Our Annual (Unsuccessful) Owl Prowl

A week ago now, on a bright sunny Saturday, we headed out for a long drive to look for Snowy Owls as we have for several years now.  The snow was so bright it washed out my photos, but I came home with far too many shots of barns and rural countryside, so you can dash through these and move on, but for me it's good memories, even if we failed to see a single owl!

The shadows of the tall spruce at the end of our street were dark across the road as we headed out.

But the sun was glaring in our windshield as we drove up the big hill going south out of Meaford.  This is the ancient Algonquin glacial shoreline, not the Niagara Escarpment.

Soon we dipped down into Frog's Hollow Road, no idea how it got the name.

And then up again past the rocks of the escarpment.  This is the Niagara Escarpment (you can see the rocks at the top of the slope), and the Bruce Trail crosses up there where the road vanishes.

We passed a well designed windbreak, back far enough from the road to work properly.  I remember when this windbreak was being planted 20 years ago or more.

We passed a number of nice farms after that, and I had to stop myself just clicking away.  But the bottom of these two is interesting.  It stands on a large farm property acquired years ago as community pasture.  Farmers can apply to graze their cattle there in a dry year.  No house left, just the barn.

Further on, as we headed for Chatsworth, the road takes a large dip down into the valley of the Bighead River, at this point just a tiny stream.

A small former church, now made over into a residence.

And a fair bit of the landscape after that, as we headed all the way west toward Paisley, looked like this - individual trees, sometimes with a bit of fencing, a woodlot in the distance, all that's left of a former farmstead.

And arriving in downtown Paisley we came to the former church that sits on the corner between the road and the river, now I believe the local Canadian Legion.

We headed north and then turned back east, passing a wide variety of barns, from the large modern operations to the sad falling down older ones.  There's so much farm consolidation going on here, it's almost more common to see a barn with no house than a conventional farmstead.

And frequently those trees or clusters of trees that mark an old farm home, here used as a spot to store hay bales.

At one point we passed a single large American elm.  Elms that are isolated seem to have been able to withstand the Dutch elm disease.  You can tell in this picture and those above how badly the lighting is off, giving a blue tinge to the photos.

We passed several Wild turkey flocks, here with their feathers showing a lot of actual blue.

And ended up back over in Tara before heading home - no snowy Owls to our credit.  But it was a pleasant drive on a bright sunny day.

Looking back on these now, I can see that these pictures are terrible!.  It's the lighting, that bright white snow that just throws everything all off in your camera exposure.  Sorry about that, but this is what you get!  And sorry about so many of them too.  

But I was pleased that I managed to hold and use my big Nikon for the whole drive though, and didn't notice my hands getting tired.  It seems that you just keep on recovering little bits of your functions as the years roll on.  I think my daily exercise helps!