some raptors is a different matter. You have to go and get them, stalk them and even wait for them to come back to a spot where they were before.

Wild Raptors!

No Velociraptors, I did not invent a time machine to shoot some lizards. I am talking about the raptors coming back to Canada after having spent the winter in warmer climes. Come to think of it, I should have done the same.

Wild Turkey, easy to shoot

On April, 5th in La Riviere, MB the Raptor Festival was held. I was highly interested to be able to follow the birders and take pictures of the birds.

Pysanky or the Ukrainian art of decorating

Easter eggs. While I have often decorated Easter eggs when I was young, never would I have used tools and beeswax to achieve my goal. At most, the eggs were decorated with a few colours, overlapping colour making for new ones.

Pysanka

The Ukrainian art of decorating the eggs is way more elaborate.

Counting frags

Or better put: Phrags. This is one of the terms used to name orchids. What corresponds to what, I have no idea. The biologists that invented the scientific names for  orchids must have had lots of imagination, or lots to drink.

Details, details, details

But I can be wrong and those names make perfect sense for the initiated. I’m not one of them.

About the Great Grey

The Great Grey Owl is the provincial bird of Manitoba, and not the mosquito as some funny people may want to make us believe. Adults are between 48 and 76cm tall and they may weigh up to 800g.

Intense

The Great Grey is a magnificent bird relying on its ears and eyesight to hunt.