Tzip a deedle tzap

Well, I wish I had more exciting things to write about...not that I'm not excited about what I'm doing, but it's not very exciting to the general public lol. I've been occupied doing background research on grassland birds in Ontario, and how they're affected by habitat and management regimes...I've also been making a guide for myself of all the songs of the birds I may encounter on my point counts. I'm going to have a couple field guide books with me, yes, but their transcription of what the song sounds like and what I actually hear don't often match up, so I've been listening to all the songs and making my own notes and transcriptions....stuff like "tzip a deedle tzap" and "like someone went nuts with that red bird squeaker" (Mama and Emily might know what I mean ), which only make sense to me, but that's ok, because I'm the one trying to make the ID.
Other than that, I really haven't been doing much. Trying to jog every second day along the trail, which I'm not very good at :( but I get to see a lot of birds as I huff and puff along. I still can't get over the cardinals - they're so blatantly red! There's nothing like that on the east coast, man. I saw a male and female pair just browsing through the grass like common robins (of which there are a million). They looked too classy to be down in the dirt like that, I wanted to tell them to get up in some berry bush or something.
What else...oh I went to my first No Frills store, which I'm in love with...like Superstore but cheapy cheap :) and they still have lactose-free and gluten-free stuff!! Heaven. But I'm such a n00b about stuff like the carts...did you know the carts are locked up here? You have to put a quarter into a slot, which unlocks it, and when you lock it up again you get your quarter back. Say whaaaat. I had been lucky so far in that every time I went to get a cart, someone was about to return one and they just gave it to me, so I had no idea about this quarter business. I was part of the mad quarter trading without knowing it yesterday: a nice old man came up to me as I was waiting for my cab and asked me if I had a quarter for a dime and three nickels, and I did...then he turned around and gave it to the lady next to me in exchange for her cart. Which I thought was odd. A quarter hardly seems worth it for a cart, he could have had my cart for free. And then the lady traded that quarter to someone else for smaller change. I was confused enough now to ask the lady what on earth was up with the quarter black market, and she explained about the cart locks. Oh. And as I was unloading my cart into the cab, a man came up and passed me a quarter, so he got my cart. I had a quarter back at the end of all that trading; I felt like I had accomplished something haha.
Also yesterday I decided to do a bit of a cleanse, in the form of eating little but drinking lots of this cleanse drink, and not having any caffeine. The cleanse drink was a weird combo of lemon juice, water, honey, and cayenne pepper. Yes, you read that right, cayenne pepper. I'd stumbled across this recipe multiple times on the internet from many different sites, so I decided to give it a go. Normally they use maple syrup but *gag* maple syrup is gross so I went for honey. I also didn't go all in - the sites say to drink that and only that for 10 days - not on your sweet lovin' life was I going to do that. One day was quite enough, thank you. Although it didn't taste as bad as I thought, it was actually kind of good, spicy lemonade strangeness. But I could never go even one day without eating anything but that, I had some fruit and veggies as snacks. And advice to anyone who knows they're addicted to caffeine: don't EVER just quit cold turkey. I've never felt so awful ever haha by the time 1:00 pm rolled around I was back in bed with a gigantic headache and I couldn't concentrate on anything. But I didn't give in! I went one whole day without even caffeinated tea. And that was more than enough, mmm coffee this morning.
I'll end off with a picture of my beloved cardinals, although I didn't take it...and one of my new favourite-sounding bird, the eastern meadowlark. Their song is fantastically beautiful, here's a link where you can listen.
http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/eastern_meadowlark/id

Northern Cardinal

Eastern Meadowlark

bye for now <3