Saturday, March 31, 2012

Lac Le Jeune Mailboxes

BoundMissing mail? The Lac Le Jeune mailboxes were broken into the morning of Friday, 30 March. The incident has been reported. Thanks to Ken McPherson for relaying the information to post on the blog.

Canada Post offers this advice on their website about identity theft. Other than the suggestion to collect your mail promptly after delivery (what time of day is that?), the site mostly explains how to protect your identity after your mail has been stolen.

This isn't the first incident at Lac Le Jeune. What can be done to prevent it? And what are some ways to prevent identity theft? It seems one step in the right direction is to receive and pay bills online.


Sunday, March 4, 2012

The Upton House

There's a great spread about Tracy and Mitch Upton's house in the March issue of Currents Magazine called "Handcrafted Living". Check it out!

Mining the Neighbourhood

Photo by Frank Morton
The Ajax Mine Project was the topic on CBC Daybreak South for several days. Check the website for the featured "Mining the Neighbourhood" series. There are several good interviews. This page will take you directly to the Daybreak South audio files.

*Note, at the moment there is not an easy way to link to the articles directly, so you might need to use the search option when the series is no longer featured.

Caring for wild birds


A few years ago our neighbourhood experienced a loss of 12+ pine grosbeaks. Today I have seen 2 birds with the same symptoms. The grosbeaks become quite distended…to the point their wing feathers do not tuck into their bodies, plus their necks also appear swollen. They become very lethargic to the point you could walk up to them and pick them up. Their death is inevitable and very disturbing to witness. Please watch out for this happening to the birds in your yard. When this happened before it only affected the pine grosbeaks. The other winter species did not seem to be affected so it may have been a viral type of illness, specific to that breed. But…it is worth a reminder to all of us to be careful with our feeding practices.

 The advice we were given by a fellow in the CO office, and a local vet who sees a lot of birds in his practice was:

  • Keep your feeders CLEAN. You can look up the care of feeders on the internet. It is recommended that they be cleaned with a weak bleach solution about every 5 days. This would be the type of feeders that the birds actually stand in (as “ground feeders” such as grosbeaks)
  • Use appropriate food. Do not feed birds bread or other left over foods. (exceptions could be birds that eat carrion?)
  • Clean up ground around feeders.
  • Once warmer weather starts wean birds off your feeders, i.e. slowly decrease the amount of food you put out. Birds can develop intestinal problems when they gorge on available food. They also would go for feeders instead of varying their diet with what nature intended them to eat. 
 Let's hope we are not about to see a repeat of 2 years ago.

Posted by Bev Lorimer,  Lac Le Jeune resident