On Commercial Road near Industrial Street in Leaside, a message in crushed energy drink and pop cans graces three utility poles. The sentiment works whether you read it as three separate instructions or just one.
(Previously spotted by Rudy.)
Author: Val Dodge
The litter worked!
Have you checked our litter lately, honey?
I suppose I should thank Kirsten and Frank at PetSmart for verifying that the cat litter is in good working order every few days. I’m not sure I want to know exactly how they make that determination.
Dysart et al
I suppose that you really have to come up with something shorter to fit on road signs when the full name of your municipality is the United Townships of Dysart, Dudley, Harcourt, Guilford, Harburn, Bruton, Havelock, Eyre and Clyde. The initialism of UTDDHGHBHEC doesn’t look much better and isn’t very catchy. But you’d think that since the initial amalgamation of the first four of these in Haliburton County in 1867, the township et al’s residents would have been able to let some of the names slip into history.
On the other hand, living in Toronto et al, formed in 1954 with a full name of the United City of Toronto, Scarborough, East York, Leaside, North York, Forest Hill, York, Weston, Swansea, New Toronto, Mimico, and Long Branch would have its charms.
Grossest TTC e-alert ever
This TTC alert just popped into my inbox:
ALL CLEAR: All earlier delays on Yonge University Spadina line have cleared. Regular service has resumed. We apologize for any incontinence.
I’m not sure what caused the delays in the first place, but it must have been quite the mess.
(And this is a perfect example of why I read things twice before I hit the “send” button.)
Don’t taunt happy fun bird
I thought we agreed last fall that you'd fill my damned feeder before I got back from Florida.
If any bird could shoot lasers out of its eyes, it would be the common grackle.
Bike parking at the lookout
There’s no official bike parking at the Chester Hill Lookout, but that didn’t prevent some teenagers from locking up before heading down the trail into the Don Valley on the last evening of March Break.
Back in my day, going to the lookout to “park” meant something else entirely.
Be vewy vewy quiet
Two signs about birds in Presqu’ile Provincial Park are meant to caution bird lovers. The first instructs people to approach a viewing area quietly so as not to disturb birds on the beach:
Another sign in the park alerts parkgoers to the danger presented by the bird hunt allowed in the park:
The perplexing thing is that these signs are both on the same post:
On Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday, it’s Lookout #3. On Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, it morphs into “Look out!” #3. I hope the hunters are using silencers so they don’t disturb the birds.
Winter wrap-up
There really wasn’t much of a winter this year but there were a few opportunities to get out and take pictures of scenes that weren’t relentlessly brown. Here’s a gallery containing a few of the things I saw this winter that didn’t quite make it into posts of their own for one reason or another.
Gone fishing
Given that they neither dive nor swim, I don’t normally think of crows as birds that catch fish. Yet as the lake ice was breaking up last week, there were three crows eating two relatively large fish that they’d caught from somewhere. I didn’t see them actually catch any of the fish and they looked a little large to fly with, so my best guess is that they were scavenging fish that had been dropped by other birds. There’s also a possibility that they’d stolen the fish away from a flock of seagulls that were at the edge of the open water farther out in the lake.
Although this was most likely just a case of opportunism, there is actually some evidence of crows catching fish on their own. Here’s a pretty straightforward video of a crow catching a fish in water shallow enough for it to stand in:
And here’s a video (with explanation) that seems to show a crow fishing in an artificial pond by using bread as bait:
Sign-eating tree
These signs were being eaten by a tree until a crew came along a few months ago and chopped the tree down while clearing and marking a path above the pipeline. It looks like they couldn’t extricate the signs from the tree and chose instead to work around the obstruction, leaving a chunk of the tree still enveloping the signs.