Birds, cats, fluffy white clouds

I know it's been a month, but this blog isn't dead, it's just resting! I'm going to two conferences in the fall, and I'm pretty busy these days making travel arrangements & working on my presentations. Keep me in your RSS feed and hopefully you'll see photos from England and Texas later this year.

I did get out to the Islands yesterday, to enjoy the first decent weather in what feels like weeks. Ward's Island is still my favourite place in Toronto to spend a sunny day: cats, bicycles, little cottages, a nice pecan tart at the cafe. It appears to be poplar fluff season on the Islands right now: see photo below. Is it poplars that produce all that fluff? It's everywhere you look: on the ground, in the air, in the water, where the geese and ducks graze on it happily.

Also, I saw several brilliant orange songbirds, and wondered what they were. I thought they might be scarlet tanagers, but they had black heads, and tanagers don't, as a quick Google search revealed. Some more Googling, and I figured out they were Baltimore orioles. So pretty!

More photos here, though none of the orioles -- they're too quick for me.