Mochelle & Stephane Return for a Concert Tonight

         Because these two talented musicians have returned to give a concert tonight, I have repeated a review I posted about the concert they gave us last year.

            I haven’t been to a sit-down music concert for years, but one of our jam members arranged to have some musician friends who were passing through, to do a performance in a spectacular local “barn” (the most beautiful “barn” I have ever seen).  Having never heard of Michelle and Stephane, I wasn’t expecting a whole lot, but from the duo’s very first song, I was blown away.

              Their vocal harmonies were solid, crisp, and tight, taking some unexpected turns in their amazing vocal range.  When Stephane’s fingers started streaking up and down the neck of his guitar, I sat in my chair with my mouth open, considering hanging up my guitar for good.  He was an amazing guitarist.  Michelle on her stand-up bass gave a solid floor to the rapid guitar runs.  

            Their music was more Modern Country-oriented than I was used to, but they did the songs so professionally and with so much energy, I was quickly converted.  They did do one song I was familiar with:  “Seven Bridges Road” (also known as “Southern Sky) a song where the Eagles’s show off their amazing vocal harmonies, ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U61bPI8K04s )  Michelle and Stephane nailed the song with just two voices. 

            The two live in a small town in Alberta and I don’t know how much time they spend touring, but I was sure happy they had come to McBride and that I got to see and hear them.

           The other great thing about the concert was being in Froese’s spectacular barn.  It was wonderful to sit there, listening to the toe-tapping music while looking out of the big barn open-air window beside the duo, onto the blue slopes of the Rocky Mountains.   It was a great way to spend a gentle spring evening.

            Below is a photo of Froese’s beautiful barn.  The concert was held on the second floor, with the top two windows open.

You can take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Another Memorable Jam Night

     It is getting so that I never know what to expect anymore when I go to our Tuesday Night Jam at the McBride Train Station.  Last night was another memorable event, not because of the music, but because for the first 40 minutes or so, there was now electricity.  The lobby was dark, but fortunately there was enough light shining through the windows in the back to illuminate things.  

    The lack of power did hamper those people who relied on amplifiers for their instruments to be heard, so we couldn’t hear the bass, electric guitar, or keyboard.  It didn’t effect me with my acoustic guitar and mandolin.   Once the power did finally come back on, our music got back to normal.

    The Robson Valley has been experiencing rain shower after rain shower, separated by periods of sunshine and blue skies.  Last night was no exception.  As we were taking the music stands and instruments into the station, a rainbow formed over McBride, as the sunshine was reflected by the falling rain.  It was a unique view of the Village, and we we stopped to watch and take some photos of the event.

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Feeling A Fool, After A Misdiagnosis

     Two weekends ago, McBride held its Pioneer Days celebration.  Our Jam was set to play for a couple of hours.  In preparation for the performance, I loaded up my pickup truck with the music stands, mic stands, PA system, and instruments, to haul down to the park to set up.  

    Once I got everything loaded in the back of the truck and it was time for me to go, I climbed into the cab, and turned the ignition key to start the truck---NOTHING.  

    In a panic, I tried again, and again, and each time the results were the same: NOTHING.  The engine wouldn’t start or even turn over.

    I scrambled to get the car and took everything out of the truck and stuffed it all into the car, then drove down to McBride to set up.

    About a week before my failed attempt to start the truck, a friend had been telling me about a carpenter she had employed to do some work on her house.  When it was time for him to leave, his truck wouldn’t start, and it was the truck’s starter that had failed and had to be fixed.

      I hadn’t thought about broken starters for many decades.  Back when I was in university, I owned a MG that had a starter that was always unpredictable and problematic.

    After Pioneer Days was over, I tried several times to start the truck, but it failed each time.  The lights on the dashboard always came on, so I knew it wasn’t the truck battery, and then remembered Ingrid’s story about her carpenter, and decided that it must be my truck’s starter that was causing the problem.

    Yesterday, I decided to do something about getting my truck fixed.  I called a towing company to make arrangements to get my pickup towed down to a local garage to get a new starter.  I called the garage to make sure everything was set at their end.

    As I waited to hear that the tow truck was on its way,  I had a thought:   Maybe it was the sloppy transmission shift lever in my truck that was causing the problem.  It always seems pretty loose about getting into the right spot when I shift the gears.

