Winter Wednesday Outdoor Hour Challenge - Winter Colours

I just purchased the Winter Wednesday Notebook Pages and Activity Ideas from Barbara over at her blog called Handbook of Nature Study. For a limited time you get Nature Study Bird Pages for free. I want to get to know this area and learn about nature in this new strange place that we live and Ausytn loves birds so I couldn't resist. This is my first post from the Challenge.

It was my very first time venturing out with the kids alone since we've lived here. I now have the van and my hubby is back at work. I pulled up Google Map on my computer to locate the nearest green space to us. I found a nice spot near the river that we could go and walk on some trails. As soon as we got out of the van I noticed this beautiful sound and looked over to see these birds. We have never seen these birds before. Where we live there are usually only crows and magpies to see from our apartment and these birds didn't seem like familiar Ontario residents. I took a picture and when we got home I researched to find out what they were. They are Bohemian Waxwings. Here is a link for you to see them and hear their sound: http://identify.whatbird.com/obj/740/_/Bohemian_Waxwing.aspx. They are closely related to the Cedar Waxwing. From what I've read they both live around here and the Cedar Waxwing has a very fun courting ritual of exchanging berries that I would love to witness. It's proving to be fun finding new things in nature that we couldn't discover on the other side of the country where we moved from.

We wandered off the trail a bit but I'm not sure what the rules are at this park so we didn't do it much. The purpose of our first lesson is to look for colours of winter. The first colour that Austyn chose was the reddish colour of the Bohemian Waxwing's highlights. It's a reddish colour. There were many pine trees here so green was almost as obvious as the white of the snow.

Here is a Black-capped Chickadee. He was hard to photograph. We watched him flutter from branch to branch and tree to tree.

There were some red berries, gray bark, black twigs, brown/orange pine cones, yellow grass, and the sky wasn't blue so we couldn't say blue on this day. Oh, and we can't forget yellow pee that Zoe insisted on drawing on her notebook page. LOL!

I find at Zoe's age we can't go far on winter days. She gets tired easy and doesn't do well in the cold. Mind you, it wasn't that cold on this hike.

It was -2 C. They took their mittens off to draw on the papers.

 We observed many tracks. Most of them appeared to be dog tracks but we saw other animal tracks including birds and something that we couldn't identify. It was a good hike.

If you think you know what the paw prints on the left are, leave me a comment. These were found under the branches of a tree. The tracks on the right look like they could be a magpie.