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Welcome to the Macoun Field Club!

The Macoun Club is now into its winter season; meetings and field trips will run until mid-June. Families can enquire about having their children join at any time. Either phone Rob Lee at (613) 623-8123 (note that “Macoun” rhymes with “crown,” not “croon”), or e-mail him at Macoun[at] ofnc.ca. The Macoun Club is sponsored and supported by the Ottawa Field-Naturalists’ Club (OFNC); there are no fees.

Indoor meetings take place at the Fletcher Wildlife Garden building beside the Experimental Farm’s arboretum (Building no. 138). Meetings start at 10 a.m. and wrap up between 11:30 a.m. and noon. Field trips take place on alternate Saturdays and typically run about 5 hours (sometimes with the option to attend only the part before or after noon). We go to wild places in Ottawa’s western Greenbelt (Stony Swamp) and Lanark County (the Pakenham Hills).

Schedule of Activities

Feb. 15: No meeting: Family Day long weekend

Feb. 22, morning: Keeping birds from getting killed hitting windows, with Anouk Hoedeman

Feb 22, evening: optional attendance at OFNC Awards Night (Macoun Club speech, members’ projects, Despotic Nature Quiz)

Feb. 29: Field trip (call Diane at 226-3306 to register, anytime Thursday)

What are meetings and field trips like?
Here’s what we’ve just done . . .

February 8, 2020: Winter for a weekend

With it turning cold (minus 23º C in the night) and the woods snowbound at last, we headed for the Pakenham Hills. Tracks were few: White-tailed Deer, Fisher, and one Deer Mouse. A narrow furrow where some small animal had ploughed through the deep powder was a challenge for most of us, but a wind-swept hummock provided the proof of one suggestion: a Ruffed Grouse. Animals were few, too: a few Chickadees and two Ravens.

As it was rather cold for stopping to examine and discuss the vegetation, we pressed on for a well-remembered lunch place. “Rock-wall Pond” offers unobstructed sunshine and shelter from north and west winds, and at -15º we were able to work and eat barehanded without giving it a thought.

Just as we were leaving, Gerry Lee, who owns all this land, drove up on his snowmobile and stopped for a talk. He thought it remarkable that he had met a Black Bear on December 21^st, and had a small bat emerge into his cabin on Christmas Eve.

February 1, 2020: Botany fun, with Jen Line

In our darkened meeting room, botanist Jen Line (who once was a Macoun Club member herself) had the group recalling with delight the fruits and vegetables they enjoy at the dinner table, with the bonus of now knowing what sorts of plants they are.

For each of several plant families, such as the Rosaceae, she’d ask us if we could think of foods that represent that group, and then showcase them on our projection screen. In this case, rose-hips came to mind among our wild foragers, but also apples and pears, raspberries, cherries  . . . and almonds, she had to advise us.

Almonds? How can “nuts” like almonds and fruits like apples be alike? Jen asked. “Have you ever had a peach-pit split open, and discovered inside a seed that looks like an almond?” Almond trees and apple trees have the same flower structure, and for each family Jen illustrated their essential features. Flowers ultimately produce seeds, and, the almond is a seed inside a pit, within the fruit of the almond tree. (Such seeds, even apple seeds, normally contain cyanide, but the tree variety known as the “sweet almond” has been bred to be safe. There is a “bitter almond” that still is toxic.)

She showed us mouth-watering pictures of familiar grocery-store produce, and then challenged us to think of wild representatives of the same plant family. In Rosaceae, we have Wild Strawberries around here. In this way, we were reminded of the plant families that contain onions (and Wild  Leeks), artichokes (and thistles), Brussels sprouts (and Toothwort), and cereal grasses and Sugar Cane (with many wild grasses hereabouts).

January 25, 2020: Mark it “Unexplored”

When the Macoun Study Area was established 50 years ago, one corner was left out. What is in there?Today we poked about for several hours, and made some interesting finds.

Garrett found Leopard Frogs, alive and kicking, in a grass-choked stream. Ruben found several Rock Elm trees, a rare endemic species. We found a Porcupine – pretty common. And we found that all of the water that flows out of the Study Area – from the big beaver pond at the Sarsaparilla Trail more than a kilometre away right on down through Ponds II, III, IV, V, VI and VII – disappears into the ground, vanishes under a Bells Corners subdivision.

Gradually, the shape of the land and its patchy coverings of White Pine, Red Pine, Jack Pine and White Spruce plantations began to take form in receptive minds, and make sense.

Just in time we came back onto familiar ground, and knew just where to go when ice pellets and freezing rain began to pelt our faces. We spent our last hour sheltered in the northern White Cedar woods, finding the places where White-tailed Deer had bedded down in the snow, where Red Squirrels had been feeding on conifer-cone seeds, and where a lone Ruffed Grouse had walked. We also measured the diameter of a big Balsam Fir; at 18.5 inches, it turned out to be the biggest we have ever found in the Study Area.

January 18, 2020: Disturbance and restoration in the Greenbelt

Sometimes speakers introduce themselves by telling us how they got into their field of study and action; today, Alex Stone told us that his career path began 20 years ago with the Macoun Club! University studies subsequently took him to the Northwest Territories, where he studied Olive-sided Flycatchers. He works now for the National Capital Commission, which owns and manages Ottawa’s Greenbelt lands, including the Macoun Club’s nature-study area in core natural area “Stony Swamp.”

Alex is involved in the NCC’s monitoring programs, and told us about surveying for frogs, turtles, and bats across the Greenbelt. We were all on common ground here, because the Macoun Club surveys for reptiles and amphibians, too.