    I got into the truck, which seemed to indicate that that the truck was in was in PARK, I tried to move the shift lever a bit more to the left, and sure enough, it moved a bit more to the left, where it clicked more solidly in place for PARK.  I then turned the ignition key, and sure enough, the truck engine immediately started.

    I felt a fool.  I quickly called the towing company and the garage to cancel all the appointments I had made.

    Looking back at the incident, I realized that it could have been  a lot worse.  I could have had my truck towed in to the garage, and then had the mechanic discover that the starter was fine, so I guess in the long run, while I was embarrassed, I was fortunate to discover the problem when I did.

View my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Seeing Bob's Drums

 Here is a blog I wrote back in 2013:

           Even with its small and sparse population, the Robson Valley always surprises me.  It is so isolated, rural, and low in residents, that you don’t really expect to come upon too many extraordinary things, but the people that do choose to live here are a pretty rare breed, who bring with them a lot of hidden talents.  This was reconfirmed to me yesterday when I drove out to the hamlet of Dunster for another music jam.

            At the end of our previous jam, Bob, the guy who was playing the dobr, most of the time, mentioned that what he really liked to do was play drums.  That sounded great to me because, I really wanted to play electric guitar.  So we decided to have the next jam at his place.  

            Yesterday, when I walked into his living room ready to do some music, I noticed a red drum kit, all set up at one side of the room.  It looked like the typical drum set that you would see at any garage-type band, so I just assumed that it was the set that Bob would play.  When the four of us started playing I was a bit surprised that Bob didn’t go over and play the drums, but instead he played dobro and mandolin. 

            Later in the session, some one mentioned the red drum set, and he said he was hoping to sell it.  He then added that the drum kit he liked to play was in a room upstairs, and offered to show it to us.   I wasn’t overly excited about looking at a drum set, because, not being a drummer, all drum sets looked pretty much the same to me, but I climbed the stairs following Bob and the other guys, to the far room.

            When I walked through the doorway, I was gobsmacked.

            I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.  Sometimes, on one of those big giant auditorium concerts, I have seen the drummers literally surrounded with drums, cymbals, tom toms, and such, and that is what I saw filling this room, the whole room, that Bob had led us to.  There was only space for us to squeeze around the edges.  Bob somehow got behind the drums, sat down, and began to hammer away on the drums.  He looked like a pilot in some enormous airplane, surrounded by the massive control panel of the cockpit.

            My camera, which is a high definition video camera, shoots a wider than normal photo, but, I could not get Bob’s whole drum set into a shot, so some of his kit can not be seen in the photo above.   Even now, as I write this, I am smiling as I think of all those drums in a little room in an isolated house, situated below a mountain.

            When we went back downstairs, and resumed our jam session, Bob once again began playing the mandolin.  It seemed somehow sacrilegious, for him to be playing a mandolin, when he had all that tremendous drum equipment upstairs.  We did have a good afternoon of playing music, and we are planning to do it again in a couple of days. 

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Kona In The Dandelions

     My grandfather, and later my uncle, owned a large commercial greenhouse where they grew tomatoes.  I spent many an hour working in that greenhouse picking tomatoes in the early morning, before the Indiana heat and humidity got too unbearable.

    I guess it is only natural that when I grew up, that I wanted to have my own tomato-producing greenhouse (made using some of the same panes of glass, I got when my relative’s greenhouses were torn down)  I naturally used the same tomato-growing techniques, I had seen my grandfather use in his greenhouses.

    Once my seedling tomatoes have grown big enough (and the cold British Columbia weather is no longer a threat) I plant the young tomato plants in the greenhouse.  I spread a mulch all over the ground around the plants to prevent weeds, and hold moisture in the soil.  My grandfather mulched with straw, but I use the dried “hay” I cut from tall weeds growing in my unused pastures.  

    When the plants get tall enough, I string them up with twine tied to wire that is strung high across the greenhouse.  This holds the tomato plants up as they grow taller, and keeps the tomatoes off of the ground.

    Today, I changed my morning routine of painting, because I have fallen so far behind in all of those  many “need to do” jobs, and I used my usual painting time to string up my more than fifty tomato plants I have in the greenhouse.  

    I am happy to report that I can now cross that task off of my “To Do” list.   To use an old Forestry term that was used to describe logging cut-blocks that were successfully replanted, my tomato plants are now “Ready to Grow.”

