Long Point - signs of fall

After Thanksgiving, Long Point really empties out. We begin to get a taste of the isolation that winter brings down here. At night the coyotes howl as they move closer to the cottages when there are fewer people around. Turkey vultures and Canada Geese are regulars on the beach chased away when someone walks a dog. There was even a Bald Eagle surveying the lake from the beach one morning.
We do different things in the fall too. The sun sets into the lake, starting early October and, if its a nice evening, George and I drag a couple of chairs out onto the beach, to watch. Sometimes there is a glass of wine and a beer involved. Sometimes there is a blanket too as it gets quite cold as soon as the sun dips but some of the best cloud colours come after the sun has gone down.

The beach grass looks red in the setting sun

When we have visitors we tend to take them to the Bird Studies Canada banding station. I enjoy it whenever we go and am quite amazed by the confidence of the volunteers, often University students studying ornithology and birders from other countries, when they handle the birds.

I think this was a yellow throated warbler and you can see how small it was,
being held in the bander's fingers.

We, like everyone else with a garden, have a ton of fall gardening chores but its been a wonderful, warm, late fall so there's no hardship in it. The tomatoes, peppers, chard and beans all produced until the second week in October and then got ripped out and composted. I bought the Thai peppers and Jalapeno peppers inside in pots to give them some more growing time. The one big vegetable garden failure was the brussel sprouts. They grew big leaves but not a single sprout and then something started eating the leaves in October. I wont try them again.
Its lovely to see the trees that we have planted, thrive, and prepare for winter. The sumac that we planted this spring all did well and went a beautiful red colour. The High Bush Cranberry has berries ready for the cedar waxwings to eat next spring. The two oak trees, one a black oak and one a red oak, turn different colours.

Every time we take a drive off "The Point" we are struck by the huge number of pumpkins that are grown in Norfolk County. We must supply the whole of North America for Halloween.

They are rolled into rows and then a tractor pulls a wagon between the rows, workers throw
the pumpkins up to others on the wagon, who pack them into the huge boxes we see
in the supermarkets.