Festive Greetings, Dogs, Cats and a Raven

December 24, 2025 / The Urban Nature Enthusiast / 6 Comments

Wishing you all the very merriest of Festive Seasons, and all the best for 2026.

My board of directors have gathered by the tree to help me send this vital message.

Luckily for us, Edgar has never been one for playing with the tree ornaments. He’s more fascinated by the tree when it first comes into the house in it’s natural form — the annual mystery of the arrival of The Great Green Stranger!
Our greatest Edgar challenge this year has been his determination to seek out his hidden Christmas gift (three catnip-filled fish.) He seems to be able to sniff them out, however cleverly I hide them — putting me in mind of the kids when they were little. I finally had to move them into the studio for safe-keeping until the Big Day.

Geordie feels (with some justification) that he deserves a large Christmas bonus for being made to wear the dreaded reindeer antlers for a few seconds again this year.

My Christmas wish for some snow on the mountains finally came true this week, so we were able to enjoy a snowy walk on Mount Seymour.

Phillip took this photo of me in my happy place, videoing a raven in the woods.

And, here’s the view from my perspective …

Geordie was also in his happy place.

So much better than posing with silly antlers!

May this holiday season find you in your happy place, whatever that looks like!

See you in 2026 with lots more crow and raven news.

Happy Crowsgiving

October 13, 2025 / The Urban Nature Enthusiast / 1 Comment

With apologies to readers of my blog who may be wondering where I’ve been for the past few weeks, here is a very short Crowsgiving greeting.

I have been going on many long crow walks, and there is so much news for the crow-verse, it’s hard to know where to start relaying it all.

But for now, on this Canadian Thanksgiving, here is a little round-up of the past week or so with some of the local crows.

One of the most joyful things this year has been the number of crow fledglings making it through their risky first summer — many more than I’ve seen over the past few years. Several youngsters seem to be sticking with Mom and Dad for the fall.

Lucky II is Marvin and Mavis’s fledgling from this spring and seems set to stick around, replacing Lucky I, who stayed with his parents for three years before moving on to start his own family this year. Lucky II is already a forceful personality!

Barry and Beryl, who live on the street with lots of berries, have Baby Berry and Fearless Fred (and his more conservative mate, Florence) have both of their fledglings with them, learning Fred’s fearless ways.

Crow harvest festival has been in full swing, with nuts being hauled out of trees and the road being used as a nutcracker. If dropping their bounty from a height doesn’t work, the crows wait for cars to run over them and then race in to scoop up the fragments — hopefully before the squirrels or other crows get their first.

Now that the nuts are almost all gone, it will be time to move up the street to harvest the berries on the dogwood trees. After that, it will be Persimmon-fest, when the big orange fruit reaches bird-snacking perfection in November. The persimmons are a big favourite with the starlings, but the crows manage to get their share, of course.

I hope your Thanksgiving is sociable and bountiful too!

Lucky II on bin day — the crows’ weekly fun fest!

© junehunterimages, 2025. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to junehunterimages with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Hoorah for Earl and Echo

July 21, 2025 / The Urban Nature Enthusiast / 4 Comments

First of all, I apologize for the vast gap in blog posts. I see my last one was in April.
In my defence, it’s been a busy year of weddings, overseas visitors, publishing a revised book and the 2026 City Crow Calendar, and trying to keep up with the unexpected success of my needle-felted Party Crows.
In between those distractions and my thrice daily walks to walk the dog and check in on the local crows, there has been little time for actually writing things down.

This does not mean, of course, that the crow world has been devoid of exciting developments; on the contrary, it’s been an action-packed spring, with more new fledglings than we’ve seen in this neighbourhood for years.

So … lots to catch up on.

Let’s start with Earl and Echo.

I was beginning to worry about them: Earl with his increasingly bent leg and halting gait; Echo with her partial blindness; and the fact that both of them are getting on in crow years.

Earl enjoyed a small blast of social media fame a week or so ago due to the image below.

The image is the picture I took of Earl, puddle-plodgling, displayed on the LCD camera viewfinder, spangled with actual raindrops and captured by my iPhone camera. Unexpectedly, the raindrops magnified the screen’s grid pattern, and the rainbow raindrops were rendered in a grid pattern, somehow combining real-life and technology in one groovy image — which is now available as a print.

After the rainy days, I went to look for Earl and Echo, but failed to find them in their usual haunts. They had been nesting since March, but it seemed that the first nest had failed. Earl’s bent leg seemed to be troubling him more than usual lately, and I worried that old age had caught up with him. Perhaps the nest failure had been too much.

Sometimes I wonder if there’s a connection between my fondness for murder mysteries with convoluted plots and clues, and my obsession with the ongoing and vast puzzle that is the crow world. In both, there are clues to follow and put together but, whereas murder mysteries invariably offer a tidy ending where all the threads of information come together, crow watching is more of an ongoing saga. Sometimes crows you’ve known for years just vanish and you’re left to wonder what happened.

While an unresolved plot line would be unacceptable in a Midsommer Murders episode, they’re par for the course in the mysterious world of City Crow Stories.

I was mentally starting to say goodbye to Earl and Echo. After fruitlessly wandering their usual area this weekend, I decided to try a block further north as a last resort.

Bingo! It was Echo who found me, rather than the other way round, and she led me further down the street to the joyful sound of fledglings. I could hear at least two, and possibly three, crow babies tucked up in the tree canopy.

The babies still have blue eyes, so they’ve only been out of the nest for a few days. Earl and Echo must have soldiered on and built a second nest after that early failure.

Earl was nearby, cawing paternally at bicyclists whizzing by on the bike route.

Earl and Echo are old friends of mine, with two chapters to themselves in City Crow Stories 2025, so I’m just thrilled to see that they’ve got more life and parenting adventures ahead of them. These new babies join the ranks of other local crow characters like Sneezy and Dennis — all Earl and Echo descendants.