View my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Greenhouse Tomatoes, Grown Like My Grandfather's

     My grandfather, and later my uncle, owned a large commercial greenhouse where they grew tomatoes.  I spent many an hour working in that greenhouse picking tomatoes in the early morning, before the Indiana heat and humidity got too unbearable.

    I guess it is only natural that when I grew up, that I wanted to have my own tomato-producing greenhouse (made using some of the same panes of glass, I got when my relative’s greenhouses were torn down)  I naturally used the same tomato-growing techniques, I had seen my grandfather use in his greenhouses.

    Once my seedling tomatoes have grown big enough (and the cold British Columbia weather is no longer a threat) I plant the young tomato plants in the greenhouse.  I spread a mulch all over the ground around the plants to prevent weeds, and hold moisture in the soil.  My grandfather mulched with straw, but I use the dried “hay” I cut from tall weeds growing in my unused pastures.  

    When the plants get tall enough, I string them up with twine tied to wire that is strung high across the greenhouse.  This holds the tomato plants up as they grow taller, and keeps the tomatoes off of the ground.

    Today, I changed my morning routine of painting, because I have fallen so far behind in all of those  many “need to do” jobs, and I used my usual painting time to string up my more than fifty tomato plants I have in the greenhouse.  

    I am happy to report that I can now cross that task off of my “To Do” list.   To use an old Forestry term that was used to describe logging cut-blocks that were successfully replanted, my tomato plants are now “Ready to Grow.”

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Captured Martins: #2 & # 3

     I know, I know, you probably thought I was done blogging about martins, and I did too, but I had forgotten about two other martins that I had live-trapped in 2013.  Here are the two blogs I had written about them:

    I am pretty convinced that my theory that there was a marten family in the neighborhood is correct.  On Monday I blogged that I had caught an adolescent in the live trap, and this morning there was another skinny, long-legged one in the egg baited live trap that I had placed in the dog house.  This one was thinner than the previous one.  And as you can see, it didn’t even bother to eat the egg.

    I put the trap with the captured marten in the back of the truck and drove it out to a thickly wooded area even farther away from where I had dropped off marten # 1.  When I opened the trap it scampered off into the woods.  I hope it finds lots of things to eat out there because it needs to put on some weight.  They eat a lot of mice, and there are so many free ranging neighbor’s cats around our house I suspect the competition for mice is pretty great.

    I hope this is the end of our marten invasion, but I will continue to set the live trap.  Why not, I still have the egg.

    It’s deja vu all over again.  Yesterday, when I went out to check the live trap I had put in the dog house, I discovered I had caught my third marten.  I have been catching one every week for 3 weeks now.  After I catch them, I drive them way out the road and let them loose in the woods.  I am having to drive farther and farther away with each successive capture.  I drove this one out 12 km (7.5 miles) down the road.  

    This martin looked healthier than the last one and it wasn’t so snarly.  I can’t imagine that there are anymore around here, but I will set the trap out again, just in case I am wrong.  It is sure strange that I had never seen a marten around here before this year and suddenly, there seems to be an explosion of them.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

A Rapid Change In The Weather

 

    There are highway signs in the mountains that warn drivers that the weather conditions in the mountains can change rapidly.  I thought about those signs yesterday evening.

    I was sitting in the living room and happened to look out of the window.  I noticed some dark clouds building over the Cariboo Mountains which I thought looked interesting with the very green trees, accented by the purplish-pink flowers of the lilac tree in the foreground, so I shot the photo at the top.

    It was only seven minutes later when a sudden rain storm hit, ushered in by furious gusts of wind.  That storm must have come from the opposite side of the Valley.  

    Everything out the window had changed.  It was darker, all of the colors in the scene became muted, and the Cariboo Mountains disappeared.

    There is an old saying that I have often heard:   “If you don’t like the weather, just wait five minutes.”

    That certainly was the case last evening.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Relocating A Martin

 This is a repeat of yet another blog I posted in 2013 concerning my encounters with Martins:

       Anyone who has been following this blog will know that I have had several encounters with martens.  Most famously, the one where a marten came into my bedroom. 

        For a couple of weeks now,  we have been noticing that we haven’t been getting any eggs from our free ranging chickens.  There for a while they were laying their eggs in the dog house, but then the eggs started disappearing.

