Fancy Rocks - Museum of Nature

 Some rocks and crystals from the wonderful collection at the Museum of Nature in Ottawa.

I hope you are all keeping healthy. Every day brings changes here. The nursing homes are on lock-down which is sad but necessary. My mother can't read a letter or work a phone by herself, so I am left with messages given to the workers in the home to be passed on to her. We are cutting back on socializing and outings. At least the weather is sunny and going for a walk or a drive is pleasant. The people in the cities will have a rougher time of it.

Dinosaurs

 I was going to put up some more butterfly photos but I am feeling like a bit of a dinosaur today so I went with dino pictures from the Museum of Nature.

 Definitely experiencing some "hole in the head" moments myself.

I like this fellow. I think I feel a kinship with his ridiculous face.

 Going hither and yon. Lead the way fair dinosaur.

My physiotherapist told me I was walking improperly. Sigh! After all these years, I still need to  learn how to walk.

However, like this turtle-like dinosaur, I can float. Even old dinosaurs can swim:)

Butterflies - group shots Museum of Nature- Ottawa

 Bowls of fruit were popular with many of the butterflies

 If you click on this photo, you will see the whole image.  I counted 15 butterflies (not counting the blurry one). Perhaps there are even more.

I think I only saw one blue and white butterfly.  It looks like a pretty piece of china.

 In this photo, you can see the colour of the blue morpho when its wings are open, and the muted brown design with eyes that shows when the wings are closed.

The swallowtail butterfly on the left and the center one are very similar but not quite the same. Likely one is the female and the other the male.

Butterfly Delight

We went to the Museum of Nature in Ottawa to see the butterfly show. It was wonderful. So many butterflies! And lots of gorgeous Blue Morphos.  They are very active and when they rest they fold their wings and just show their brown outer colouring so I tried to get a short video of them.
Photos of  lots of butterflies coming soon.

Ecomuseum - Part 1

 We went to the Ecomuseum in St. Anne de Bellevue which is not far from home.  It only has animals native to this area.  The animals are ones that were injured or orphaned or otherwise unable to be in the wild. This adorable porcupine thought a rock would make a cozy place for a nap. He was so still all you could see moving was his little back going up and down as he was breathing. His nose looked like velvet.

 Later he roused himself a bit. The bottom of his back foot looked soft just like the sole of a teddy bear's foot.

 A couple of lynx were well camouflaged. In fact, many of the animals were hard to see at first glance, and a lot of them were sleeping making them even less visible.

Aren't they handsome?
I have more photos but they were taken with my phone.  I was hoping that the latest Windows 10 updates, which were substantial, would solve the uploading problem, but, alas, I still can't upload straight from my phone.  So I e-mail them to myself and transfer them from the e-mail to the photo file. It's a bit tedious so I am posting the Ecomuseum photos in parts.

A Few More Pictures from Upper Canada Village

 Here are a few more views of our visit to Upper Canada Village.  In this back shed, an attractive small wagon was parked and, in the background, is a substantial amount of firewood that would be used to heat and cook with.

 A pleasant vignette shows a couple of farm workers piling loose hay into a wagon. The St.Lawrence river can be seen behind the field. The "villagers" do real farm work with the horses and oxen.

 This is an unusual house.  To me it looks like it should be in the South-west US. The fences around the houses and gardens provided protection from the farm animals who were often left to wander loose to eat grass where they could find it.

The tinsmith was busy at work producing household items.  Tourists can purchase his wares at the gift shop.

I liked this picture that was being made out of dried flowers.  The words at the bottom say, "Long Live the Queen."

 The brooms are made from broom plants that are grown at the village. 

 The sawmill is a great place to see.  I wish I had better pictures of it and that you could smell the delicious pine scent that permeates the building.  The mill is powered by a water-mill placed in the small stream that runs through the village. Just to the left of the man is a large vertical saw blade.  When he has finished placing the log, the blade will be engaged and move up and down cutting the log which is slowly moved along by a frame. The mill makes quite a bit of lumber which is then used in the village for various building projects.

I really like this cabin.  It is so typical of the early settlers rough buildings. Notice the little eaves trough over the door. The cabins were small making them easier to heat in the winter.  Heat was always provided by wood, and it was a lot of hard work to cut the trees down and into short lengths and then split the wood into manageable pieces. Even today, using a chain saw, cutting enough firewood for the winter is a lot of work. 

Upper Canada Village

 Last week we visited Upper Canada Village which is suppose to show an Ontario village around 1860.  This is the hardware section of a general store.  The barrels probably had nails and spikes and other bits needed for building.

This is a view of the outside of the store.  It's quite plain as most of them would have been.

 Inside are an assortment of useful kitchen and dining items as well as a wonderful rocking horse that would be hard to resist buying. On the other side of the store, bags of flour, sugar, candy and other necessities were on display, but too many tourists were blocking the view to get a good photo.

The grocery store would often be the post office as well.

These posters are actually printed at the print shop at the village using old wooden and metal type.  The print shop also produces posters to advertise current events going on at the village.  When we stopped in, the woman printer was hard at work creating a new poster for a special fall festival.  She explained some of the challenges of picking an appropriate font as some of the fonts might not have enough of one letter to write the needed words, or some fonts just make a particular word look odd. All the tiny print on the Lion Of The North poster was set by hand at the print shop. Great looking horse!

Southern Ontario became home to many United Empire Loyalists (people loyal to the British monarch) as they fled the US around the time of the American Revolution.  This house definitely has a New England feel to it.

 The side garden had lots of zinnias which were probably popular back then.

In the backyard, we saw a couple of nice pear trees.  Some varieties of pears are hardy enough for our winters, but apples trees are by far the more popular fruit tree.

Behind the house is a large mixed vegetable and flower garden.  The flowers here would be used for bouquets or as dried flowers.
More pictures next time.  I was disappointed to realize I didn't take photos of the many "villagers" dressed in period costume. Some other time I must focus on the people.

Vikings

 Here are a few photos from the Viking exhibit at the Museum of History.  This is a stone which depicts the life story starting with people in a Viking ship that has a large sail aloft. Further up is a battle scene, a funeral scene and finally crows over the dead person.

 Perhaps the Vikings would have looked like this fellow.  The Vikings, although renown for their raids, were primarily farmers.  Around 800 AD, they deforested Iceland using up the wood for houses, barns, ship and fuel.

They used coloured beads a lot in their jewelry, and the metal work is quite detailed.

 They liked to keep their treasures locked up, and this is a great collection of keys.

I was struck by how much this textile looks like South American cloth.  What a strange collection of animals! The black one at the top looks like a llama, but the Vikings had cows, sheep, deer and pigs.

The replica ship I saw in short video had a big horizontal sail like the one above which is made up of small panels.  The ship moved very quickly through the water, but I was surprised how close to the water the gunwales were in spite of the high curved front of the boat.

 A very odd relief with what look like, at first glance, octopi. I'm not sure what they are supposed to be.  The other stone has runic writing on it.

The original snakes-and-ladders game?
The exhibit didn't include anything about the Vikings landing in Newfoundland in 1000AD, but I think they were focusing on the 800s.

Museum of History

 It was a gloomy day so we headed up to Ottawa to visit the Museum of History to see an exhibition about Vikings. I like the curvy architecture of the building.

 The main entrance.

Click to see the full width. The view across the Ottawa River looking at the Parliament buildings on the right.

I like the big shadows painted on the walls.
Next time, some photos of the exhibits.