Coffee Time! #20

Hi everyone! I’m finally back with another coffee post so I hope you are ready to grab a cup of coffee, or tea, or whatever, and join me for a few minutes today. We have very thick smoke again today from forest fires to the west of us. The smoke has been with us all week, but today is definitely the worst.

I am actually having a hard time breathing and I’m coughing all day long. That started yesterday afternoon. It is even bothering my eyes a lot today, they are feeling quite sore. The closest fires range from about 20 to 35 miles (32 to 56 km) away. One is 102,000 acres (about 41,000 hectares), another is 250,000 acres (about 101,000 hectares) and there is a newer one that is now 100,000 acres (about 40,000 hectares).

There are 10’s of thousands of people that have been evacuated across western Canada now due to forest fires. Fortunately there are none that are too close to us here. But that can change quickly. A friend and I went for a drive along one of our highways east of here yesterday. We stopped at several smaller lakes along the highway to get photos, some I will be showing today.

But I need to sort them out before showing more of them. The smoke wasn’t as bad as we went further east. But one thing I noticed was how terribly dry it is in the forest. I haven’t seen it this bad in a very long time. It wouldn’t take much to get some terrible fires burning all around us.

We are fortunate here, we don’t have many fires burning right now, just 11 of them. At one lake we stopped at there was just so much bird activity, I would love to go there and just spend a whole day in that one area to see how many different bird species I could photograph. I wanted to cover a bit more territory yesterday, hoping to find certain wildflowers.

But, unfortunately I didn’t find them on this trip. Our next trip will likely be too late to find any, but there will be others blooming by that time anyway. And hopefully a lot more insects too. There were a lot of insects out yesterday, though a lot of them were not cooperating, but some were.

Oddly, I never saw even one dragonfly, that was something that really surprised me. Normally there should be quite a few different species of dragonflies flitting about along the shorelines of the lakes we visited. Oh well, perhaps next time I will capture some with my camera.

There were several species of flower flies out already, so I hope that means it will be a good summer for them. I would like to capture more of them with my camera too. Some of those flower flies can be very difficult to identify though.

All photos are at lakes we stopped at yesterday, May 29, 2025.

But that is part of the fun of this hobby. If everything was easy it would get boring. Or not. Well, that’s all for now, I hope you all have a great weekend and God bless!

Steve and Muffin.

©2025 Steve McLeod.