        I thought the thief might be the marten, which suddenly started hanging around our house.  I had a live trap that I borrowed from a friend, and so two weeks ago, I put it into the dog house with an egg in it for bait.  The next morning the egg was gone, the trap was open, and overturned.  I had caught something over night, but because the door mechanism was a bit wonky, the animal had struggled and managed to escape.

        I worked on the trap making it more secure, re-baited, and reset it.  A week and a half passed with no results, then yesterday, my wife noticed that the trap’s door had been sprung, and when I investigated I found a not too happy marten inside the trap.  It snarled and hissed at me.

        We drove it out to a nicely forested area down the road, and the marten didn’t even wait for me to fully open the trap’s door before it rocketed out, escaping into the bush.  Hopefully, that will be the end of our marten problem, but I am not so sure.

        I was immediately struck at the trapped marten’s appearance when I first discovered it in the trap.  It seemed like an adolescent.  It was thin and long legged.  The other marten I had seen appeared more bulky.  Maybe the fact that it was running around in my bedroom made it appear larger.  I do have a suspicion that this might be a young one recently kicked out of a family, and the other was the mother.  I will just have to wait and see.

        I guess I will reset the trap with another egg and see if any more of these critters come in for a meal.

My paintings can be seen at:  davidmarchant2.ca

BC Forest Service: Driving Around In Trucks

 Above is a painting I did of an old Forestry truck that I owned after it was sold.

       I sometimes question my masculinity.  I am not what is often thought of as a typical male.  I have absolutely no interest in sports, and I am not a motor-head.  I am not interested in loud powerful engines or going fast in vehicles.  All that being said, I must say that one of the things I really enjoyed during my 23 years of working at the BC Forest Service (or the Ministry of Forests, as it was later rebranded) was being able to explore the Robson Valley by driving around in trucks.

        Our district was huge, as big as the country of Belize.  It was made up of mountains and valleys.  Highway 16 went through one valley east and west, and Highway 5 went through another valley north and south.  The rest of the area could only be accessed through a few secondary roads, some well maintained “Forest Service Roads” and a lot of very poor logging roads.

        The jobs I often had to do were varied.  I had to sometimes go out to pristine areas that were slated for logging to do timber cruises.  I had to get fire fighting equipment to fires, ferry barrels of jet fuel for helicopters, take boxes of baby trees to tree planters, and to visit isolated side valleys to determine what kind timber types were growing there.

        Sometimes the remoteness of the places I had to go to meant that a helicopter, ATV, or snowmobile had to be used, but most often it meant driving a big 4 wheel drive forestry truck.  I really enjoyed slowly bouncing along unexplored roads, not knowing what lay behind the next bend.  

        Of course, driving in the trucks was just a means of getting where we had to go.  Once there, things often became much more physical.  Tromping up mountains, and spending the day, fighting our way through the Devils Club (a nasty spiky plant), fighting mosquitoes, or snowshoeing through heavy snow.

        What a glorious thing it was to finally return back to the truck after a hard day in the bush, and to be able to finally sit down again.  It was always a welcome reward at the end of an exhausting day, even if it still meant  a half an hour of bouncing along a logging road, then another hour’s worth of driving on a highway before I finally got back to the office.

        Because the Forest Service used to hire on a lot of extra people over the summer, it meant that we needed extra trucks for them to use.  One of the things I always looked forward in the spring, was being part of the crew that was driven up to Prince George, to pick up the brand new rental trucks, and driving them back to McBride.

        Not only was it enjoyable to drive a brand spanking-new truck, the trip always gave us some “city” time, and since we had a truck, we often took advantage of the situation by purchasing items that we couldn’t carry in our own personal vehicles.  I bought a rototiller once and hauled it home, and another time bought a fruit tree that wouldn’t have fit in my car.

        I will always have fond memories of those forestry trucks.  They were not only a means of exploration and adventure, but also a sign that a hard exhausting day was finally over.

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Seeing Green

     The winter after our first summer living in the Robson Valley, I got out some of the slides I had taken over the summer.  I was surprised when I started looking at them:  Everything was so lush and green.  It looked like something you would see in the jungle.  I later learned that our area is classified as an  Interior Temperate Rain Forest.

