MOTW - Jul 1 - Jul 7 - Uncle Chester

[Jenste]

This weeks nominated MOTW is Uncle Chester!!!!

Looking forward to learning about you!

Let's not forget to send in the nominations!!!

[NatureLady]

Congrats Uncle Chester! Look forward to this week of getting to know you.

[BlueisallIneed]

Congrats!!!! Can't wait to hear all about ya!!!

[Jenste]

Monday, tell us all about you! We know you obviously like amphibians, but we want to know about the rest of your life. Details about you, your life, hobbies, families, past times, favorite colors, poems you have written etc etc....just use this post to brag/boast/bore us how you please.

[UncleChester]

As the flag to the left shows, I'm from Canada-I've lived in Montreal,Calgary, Prince George, Victoria, Toronto, St. Catharines, and afterliving in all these (mostly) cities I've spent the past 4 years renting a farmhouse in the country ... as in the nearest neighbours are over the next hill and if you look just right through the trees and use your imagination you can maybe see their mailbox. I share the house with my girlfriend, our 5 cats, 4 frogs, 3 goldfish, an attic full of bats, and this years chipmunk and squirrel invasion. The furry rodent types frequent a back covered porch area where the bird-feed is stored, much to the felines disappointment they don't make it into the house (the cats are all confined to the indoors).

Part of our country entertainment involves waging a losing battle against the impatient groundhogs who want to eat our vegetable garden- if they would just let that tender zucchini plant grow instead of eating its leaves off they could be eating zucchini the size of my leg by now. Our most interesting garden casualty was in our first year at this farm. We put in our tomato plants in the morning and later that night we found one of them had been demolished. Not eaten, but demolished, like a mini-bulldozer ran it over to make way for a bypass. Confused at what hateful monster would do such a thing, we looked around for more casualties and found a now ornery snapping turtle that had wandered in from the nearby stream to lay eggs in our garden. Apparently a young tomato plant is no match for a snapper on a mission. When she was finished laying, I managed to steer her out of the garden without further damage. Sadly, but not unusually for our climate, none of the eggs hatched.

We have no TV service, but frequently watch TV shows and movies on DVD on a computer. I don't miss commercials, or having to wait for season ending cliffhangers to be resolved as most of the stuff we watch is older. We do keep up to date on Dr Who as much as possible though, it is a childhood favourite of mine and what got me started on watching BBC shows on PBS. I fondly remember hiding under forts made of blankets and couch cushions while the quick witted Tom Baker's Doctor scraped past yet another horrifying monster (aka a man in a cheesy rubber suit). Black Adder and Red Dwarf started a lifelong love of BBC comedy at an early age. The 4th season of Black Adder in particular I think still stands as one of the funniest and saddest series I've ever watched. The Pinky and the Brain Christmas special where the Brain actually started crying when he realized just how great a friend Pinky was might be a close second.

The frog (and general nature) loving hobby has been closely paired with my pre-existing photography hobby. I've always had a camera of some sort, but I ventured into the realm of dslr ownership about 6 years ago with the hopes of photographing birds, specifically the red-tailed hawks I'd always see flying around when I lived on the 20th floor of an apartment facing out over the Don Valley in Toronto. Armed with the slowest focusing slr ever made and a cheap kit telephoto zoom lens I spent a few years of helplessly chasing birds around in the wild (which really opened my eyes to the incredible diversity of wildlife even in the heart of a major urban area) and I realised that to get the kinds of photos I wanted I needed a combination of incredible patience/flexibility of waiting for hours on end in blinds and the kinds of telephoto lenses I can't actually afford. With this insight I invested in a macro lens and turned my camera downwards, aiming at things that I can easily outrun. This includes flowers, frogs, insects that don't fly fast or straight, objects I have lying around, and occasionally myself. I have a flickr page you can checkout Flickr:Jelly Brain's Photostream. Don't be deceived by the front page and all the calling toad photos (I had a couple of very fun and successful outings this spring) I swear it contains non-amphibian stuff as well.

I think I heard a gong, so I'll cut it off here

[Froggiefressh]

Uncle Chester, It was fun reading about you. I looked through your Flickr and I must say you are one hell of a photographer. I was really impressed by most if not all of your shots. It really hard to pick, but The "Brave Mealworm" has to be one of my favorites! Congratz on MotW!

[BlueisallIneed]

Flickr: Blueisallineed's Photostream I love taking photos too. Your work is AMAZING! great to know more about you!!

[Jenste]

Wednesday, show and tell. Wow us with your pictures/videos/sound clips.

[UncleChester]

Thanks everyone!

Wednesday, show and tell. Wow us with your pictures/videos/sound clips.

Ooh a curveball... if it's alright with you I'm going to go ahead and do tuesdays task today:

Tuesday, tell us about your amphibians. How you came to keep them, mistakes/learning curves, species kept, breedings, how you found Frog Forum etc....we heard enough about you on Monday, let us hear about them frogs!

