I left my "real" cameras at home as there often aren't many photo ops at the Jack Pine Trail. Besides it would provide for a uninterrupted walk. 🙄🙄
Within one minute of walk down the trail, out came my cell phone set to record a video. A raven decided to accompany us down the trail. It was sitting on the trail at the start, walked long just ahead of us, once time almost next to us, and then fly ahead 10-15 yards afew times. It finally flew off (for a coffee break at Timmies??). There were raven footprints all along the lengthy first section of the footpathÂ
The cattails were losing their seeds
Someone had made a snow animal in the crotch of a tree stump. Sunflower seeds were used for eyes and nose.
As I had shown in one or two other PhotoStories, this year the snow looked like scarfs wrapped around tree branches. I suspect the thin layer of freezing rain and the cold has held the scarfs together
There weren't many animals around. One of perhaps 2-3 red squirrels was having breakfast at freshly created tree stump.
Blue jays seem to hang out at Jack Pine, as do a few chickadees. We also heard, but did not see, cardinals at a distance. Another very quiet call was identified by my Merlin App as a red-breasted nuthatch. I put together a much edited, in basic sound software, a soundtrack of the calls we heard.
The red-breasted nuthatch call is quite different from its cousin the white-breasted nuthatch. I downloaded much better samples of each of their calls. (The sounds were from the AllAboutBirds website. They allow embedding their sound files. But the embedding didn't work, so IÂ downloaded them.)