    After our long winters and things warm up, the plants know their growing season is rather short, so they get down to rapidly growing, and explode into foliage.

    I took the photo above looking down from the balcony to the small pool I have beside our “shade” deck.   The plants have been busy elbowing each other out of the way, trying to get as much sun as they can, for themselves.

    Below you can see the view looking out from the balcony.  You can see that there are areas where I have forced my will onto the landscape, in a desire to have some “jungle-free” space that can be used for other things.   Even though those areas have been cleared, I think you would agree that there is still a predominance of green.  Can you spot the pool featured in the top photo, in the lower left corner of the photo below.

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

A Pine Martin In My Bedroom

     I have been blogging about my first experiences seeing a Pine Martin in 2013.  Today’s blog is the exciting finale to the story:

        As you can no doubt tell, the photo above is fake.  It is a poor composite I constructed in Photoshop, but it does pretty much show what I saw this morning at 4:45, when I raised my head off of my pillow to see what all the commotion was.

        I was asleep and I heard some scratching noises.  I assumed it was the baby squirrels (I had discovered they had a nest up under the eaves of our house.  I figured they were venturing around up in the ceiling.  

        Since there was nothing I could do about it, I tried to go back to sleep.  Then I was roused by our cat, who was jumping around by the window, and knocking off papers and books that were sitting on the short filing cabinet below the window.  

        I raised my head off of the pillow once again to yell at the cat, who seemed mighty interested in the curtain, or what was behind it.  Surely, I thought, those baby squirrels hadn’t gotten in through the window.  At that point, a head peaked out from behind the curtain--it was the marten we had been seeing around the house.

        I usually have the window shut overnight, because when it is open, the train whistle that originates across the river and valley, over a mile away, sounds like it is coming from just outside our house.  Over the last few nights, despite the train whistle, I left the window open, because it has been so warm.

        We do have a screen on the window, but it is held by some slots, and the marten managed to slide it out of the slot and squeeze through the crack on the loose side.  Now, it was hiding behind the curtain, and Lucifer, our cat was stalking it, even thought it was a lot bigger than she was.

        I jumped out of bed, my mind racing through all the possible solutions of how to get the marten out of the house.  The marten, who by this time was feeling outnumbered, to his credit was trying to get back outside, but couldn’t get the window screen open.

       The cat jumped, and the marten responded by leaping down to my guitar case, then the floor and finally behind a dresser.  Lucifer followed, and as the marten vocalized various hissing and growling moans at the cat, I tried disparately to get the screen out of the window, so that if the marten got back on the windowsill, it could escape back outside.

        I yelled at the cat to get away from the marten, and finally got her out of the bedroom, at the same time I opened the door to our balcony, thinking maybe I could get the marten to go out that way.

        In the end that’s what happened.  Once the cat was gone, the marten came out from behind the dresser, and I herded it out into my office, and seeing the open door, it scampered out to the balcony, and I closed the door behind it.

        Needless to say, it was a while before, I calmed down enough to go back to sleep.  Life in the frontier is not always as relaxing and stress-free as urban dwellers often think.

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

The Pine Martin Gets Closer

     A couple of days ago I blogged about seeing my first Pine Martin in 2013.  Well, that wasn’t really the end of my martin story.   A couple of weeks later, I had another blog about the martin:

          Some of the critters we have around here are sure publicity hungry.  On May 23, I wrote about spotting my first marten along our trail.  I took its photo and posted it on on my blog.  They are rather secretive creatures that you don’t normally see.  It wasn’t even in the type of forest where they usually live.  

            I suspect this one got hooked on the international publicity, because the other day, it had scampered  out of the woods, and was running around on the branches of the birch tree that sits 10 feet (3 m.) from our house.  I assumed it was interested in getting its picture taken again, so I obliged it.

Take look at my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

At The Whistlestop Gallery

     McBride is known as sort of an “Artist Town” because of the many talented artists that live in the area.  The McBride Train Station features The Whistlestop Gallery, where many of the paintings and other works of the local artisans are on sale.

    On Wednesday, a film crew from a Prince George television station traveled to McBride to film a piece about McBride and the Whistlestop Gallery.  I was asked to show up as one of the contributing artists to be interviewed.

    While one of the Whistlestop officials was being interviewed, I was standing out in the lobby awaiting my turn.  As I stood there, a tourist couple came in and were looking at some of the brochures on display.  Being a friendly local resident, I asked the lady tourist where they had come from.

