Farewell to Summer

After my wild Algonquin adventures with Ann back in September (yes, folks, I'm out of order once again with my blog), the final week of the summer was spent recuperating from Ann's escpapades peacefully at the cottage with some of my local lovelies, beginning with this female Pileated Woodpecker that foraged for nibblies along our shoreline in the late afternoon. My first feeble attempt at a semi-flight shot looks like this:

Look at the long neck on her as she did a food toss in the air!

...now up to the stump...

...and then over to this pine, she really didn't pay much attention to me as I tried to anticipate her next move as she looked for food, what a beautiful girl!

And speaking of beautiful girls, Mia suffers at the cottage on one of her many beds...

...as does Tessa, whose morning ritual is to always trash the sofa on the front veranda by throwing the pillows and blankets on the floor, but I beat her to it that day:

The last full day of summer already had autumn tints reflected onto the water of our back swamp:

I felt compelled to visit the Osprey nest in the late afternoon, as so much of my wonderful summer had been spent there with the family, one of the babies was cleaning up its beak after a food drop by dad:

"This feels sooooooooooo good!"

Dad did another food drop and as he left the nest, looked at me as if to yell:

"Why am I so grumpy-looking? You wanna know WHY? Because my wife has left me with two screaming babies here that will NOT stop whining at me to %$^&* feed them! Grow up, kids, so I can catch up with my bride in Florida! And shaddup, already!"

"Guilty as charged, I'm one of the whiners, but also the winner of the food drop just now!"

The losing Whiner stayed out on the branch:

I stayed with the babies for about an hour and a half, as I knew it would be one of the last times that we'd all be together (which it was, in the end, waaaaah):

I returned to the cottage just in time for the final sunset of the summer, and what a gorgeous one it was!

The first official sunrise of autumn was a few days later on September 25th, as we were clouded out prior to that:

The first decent autumn sunset found me moving further and further out on the dock each night to chase it as the sun was racing away from us:

Bye bye, summer!