Canadian Tulip Pre-Festival (2016) & birds (and one squirrel) at FWG!

The popular Canadian Tulip Festival will begin in two days (here is one of my posts from two years ago).  To avoid the crowd, I went to Dow's Lake this afternoon to see if there are any tulips flowering beforehand.

And indeed there were!

Love the colours!

Floral sea of red, white, and yellow.

Love the multi-coloured tulips.

Another sea of tulips.

I only stayed for a short while because I needed to walk through the Arboretum and Carleton University to take the O-Train home.

Tourists paddle-boating on Dow's Lake.

Along the lake, I noticed an Eastern Kingbird (Tyrannus tyrannus) hiding in a tree.

First kingbird of the year.

American red squirrel (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus) munching on a nut.

Another reason why I wanted to come here today was to search for a bird reported at FWG - the Baltimore Oriole (Icterus galbula), a species that I only photographed one time almost six years ago!

The bird even sang a short song to defend his territory.

After watching the oriole, I (fittingly) had an orange and reminded myself that it was time to go home to make dinner.

Before leaving, I searched for this American Goldfinch (Spinus tristis) singing pretty songs while hiding in a crabapple tree.

White-throated Sparrow (Zonotrichia albicollis) at the bottom of the feeder at FWG.  What a handsome sparrow.