It’s amazing the variety of animal and insect life that one runs into every day, once you get used to looking.
Some of these were found on “photo trips”, like Bella, a downtown Oakville cat who likes strangers. Some show up and wait for you to go and get a camera, some are too impatient, and get their pictures taken on a phone, like the snake and spider which were saved from the pool skimmer, or the cicada that I found outside our kitchen door on my way back in after letting Clare out for her evening ritual. And some like the fox and the hawk were photographed through the glass in the back door.
One we missed getting a photograph of was a snake that I found in our basement. Obviously a very young garter snake, this was at the bottom of the basement stairs, so I picked it up and took it upstairs, showed Mary-Jo and Anna, and then released it outside near the pond, where there are lots of nooks and crannies and probably some friends. Only afterwards did I think we should have taken a photo! Where it came from had us stumped for a while, and then we realized that earlier in the week Adam had brought back my mitre saw that he had borrowed and the snake had probably hitched a ride. I imagine that by the time I found it, it was getting quite hungry and thirsty, as the fridge door was a bit too big for him to open!
