The day before it was a juvenile raccoon, relatively small, rotund and adorable on our porch picking up peanuts and nibbling them. Actually it was night-time, dark though the porch light cast a good amount of light. The little fellow wasn't anxious and didn't seem perturbed at my presence at the opposite side of the glass front door and lingered awhile as I stood by, watching. By the time I had returned with my camera, he had departed, however.

Last night there was a much larger, mature raccoon repeating the visit, scarfing up the remaining peanuts from those that had been placed out in the late afternoon that day to service the cardinals and chickadees and squirrels. And he -- or she as the case may be -- was rather less trusting than the juvenile. My hovering stealthily behind the front door must have alerted him to my presence, detecting some motion though I thought I was perfectly still. And he swiftly made off, under the cast-iron bench on the porch. When I took a photo, only his tell-tale ringed tail was evident.

We've had a spate lately of colder, sunny days with notable wind, and today was another of them. We anticipated that the trails would have reverted to ice, and they had. Thinking it better to once again begin having Jackie and Jillie wear their boots, on they went and we set off. The boots to protect their tender tiny pads from the ice-pebbles strewn across the now-icy-again forest trails. The discomfort they felt yesterday was adequate evidence they needed the boots.

The return to colder temperatures has temporarily halted the melting of the snowpack, and consequently the creek though still running vigorously, is nowhere near as swollen with snowmelt and nor turbulent with stirred-up clay and detritus from its bottom.

Discounting the care we had to take on the descents of some of the hills, even though we were wearing our crampons, it was a pleasant enough tramp through the woods. They always are. As long as we minimize the opportunity for falls. No going to emergency departments at hospitals these days with the crowded conditions and panic over the novel coronavirus.

When we regained the street after hiking our way up the last hill, we met up with an old hiking friend who handed us a note that he was copying to all the usual ravine habitues. Explaining that he and his wife had decided to collect donations from willing donors to gift a quite special person as a sign of our collective appreciation of his community spirit.

It's actually more than that; the man is not a dog owner, but he has taken it upon himself to put out collection areas at all entrances to the ravine within the larger neighbourhood -- and its forest confines, to collect dog leavings. He makes it his business to buy the bags, place them in the containers he has also acquired, and at garbage collection day, put the bags out for pick-up, replacing new bags in the containers for another week's collection.