Flora and fauna

(Photos to be added later.)

This has been a really pleasant weekend: a visit to the Ikebana exhibition at the Canadian Museum of Nature yesterday, walking 8km to get there and back, and a sunny walk to our local [Maple] Sugar Festival in Vanier this morning. It is definitely Spring weather today, so most appropriate. We lunched at Arturo's Market afterwards and I sat in a patch of sunshine in the garden for some of this afternoon.

The nature museum also gave me the chance to see a 3D film and I was lucky to be there at the time when the film about migratory birds was showing. I was touched by one of the sequences in it where cranes, having flown to the point of exhaustion for thousands of miles, reach their destination, wetlands in Scandinavia. When they get there, to the right place, they literally dance for joy, in pairs, leaping into the air from ground level and flapping their wings, the young ones trying to impress a potential mate, of course, but the older pairs, faithfully committed to one another for as many as 40 years sometimes, simply to reinforce or celebrate their bond. Perhaps the vocabulary I'm using is too anthropomorphic, but that was the impression I got.

Apart from the maple sap dripping into the metal buckets, the other attraction at the sugar bush event this morning was the animals. A team of sled-pulling huskies was standing, sitting or lying on tressle tables at a level where they could be petted by human visitors of all ages, and in a tent were farm animals, sheep, goats, rabbits, chickens, a donkey and a llama. I stroked as many as I could reach and children were allowed to give them animal food.