    She replied that they lived on Vancouver Island.  She then told me that they had driven up to the university in Prince George to visit their daughter.  She added that now they were on their way to Clearwater, to see a friend who lived there.

    Then she said that long ago she had a high school teacher in Victoria who had inspired her to pursue an education in biology, who she thought had later moved to McBride.  

    I asked her what was his name, thinking I might know him.

    “Mr. Foster” was her reply.

    “Mr. Foster?” I surprisingly remarked,  “He was my next door neighbor for 35 years.”

    Then it was her time to be surprised, and we talked about the Fosters, who had just recently moved down to Victoria on Vancouver Island.

    The incident shows what a small world it is, especially for people who live in a very small community.

    My interview with the TV presenter, must have went okay, because I later learned that after I had left, he bought the print of my painting of Mt. Robson, I was holding up, as I explained my painting technique of painting just one two inch square every day.

    I also learned that the woman tourist who I was talking to, bought one of my art cards.

You can see my other paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Seeing My First Pine Martin

         The following is from a blog I posted in May of 2013.  It was after a day when I saw an unusual number of wild critters.

        Yesterday, was another one of those rare days, when all sorts of wildlife were out galavanting around in the woods.  I blogged about the black bear we saw on our morning walk, and when we started out on our afternoon walk, we were wary of coming across the bear again, so I thought I would make some noise as we walked so it could hear us coming.

        Usually the late afternoon walk, I take some oats and corn along to scatter where the trail runs beside our pond, to feed the ducks (and inadvertently) the deer.  After I had emptied the plastic jar of the oats and corn, I just drummed on it’s bottom and whistled a happy tune to alert any bear as we continued down our trail. 

        Shortly upon entering the woods, I saw some commotion, and watched as a mother moose, and calf retreated deeper into the bush.  When we got to the field where we had seen the bear, it was empty, but a big hawk or raptor took flight.  When we re-entered the woods at the far field, we scared off a spruce grouse (a chicken-like bird).  

        Like I was saying, I was trying to make noise kept vigil as we walked, and through the high brush I saw movement in a tree.  When I got a clearer view, I could see a dark furry animal, but wasn’t sure what it was.  It was bigger than a cat, and it had a really furry tail.  I took two photos, and when I got home I looked it up in my BC Mammal book.   I decided it was an American Pine Marten.

        Martens are pretty elusive animals.  I have never before seen one in the bush.  They eat voles, insects, squirrels, and have even been know to finish off an apple pie that had been left in a window to cool.

        Seeing a marten, was really a special treat for me.  They are usually only found in deep mature conifer forests.  This one was in a mixed forest mostly aspen, cottonwood, and birch trees, with only a scattering of spruce and balsam.   They are a sign of a healthy mature forest.

        Pine Martins are prized for their fur, and are sought after by trappers.  Hopefully, this one will have a long life in the neighborhood.

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Merlin Bird ID App: Early Birds

     Last night at 3:45 AM, I was awaken when my wife fell, on the way to the bathroom.  Still very groggy from being suddenly awaken, I got up to help her.  I helped her get back on her feet, and supported her as she walked to the bathroom, then back to the bedroom.  

    This middle of the night activity, woke and excited Kona, and so I carried her outside so she could pee.  When I got outside, there was already a bit of light in the sky (we have very long days this time of year.)   What really surprised me when I got out there, was the number of birds that were tweeting and singing their songs.

    I am used to hearing this very early morning bird chorus in June, but it is usually during my half-sleep when I was in the bedroom.  Last night was different because all the songs were louder, since I was outside. 

    Instead of just waiting around for Kona to pee, I went upstairs and got my iPhone.  On the phone I have the Merlin Bird ID App, which, when you turn it on, identifies the different bird sounds going on.  I only had the app on for three minutes, and I was very surprised at how many birds were out their singing their hearts out in the early morning.  Above you see the birds the Merlin app recorded.

    I was especially happy to see the American Redstart and the Western Tanager on the list.  They are such beautiful birds that I hadn’t actually seen for a few years.  I am glad that they are still around.  

    Not being a hardcore birder, there are only a few birds that I can identify by their songs.  The Merlin app is wonderful for doing so, for you.  

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca