butterflies in early March

zebra longwing

Yesterday was gross and rainy -- not good hiking weather. So we went for a walk indoors instead. There's something to be said for warmth, light and green at this time of year. I hadn't been to the Cambridge Butterfly Conservatory in years, so I thought it might be time for a revisit.

It's not a big place, but it's very pleasant. Outside the glasshouse there's a couple of spaces for exhibits; the permanent exhibit is about Insects of the World and there's a space for rotating exhibits. This one was on bats (woot!) and though not very large it was quite informative. My only complaint about their interpretation in both the galleries is that there's an awful lot of verbiage and it's often very small font. smallfry liked looking at the colourful insects under glass, though. She particularly liked looking at the live honeybees in the honeybee exhibit.

green!

The glasshouse is really pleasant. Lots of green, a comfortable humidity and a slightly tropical heat (around 24C). There's the constant sound of water running, thanks to two waterfalls and a little stream that runs around the entire place. There were others there, but it wasn't terribly crowded on a Thursday morning.

owl butterfly

There are butterflies everywhere. When we got there, sort of mid-morning, there weren't a lot flying around; don't know if the light wasn't right, or they're perhaps late risers? but by the time I left after the lunch hour, there were butterflies flying everywhere. It's a very pretty effect.

can't remember what this one is called, but they're one of my favourites

There are also many, many birds. They have ornamental finches in spades (who were collecting nesting material as I was there, so one expects there will be more ornamental finches at some point in the near future, unless staff find the nests) and there are a couple of quails, and new to me this time was a green-cheeked conure hanging out across from the hatching station.

his name, poor thing, is "Cheecho"

The hatching station is where the butterfly chrysalides are hung to hatch. The Conservatory gets all their chrysalides from farms in the tropics; I'm not sure whether any of the butterflies they already have ever lay eggs, and I didn't ask. One suspects that though the finches leave the [live, healthy] butterflies alone that caterpillars might not be so lucky. Not sure they have the right food plants for the butterfly species they have either. At any rate, they hatch from their well-travelled chrysalides in a special area open to the rest of the conservatory, where the staff have the chrysalides all labelled carefully and where you can watch the butterflies chilling out, pumping their wings full and resting before they flutter off into the wider conservatory.

the chrysalides hang from sticks in the middle panel

I didn't spend time talking to anyone; smallfry and I did a couple of circuits, I practiced with the camera (still need a lot more practice, I think) and then we sat for a while. A very nice way to spend a couple of hours on a rainy, windy March day.

my favourite muffins (currently)

When the going gets tough, I tend to get baking. Unfortunately, that means that two of us often end up eating enough baked goods to kill a small horse. When the baking is things like cookies or these awesome Overnight Cinnamon Rolls this is a problem, because the small horse would have died of heart disease, probably.

So I have been on a quest to find healthier things to bake, and thought I'd share my current favourite muffin recipe. I know it says "bran" in the recipe there, but these are light muffins, not the dense, chewy, cardboardy pucks that can sometimes result from heightened fibre content. It's a modified Canadian Living recipe, from the "Honey Bran Muffins" recipe in their Complete Canadian Living Cookbook (an excellent cookbook that I use regularly for all sorts of things.)

Wet ingredients:

2 eggs

1 cup plain yoghurt

1/3 cup milk

1/3 cup canola oil (although I often use slightly less)

1/4 cup liquid honey

2 tsp vanilla

1 1/2 cups 100% or all- bran cereal 

Dry ingredients:

1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 cup packed brown sugar

1 1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp salt

1 1/2 cups raisins (or chopped prunes work really nicely too)

Preheat the oven to 375F (190C).

In a medium bowl, whisk together all the wet ingredients. Stir in the bran cereal and let stand for at least five minutes.

In a large bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients. Pour the bran mixture over the dry ingredients, add raisins, and mix just to combine.

Spoon into muffin cups and cook for 25 minutes or until golden brown and tester comes out of centre clean.

Makes ~12 muffins.

hiking on camera

My stay-sane-and-happy plans appear to be mostly working, though I'll slip up every once in a while (like yesterday) and stay inside on a glorious day just because getting out is too much damn work. But generally I've been hiking someplace most days when it's not too windy or precipitating. I take the baby and the binoculars and off we go. We've seen some great new trails, and I'm birding up a storm.

The problem is I don't generally take the camera. I recently picked up a new (used) lens for our DSLR on kijiji -- it's a great lens for the price, and aside from being a little heavier than the old lens and not doing macro at all, it's fabulous. The key use I saw for it was taking photos of birds in the backyard, particularly the feeders, but it's always very tempting to take it walking too. Only it's heavy, and a little awkward, and I generally have the maximum number of things strapped to me that I can comfortably handle.

As is the general law of cameras, though, every time I go out without it I see something that would make a great photo. The walk last week where my friend Lorax and I were surrounded by Cedar Waxwings at eye-level and five feet away? Would have been nice to have the camera for that. The walk before where Mom and I had great looks at some Brown Creepers less than ten feet away? Also would have been nice. I don't pretend to be excellent with the camera; I am at best a somewhat enthusiastic novice. But something like the waxwings would have been hard to miss.

these binoculars were made for walking

There has been a confluence of forces in my life that has conspired to turn me into someone who searches out new trails in the area on a nearly daily basis. First, I am now officially home alone with a baby during the weekdays (lucky me, I wasn't until very recently) and second, eBird.

The first reason for my almost pathological need to get out of the house should be self-evident. The added challenge that smallfry is still not supposed to be exposed to respiratory infections if we can avoid it at all means that I'm cut off from the traditional activities parents on leave might do with their little people. So I need to find ways to get out safely, otherwise I start to go crazy with only my own thoughts to occupy me. It's amazing what an anxious, fearful, sad bent they can take. smallfry is good company, but not always the most stimulating or even distracting companion. Hiking is perfect -- it bites a chunk out of my day doing something worthwhile that doesn't involve me stewing.

The second reason I've been on a hiking kick is eBird. Now, I've always been a birdwatcher, sometimes more casual and sometimes pretty hard-core, though I'm not what one might call a "twitcher." It's just not how I roll, though I see the appeal. I am not going to go out of my way to see something unusual, even if it's only half an hour away; I'm happy to see it if I stumble upon it, but I'm happiest just hiking along and watching whatever comes my way. Although... well, I'll admit to twitching the Yellow-Throated Warbler at Rondeau in spring 2011 since we were there anyway. And... I twitched the Summer Tanager at Pelee in 2010, but again, we were right there. And... well, let's just say that if there was a reliable report of a Kirtland's Warbler within half an hour of my current location, I would probably drop what I was doing and twitch that pretty hard. ANYWAY.

What I do like is data entry. I ... I really love data entry. Even more, I love to watch masses of data I've entered gradually growing into a statistical picture that reflects my experience. Something like eBird is like candy to me. Delicious, easily-accessible, free candy that almost might be good for you. In that reporting to eBird is good for science!

What I've realized through entering my backlists into eBird are a couple of things: first, for someone who likes data so much, I've been pretty pathetic about keeping it. I've seen a lot more birds than I've ever written down on a list; I've done a lot of birdwatching list-free. This is not necessarily because birdwatching is more fun list-free, it's more because I am lazy and/or disorganized. I really like keeping lists when I can be arsed to find a pen and paper.

The second thing I've realized is that I've not done a lot of birdwatching in my own backyard. We go places to birdwatch; Panama, Cuba, Bruce County, Point Pelee, Rondeau... but I don't really do a lot of birding around here, and that's a shame.

So that dovetails nicely with my need to get out. Turns out smallfry is a pretty excellent birding companion. She sleeps in her stroller, as long as we keep moving at reasonable intervals. She really, really enjoys her new carrier, in which she can be strapped to my front facing outwards (leaves my hands free, and we can hike on less-smooth trails, and she can see what is going on, which is paramount.) In the past week we've birded three different locations in the region, only one of which I'd ever been to before (and even there we walked much further than I've walked there before.) The fruits of our labours have included a juvenile Bald Eagle seen flying over the river today and many more Common Mergansers than I customarily see, since I like my warm and comfy house at this time of year. (Don't get me started about the weather, though; as much as I like getting out in the warm sun in early February, it's creeping me the hell out.)

The payoff? Lots of birds, meaning lots of data to add to eBird, and smallfry is sleeping well at nights thanks to all the fresh air, and I am getting that last little bit of pregnancy weight off, but most importantly I am feeling good. I've got a list of places I'm looking forward to hiking, and a growing list of places I'm looking forward to revisiting at regular intervals throughout the year. I suppose the exercise is its own reward, though that's never been enough for me. But hiking to watch for birds -- there's always something interesting to see.

she bakes, she bakes

More baking adventures. It appears that I have... well, not perfected, and not even mastered, but accomplished the art of a reasonable flatbread. First there was pizza dough, which I have made using Alton Brown's recipe (you may detect a theme here) and that has generally turned out. We've eaten a lot of pizza; each time I make the dough it gets better. So practice is clearly a component. Next up with pizza adventures: I'm going to try Alton's grilled flatbread pizza recipe. You know, because winter's such a great time for grilling.

I have also accomplished a reasonable facimile of a sort of mana'eesh, a Middle Eastern flatbread that is essentially a pizza with za'atar on it instead of tomato sauce and pepperoni. I'll make this one again, I think, and up the oven temperature from the 400 F the recipe called for; my mana'eesh didn't really brown, though they were quite tasty all the same. And very, very easy, except for the part where my pizza stone can only support two at a time.

also, za'atar is extremely delicious

Finally, today I accomplished homemade bagels. They're not beautiful, but wow are they tasty. I did them the traditional way, poaching them in boiling water with baking soda and malt syrup before baking. They weren't blatantly flavourful the way, say, a store-bought bagel is; they were better. The texture was flat-out awesome. They had a subtle flavour; something not quite sweet, not quite savoury. They were a fair bit of work; a pre-ferment, then mixing and kneading the dough, then another rise, then shaping them and leaving them in the fridge overnight, then poaching (which I could only do two at a time) and then baking (which I could only do four at a time.) And things are a little time-sensitive when it comes to the poaching-draining-baking thing, so I'm not sure I'll be doing much of them when I'm home alone with smallfry. But as a weekend baking activity I'll definitely pull this recipe out again. I may have been ruined by these bagels; I'm pretty sure I'll never be able to go back to store-bought.

Incidentally, for those looking for a good mana'eesh or bagel recipe, I got both from Daniel Leader's Simply Great Breads book. My current copy is the library's but I'm pretty sure I'll be buying one. The failed bialys were from this book too, so my record with it is not perfect, but there are at least two recipes there that worked out well, and several more that I'd like to try (cider doughnuts being first on the list.)

I just ate another half-bagel, just to confirm that they really are that tasty. So. Good.