Flowering Plum

Despite the rainy and cold days of late, Spring is very slowly progressing and more of the early blossoms and flowers are emerging.|
The Camellia in Doug's garden is covered in these gorgeous pink flowers ..

                                                                        

Shear perfection!

                                             

Their Pieris Japonica is flowering profusely as well:

 

In between rain-showers I managed to walk to the vineyard at the end of the road.
They've taken out several rows of vines because apparently the old Pinot Gris vines, planted in the early 90's, were dying from Phylloxera (a tiny root-eating insect) and will be replanted with Pinot Noir.

The rest of the vineyard still looks very dormant, I don't blame those vines .. too bloody cold!

Every now and then the sun appears for a few hours though, just enough to feel hopeful there's better days in the future!

Ever so often people I meet on my walks will ask me what I'm photographing.
Most of them are nice and just interested or curious although sometimes there's a suspicious or even a little aggressive one ..

Any-who .. yesterday, when a guy asked me, I said: 'anything fun or interesting or 'out of the ordinary', and pointed to this black blob high up in a pine tree:

                                      

'Just a branch, or a nest', he offered, but I took a few shots anyway .. and lo and behold ...

... when I got home and played around with them for a little on the computer it turned out to be an owl!
A Great Horned Owl to be precise! I know, it's not a great shot and he's looking away from me but isn't that cool?
I hope to get a better shot in the future now I know where he's hanging out!

I've got a new customer at my feeding station as well. It's a Townsend's Warbler:

                                             

He's another migrant from southern California or Mexico and is on it's way to it's breeding grounds in Washington and Canada as well ..

                       

The suet is very popular at the moment. With this cool weather everybody can use some extra fat!
These are two different Nuthatches, the red-breasted on the left and the white-breasted on the right:

           

And here's the Mister and the Missus Downy Woodpecker:

           

And of course the Bullshit ..eh, Bushtit family, sorry:

           

Apparently Bushtits have such a small body weight to size ratio (average weight is 5.5 g) that it results in high rate of body heat loss. During the winter, individuals need to eat about 80% of their weight per day to avoid losing weight!

And although we definitely don't need to eat 80% of our weight, this cold weather asks for lots of warm, sweet, comfort food .. like french toast for breakfast:

               

Covered in powdered sugar and syrup and bananas and walnuts .. !

                              

And how about these delicious apple dumplings for coffee, made with a can of croissant dough and, surprisingly,  a can of Mountain Dew!

                                                  

A la mode of course! And no, we didn't eat this in one day .. OK, two ..