Mr Walker Strides On

March 11, 2023March 10, 2023 / The Urban Nature Enthusiast / 1 Comment

Mr. Walker is number four in my City Crow Stories book of crow characters — and his life seems to be rambling on much as it has in previous years.

He and his mate Wanda wait for the dog and I each morning. If Mr. W is busy in the alleyway checking out the bins, Wanda will let him know it’s time.

Time to drop whatever he’s up to and get himself into position for the daily gallop alongside the “bringers of the peanuts” to the sacred spot at the foot of the massive cherry tree.

Here he is in action this very morning — showing fine promenading form once he gets neck and neck with Geordie, the dog …

As per usual, he strides/ambles/scampers alongside Geordie, waits for him to have the customary sniff at his tree, and then up onto his pedestal for the peanut payoff.

As is also routine, Wanda, having arrived at the tree via air (I’ve never seen her lower herself to pedestrian pastimes), drops down from the branches above to get in first dibs.

Mr. Walker this morning, looking as suave as ever

I wrote last summer about the Walkers’ early nesting failure and, though they did seem to be working on a second nest, I think the stress of another hot dry summer led them to just give up in order to concentrate on keeping themselves fed and hydrated.

It’s a pretty exhausting business raising fledglings, as seen in the book with pictures from 2021 when they raised two of them

They went AWOL for the latter part of the summer and imagined them just kicking back in the shade, tiny sunglasses balanced on their beaks, waiting for the cooler weather. Far too hot for any jogging, even for peanuts.

And, indeed, by fall they were back at the appointed spot — Mr. Walker ready, willing and eager to get back into training for the peanut Olympics.

On this occasion, for once, he beat Wanda to the goodies!

The simple reliability of this little daily ritual is strangely comforting — and Mr. Walker’s enthusiastic perambulation technique always brings a smile.

Hip To Be Square #TBT

August 9, 2018August 9, 2018 / The Urban Nature Enthusiast / 7 Comments

1200px-Kodak_Instamatic_100

This was the first camera I owned. Well not that one exactly, but this type. I received it for my ninth birthday in, gulp, 1963.

I don’t believe it came with a manual as it was so utterly basic. There was no focusing, no exposure settings, certainly no filters. Framing choices were limited to square.

It was case of: point, shoot and hope for the best.

Perfect for an enthusiastic nine year old!

This nine year old me does not look very excited, but I was. Our class went on a thrilling school trip to the Flamingo Park Zoo, in distant and exotic Yorkshire! However, as you can see I was always going to be more comfortable behind the camera, rather than in front of it. Or maybe I was just worried my friend was going to drop my new treasure …

A picture from the first roll of film I ever shot, again at Flamingo Park Zoo. There were also a lot of photos of flamingoes …

Perhaps because of this early viewfinder, I always “see” my images as squares, even when using a rectangular viewfinder. Square format came back into fashion during the Polaroid era, and now Instagram has brought it back. That’s nice — makes it easier to find frames!

However, I do like to think I “invented” the one and only thing you could do to vary my square photographic universe — the “groundbreaking” Diamond Shot.

Me and my first Canadian dog, Finlay, taking a break while tree planting in northern BC — a photo made using the exciting Diamond Shot method.

A pair of cactus-themed diamond shots taken on a road trip to the Mexican desert.

A more conventional square shot of some roadside repairs being done on the car that took us (unbelievably) to Mexico and back to northern BC again.

The good old Instamatic, although technically rather stunted, was super portable. It travelled with me through schooldays, university, and moving to Canada.

It’s portability, in the end, proved to be its downfall. While tree planting in a particularly gorgeous spot near Mount Robson, I decided to bring the camera with me to the top of a “run” so I could get a photo of the view. Sadly, the only place to carry it was in my tree bag, where it got wet from the peat moss meant to keep the trees moist and alive. As I advanced the film for the last shot, the lever made a sort of grinding noise from the particulate matter in there.

Still, the film did come out, and this is the very last photo on the roll. Great view, right?

McBride-4f

It was a sad goodbye to an old companion, but that Instamatic had been a trusty friend for almost twenty years, so I really couldn’t complain. Plus, well … wet peat moss …

After some brief flirtations with Canon and Minolta models, I finally settled on an Olympus OM-1 film camera to replace the old Kodak. No automatic features, but tons of fun to be had playing with f-stops, film speed and exposure length. I’m still using an Olympus — now the digital variety. I’m on my third model after “killing” the first two, both times without the aid of wet peat moss!

Ah, they really do not make ’em like they used to.

Last bit of nostalgia. The little cabin I built and lived in by a creek in northern BC, circa 1978.

www.junehunter.com

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The Crow Calendar is Coming

September 30, 2016October 18, 2016 / The Urban Nature Enthusiast / 1 Comment

You may (or may not) have been wondering where in the blogosphere I’ve gotten to for the last few months.

Well, puppy training is surprisingly time consuming … and then there has been my City Crow Calendar project.

The puppy training and the cat/dog peace treaty are both, by the way, going well.

But for a while it looked as if there wasn’t going to be a calendar this year.

First, there was the Canada Post dispute over the summer. I was worried that it would linger into to the busy mailing season and I’d have to hand deliver each and every calendar. Time to start Geordie’s sled training!

Happily, the dispute was settled by August. But then I thought maybe I’d left it too late.

Requests and queries started coming in. When will the 2107 calendar be ready? It did sell out by the beginning of December last year, so I guess people were anxious that they might have missed it already.

So in mid-September I finally got into calendar creation mind set.

Narrowing down the 12 images to feature is tough. From the thousands of crow images on my hard drive, it took at least a week to narrow it down to the dozen.

I could have been done then, and have the calendars already printed, but …

I had this lingering thought in my head that I’d like to give people more than just a calendar. I’d like to make it even more of a “crow-promotion” by adding interesting little facts about crows for every month. I also wanted to add some extra photos to help tell the “crow story”. I decided I could do this by using the little bits of vacant real estate on the calendar left by the grid spaces in each month that don’t have dates in them.

It wasn’t too hard to come up with “crow facts” for every month, although it took quite a bit of tweaking and editing to get them concise enough to fit into the little calendar grid boxes. It took a little bit more time to pick out the extra photos.

I thought I was finally finished last Friday, but then I found that the reason that more sensible people don’t make these cute little additions is that it’s a technical nightmare!

I won’t bore you with the InDesign technical reasons why this is such a fiddle, but suffice to say that I spent hours this week going over it with a fine tooth comb to get the weensy boxes of text and mini photos to align perfectly with the grid part of the calendar.

Geordie waits patiently while the crazy woman mutters at the computer screen.

Finally I decided that my nitpicking was going beyond the rational, so Geordie and I took the file off to the printer today. It is now, I am happy to report, out of my hands.

I expect it to be back into my hands early next week when it will be available to order online. I’ll be sending out a newsletter when they’re actually available, just in case you’d like to get your hands on one.

UPDATE: The City Crows calendar is now available for order on my website.