Good morning everyone! It’s a beautiful sunny morning, though cool once again, but at least not quite as cool as yesterday. It seems that rain we received on the weekend was not widespread at all, it only covered a very small area right around here. Most places didn’t get any rain, or very little. So the number of forest fires has gone up to 63 active fires now in this northwestern part of the province. Most are still small but a few are starting to get larger. The largest is now 70,300 acres, others are 54,990, 51,590, 43,271 acres in size. There are quite a few in the 5,000 to 20,000 acres, but the rest are small so far.

The return of warm, dry weather by the weekend can change those numbers quickly though, especially if there is strong winds as well. But there doesn’t appear to be any smoke in the air this morning, the sky is a nice clear blue and hopefully the sun will warm things up a bit today. It did get to a high of 65F (18C) yesterday, a rather large drop from the previous day. But this is the north, temperature swings like that are quite normal. Jasmine was here enjoying a quiet breakfast this morning. Pocket came along. The chase was on! Well, kind of anyway. It looked sort of slow motion, like a pretend chase. They were running, but it certainly wasn’t fast running.

Finally Pocket disappeared and Jasmine gave a single “chip”, which was more like saying good bye, than a scolding type which she would normally do. It was like this. “Hi Pocket, we have to make this look good in case someone is watching.” “Okay Jasmine, let’s go.” The chase begins. Pocket yells, “help, help, the big mean squirrel is after me.” Jasmine yells, “I’ll get you crazy chipmunk, and any other chipmunk that dares come around here.” Finally Pocket goes into a box, stops, and says, “bye Jasmine, see you tomorrow.” Jasmine says, “okay Pocket, I’ll leave you an extra peanut in the same place as last time.” Really, it wasn’t a normal squirrel/chipmunk chase. Quite interesting, something I would expect to see perhaps with Jasper, not with Jasmine.

My photography opportunities have really gone downhill lately. No birds around except the gulls and crows, so dry the wildflowers died before they bloomed, too dry for mushrooms, even the insect population has nearly disappeared. That doesn’t leave me with many opportunities to take pictures of anything. That’s bad. Summer is my big time for photos. Oh well. I do have a lot of insect pics, but not everyone is thrilled about looking at those, but I’m going to start an insect series soon, but I need to identify a lot of them first, and that part is not easy. Such a beautiful summer morning. Have a wonderful day everyone and God bless!

Steve and Muffin.

©2021 Steve McLeod.