[UncleChester]

How I came into frog ownership:

For the past few years I've been putting my education to good waste have been working at a small garden centre. It is on a 100 acre unused farm and is something of a mecca for wildlife. There are always frogs hopping around, and it was here that I discovered we have treefrogs living in Ontario. Crazy! Gray Treefrogs, Hyla versicolor, seemed to be everywhere. It was hard not to love a frog that sits there passively while you are literally inches away from it and yet will burst out with such explosive energy to attack a nearby moth or when calling for a mate. I got to know a few of the regulars by their general location as well as the patterns on their faces.

Usually one of the small greenhouses would stay heated for the winter (to store house plants and other annuals for propagation in the spring) and it always housed a small population of Grays and we could hear them call all winter. 3 years ago, we decided to shut it down for the winter and paint its interior. In preparation, we started kicking out the treefrogs as we found them early in the fall. Unfortunately, we kept finding them after it was too late in the year to kick them out- the snow had already hit the ground. So I built a habitat to winter the leftovers in my house. We found 6 stragglers in total. I had intended to release all 6 in the spring, but that was never meant to be and I kept two of them. Waldo, a male who appeared to be 1 year old when I took him in, won me over with his trilling during the winter months, and Fatty, a female who was at least 2 when I took her in. I had become intimately aquainted with Fatty earlier in the year when she ran into one of the cacti we had for sale (we try to keep the cacti someplace the treefrogs won't go, but accidents are bound to happen). The kind with fuzzy little needles. She had them all over her head like a little mo-hawk and also on her front feet. I spent an hour with little tweezers carefully pulling them out. I became pretty attached to her as as a result and having her all winter in my house was the last straw so I ended up keeping her.

Fall of 2010, we found a fairly newly morphed Gray Treefrog with a left hand that failed to develop properly. I wasn't planning on getting another Gray, but having never really seen a frog with a handicap like this make it to adulthood... I ended up caving and he was taken in and dubbed "Tyr".

Bamf, my American green treefrog, Hyla cinerea, came shortly after. I had built a vivarium to house some sort of north american native frog, but wasn't decided on the species yet. In December I saw a local pet store had a few Hyla cinerea in and my girlfriend offered to buy me one for Christmas. I had planned on going to a show in few months to find an inhabitant for my new tank, but a in 'snap' decision I agreed. They didn't know if he was captive bred or not so I assume he's wild caught, but hey, he was just so darn cute and in the right place at the right time (I hope).

There you have it- (probably) all my froggies are wild caught.

[Jenste]

oh I am so.sorry! I am getting ready for vacationand really mixed up my days! Way to keep me on my toes!

[Heatheranne]

Wow! Great photography! I enjoyed looking at your photos. Adorable frogs! I can see where you couldn't bare to leave them outside .

[Jenste]

Now, for the real Wednesday, show and tell. Wow us with your pictures/videos/sound clips.

[UncleChester]

Jen may still be busy with vacation prep (the lucky girl), so following in the footsteps of Hercules I'm going to move on to today's labour. Tomorrow I clean out the stables, but today:

Wednesday, show and tell. Wow us with your pictures/videos/sound clips.

Some of these will be repeats for those of you who looked through my flickr stream or my albums here.
My frogs (Click to enlarge):

Tyr:


Bamf, Fatty, and Waldo:


I've recently become interested in trying to make triptychs, 3 images that are taken in the same style as one another, like the 3 frogs above. Here's a dragonfly one (apologies that the forum software decided to recompress both triptychs and butcher the quality. The same goes for everything here really, I don't know why the software feels the need to mess with pictures in some cases making them simultaneously larger and poorer quality):


An ongoing project is to get photos of all our native amphibians calling (and eventually their other 'standard' and non-standard behaviors). I've made some decent inroads this spring (though the Gray Treefrog below is an old one of Waldo). The leopard frog below is giving a release call, but it's much funnier than the ones I have of their advertisement calls so here it is:



I'm not really big on entering photo contests, but I have entered 2 national (Canadian) competitions to date, so I'm going to brag about them. The Peeper on the left came in 2nd in the 2010 Outdoor Photography Canada Fall Macro contest and I won a little tripod. The Peeper on the right hit an honourable mention in the 2011 Canadian Geographic Wildlife Photography of the Year contest and I won a $1 coin in a fancy plastic case that makes it hard to fit in a vending machine or split with the Peeper as a modeling fee. I have good luck with peepers I guess!

[UncleChester]

Now, for the real Wednesday, show and tell. Wow us with your pictures/videos/sound clips.

You beat me by 2 minutes while I was still typing

Jen may still be busy with vacation prep (the lucky girl), so following in the footsteps of Hercules I'm going to move on to today's labour. Tomorrow I clean out the stables, but today:

Wednesday, show and tell. Wow us with your pictures/videos/sound clips.

[Jenste]

I got up to do the post - first day of vacation =P

Love your photos! You have a real talent with the camera!

[UncleChester]

I got up to do the post - first day of vacation =P

Love your photos! You have a real talent with the camera!

Thanks! Enjoy your vacation

As for me, it looks like I'm getting off easy for Thursday:

Thursday, answer any questions posted to you regarding your threads on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Other members can use this opportunity to pick your brain. (All questions must be appropriate and related to topics of discussion.)