Is it True that I'm about to be CAUGHT UP with my Blog??

Yup, I'm in the homestretch now with finalizing the few days that Ann and I spent together three weeks ago, I'm ashamed to say, but hey, perhaps it will be worth the wait??

So to refresh my your memory, Ann joined me at the cottage on the afternoon of Monday, August 2nd for a few days. Remember the 1,848 photos I had to edit? It's taken me this long to go through them all, so here we go at last with Tuesday, August 3rd.


I first took Ann back to the amazing field of sunflowers for some morning rays:

From there we dropped by at the Lindsay Sewage Lagoons (was dead), so we continued on to the Dunsford Nature Trail, and en route we spotted a Northern Harrier hunting over a field. At Dunsford all we found of note was a Flycatcher, it was so long ago now that I cannot recall its song to properly identify it (sorry, John):

CKL Road 24 beckoned, though, and we easily found the tagged female Osprey in her usual spot near the bridge over Emily Creek:

At this point, we were so desperate for critters to photograph that even FROGS were given some space on the memory card, we feared that this was as good as it was going to get for the day:

Even the Osprey family at the now-famous bridge outside of Bobcaygeon was lying low, a parent (top) with one of the young ones was in a tree:

I'm not sure of the order of things now, but I recall that I decided to show Ann the local habitat of Kawarthans, as it was soooo quiet on the birding front. We therefore proceeded to the far side of Bobcaygeon for an extremely nourishing lunch of the local ice cream, cradled wonderfully in a delectable waffle cone at Kawartha Dairy. Life was good again for us both as we swooned over our respective cones, and we both patted each other on the back for showing such restraint by only ordering a size small...

We waddled back to the car and opted to return to the Osprey nest by the bridge in case they had returned, but stopped first at the nest on the south side of the road and were thrilled to see this family enjoying themselves. We realized that the single young one had not fledged yet, so Ann and I watched him wingercising, getting higher and higher each time, almost as if he was surprising himself each time he flapped his wings and suddenly became airborne, can you even imagine what's going through his mind?? He's not taking off or landing here, he's just going straight up, and then hangs on for dear life while the power- steering kicks in to hopefully bring him safely back down to the nest:

...back safe on the nest....

...taking a breather and no doubt trying to process what the heck just happened:

...ding ding round two:

He's totally oblivious to us, so we move in a bit closer. Remember the poison ivy-babywipes story? Yup, here's where we both went stupid, it must have been the brain-freeze aftermath from our healthy ice cream lunch, grrrrr:

One of the parents returns to the nest, no doubt giving Junior a "high five" for his flying efforts (unless she wants a closer look at Ann and I in the poison ivy patch):

This parent has a fish, make that a partial fish:

The rest of the family were not amused that there was no sharing of the bounty:

Check out the fish fillet in his beak:

But they eventually kissed and made up, all three of them are in the nest:

We left them alone, and our final stop was the family at the bridge, who were still playing it cool with us. One of the young ones balances precariously on a tree branch:

A stunning Halloween Pennant Dragonfly rested by the shoreline:

We returned to the cottage for the night, and before dinner, one of the adult Ospreys from our nest flew overhead. Ann realized when editing her photos that its right leg was in fact banded:  

The Northern Lights I had pre-ordered for Ann's visit commenced around 10:15 p.m., and we watched them from the dock until they subsided an hour later, a sweet way to end the day.