What's out there as night falls? Not down here, where owls hoot and mice scurry, but up there where first one faint light and then another appears. People have been wondering in a serious way about the sun and the moon and the stars for thousands of years. Today Rob guided an exploration of the [...]
Late autumn on a cold, rainy day: what is there to see in the woods? We dragged a small sheet over the ground but collected no ticks at all. Apart from a solitary Raven circling high overhead when we walked away from the cars, there were no birds. Two types of mushrooms were seen several [...]
By Julia Cipriani Mushrooms collected in the forest, photographed by the MacSkimming Centre team On Saturday, October 1, well over 110 people met at MacSkimming Outdoor Education Centre to participate in the MacSkimming open trails event. There were members of the general public, of OFNC, and of les Mycologues amateurs de l’Outaouais (MAO). The [...]
Quartz, olivine, garnet, pyroxene, hornblende, the micas and the feldspars – what unites them? There is an underlying order in their composition. They are all share chemically identical molecular silicate skeletons. It is said that if you get to know the minerals just named and recognize them when they appear in more complex rocks, you [...]
OFNC monthly meeting, 13 September 2016 By Marissa Carroll Dr. Micheline Manseau, an associate professor at the Natural Resources Institute of the University of Manitoba and an ecosystem scientist for Parks Canada, was the featured speaker at the OFNC meeting this September. She lectured on the iconic High Arctic Peary Caribou. Understanding the species’ origins [...]
One hundred years ago, just after the last Passenger Pigeon and Carolina Parakeet died, rendering both species extinct, the International Migratory Birds Treaty was signed, protecting the remaining birds of both Canada and the United States where single states and provinces, and even countries had not been able to do it. Today, Rob explained how [...]
