I have spent the last week up at our chalet in Mont Tremblant, QC. One of the things I love most about the area beyond the beautiful trees, mountains and endless activities to do is the wildlife. The deer, birds, chipmunks, squirrels and more.
We have names for all of them.
The deer are called Prudence. The deer crossing warning signs on the roads here show an image of a deer and the word Prudence which of course means caution but we picked it up as the name for deer so all deer are now named Prudence.
The chipmunks are all called Joey. This goes back to my childhood summers spent at a family cottage in Northern Ontario. I don’t know why but my grandparents always called the chipmunks Joey and that stuck with me. So all our chipmunks are Joey except we discovered a new chipmunk here this year which seems to have his tail bobbed off so he’s Bobby.
Red is a squirrel we haven’t seen since our first winter here but during that first winter we were so excited to see the deer in the backyard that we bought some deer food (we know it’s wrong and we don’t do it anymore!). We put the food out on the snow for the deer. We hadn’t anticipated that a squirrel would discover it and feel like he hit the jackpot. It was the funniest thing we had ever seen.
The red Squirrel discovered the seed on the ground and started zipping back and forth to his nest with as much seed as he could but realised he could never take it all back so he started burying it in the snow just a few feet away from the original pile. He would stick his face into the snow drop the seed then (I’m not kidding) fluff up the snow around the seed to make it look like it was covered and not a stock pile.
The name red is based on the fact that he is red coloured but also that he’s zippy fast.
This year for the first time we have a nest of Robins on our deck. We arrived last week and our first thing to do is go out onto the deck and look for Joey (he has a home at the end of the deck). As we were exiting the house a bird whipped by our head we looked over and saw her nest in the deck roof. The next day we had a look at the inside of the nest to see if there were any eggs inside. There were four beautiful blue eggs. We’ve been trying ever since to avoid going out on the deck to let her stay with the eggs.
Yesterday her behaviour changed she wasn’t leaving the nest at all. I had the feeling that the eggs were hatching. We had a quick peak when she finally left the nest and the eggs were just starting to hatch. You could see the tiny featherless bodies popping out of the eggs. I did not want to disturb the mother so we quickly got out of the way.
Today we took a picture of them. Here is the picture of the babies. It’s a tiny bit blurry, again I did not want to disturb the mother. The names of the robins are Roberta, Robert and now the babies – Bambinos.
Baby Robins