Alex outlined some of the things that disturb the natural environment, such as the invasive species Glossy Buckthorn and  Emerald Ash Borer. Again, he had a receptive audience because the Macoun Club has first-hand experience with these things, too. Then he covered the ways in which the NCC tries to restore natural ecosystems – eradicating buckthorn and re-establishing wetlands — much of which is physically beyond the capacity of Macoun Club members.

January 11, 2020: Adventure on a glacier

Rob settled everyone down and began to read from John Muir’s story Stickeen,from his Alaskan journey of 1880.  Muir had set out from camp one morning to explore a new glacier.  He had a dog on his hands that he didn’t want with him, but it wouldn’t be shaken off. “So at last I told him to come on if he must . . . then we struggled on together, and thus began the most memorable of all my days.”

In these days when people have to be urged to get out and walk, it is staggering to realize what Muir undertook that day.  He worked his way three miles over fallen trees and boulders beside the ice to reach a point where he could safely walk out onto the glacier, “a seemingly boundless prairie of ice” seven miles across; he crossed it.  A few miles farther up along the other side he encountered an entrancing side valley and explored it for “three or four miles.”  And then, 17 miles out, he noted the late hour and threatening weather and started back.

At this point, Rob drew everyone’s attention to the circle with a 30-mile radius around Ottawa that is marked on the room’s wall map, and explained that it had been agreed upon in John Muir’s day (and John Macoun’s) to be a reasonable distance for a man to travel on foot, out and back, when botanizing or searching for birds.

The 34 miles of Muir’s round trip doesn’t take account of the innumerable crevasses that had to be jumped, or else explored for a way around – often more sideways travel than forward.  The little dog Stickeen bounced over every obstacle without seeming to notice danger at all, until confronted with an ice bridge 70 feet long, “the most dangerous and inaccessible that ever lay in my way,” said Muir.

Muir had an original explanation for how ice bridges form in the first place, and Rob related the extreme weathering Muir described to every child’s experience of icicles that “melt” away in cold weather, by sublimation.  The bridge had become a sliver.  It had to be chopped into shape before man or dog could cross it, with perhaps a thousand feet of booming chasm below them.

Looking back years later, Muir said: “Nothing in after years has dimmed that Alaska storm day.  As I write it, all comes rushing and roaring to mind as if I were in the heart of it. Again I see . . . the vast glacier outspread . . . and in the heart of it the tremendous crevasse . . . low clouds trailing over it, the snow falling  into it; and on its brink I see little Stickeen, and I hear his cries for help and his shouts of joy.”

December 14, 2019: Of many fish and fishes

Ichthyologist Noel Alfonso of the Canadian Museum of Nature found a very interested audience in the Macoun Club today. We knew we had one “extreme angler,” but kids who’d never come to notice as knowing or wondering about fish had question after question for him. He gave us an overview of the fishes of both the Ottawa region and the Arctic, where he’s done research from sea-going vessels, and along the way highlighted interesting features of many individual species.

He taught us to focus our attention on the positioning of a fish’s fins and mouth, and see that a predator like the pike has power built into its tail, while other fish may have an upturned mouth for picking insects or zooplankton off the surface above them. Northern Cod, for instance, glean their food off the bottom of the sea ice – a rich ecosystem that supports plankton, small fishes, bigger fishes, seals and seabirds, and Polar Bears.

Noel often commented on the beauty of the fishes, and we realized he was seeing them in his mind’s eye, alive and in living colour. He had brought in several jars of preserved fish, which had lost all colour and poise. But that is necessary for permanent record and proof of a species’ existence at a given time and place, and often for identification as well.

Finally, one boy asked, “Why do we say ‘fish’ for more than one sometimes, and sometimes ‘fishes’?” Noel’s answer made it simple and clear: if it’s two of the same species, they’re “fish;” if they’re two of different species, “fishes.”

December 7, 2019: Just enough snow for it to be winter

We took a walk down a road that is not maintained in winter today, the California Road in Lanark County, with forest all the way. Pickup trucks have been keeping it open, so the walking was easy, and when we wanted to we got off it and made a lunch fire by a big beaver meadow. All along the way we identified animal tracks: voles and mice and shrews; Ermine and Fisher; Red Squirrels, Red Fox, and Coyote. There had been a Gray Squirrel, too (the black version), but something had caught and eaten it, leaving only the furry tail.

Most of the ice was thick enough to walk on (Rob checked with an axe) but there were open places and we were cautious. In a beaver canal, Garrett scooped up a tiny Sunfish in his net. Nearby a little stream flowed out of the hillside and ran down to the pond, the emerging groundwater still too warm to freeze.

Coyote tracks ran back and forth all over another beaverpond, and in one place circled about so thickly that we could imagine a pack of them playing chase with one another round and round in the moonlight last night.

We saw not one bird – just the marks in the snow where two Ravens had checked out the remains of the squirrel to see if any scraps had been overlooked.

November 30, 2019: Canada’s Ice-Age megafauna

During the last ice age there was pretty much nothing but massive ice and rock here in Ottawa. But the continental glaciers didn’t cover the whole continent, and a part of it north of the ice sheets (Yukon and Alaska) lay bare the whole time, connected with Eurasia. Arctic and steppe vegetation flourished in this region, known as Beringia, and animals now extinct, such as Woolly Mammoths, the Yukon Horse, and Giant Beavers prospered.

Last summer, Margaret Currie of the Canadian Museum of Nature took part in a collecting expedition to the Old Crow River area. The team she joined flew into a remote site by helicopter and set up their tents on the sandy banks of a meandering river.

The mineralized bones of the extinct animals have been washed down the river and deposited in the very sands they were camped on. They fished out the bigger bones by hand, and caught small fragments by sieving the sand. She brought a selection of specimens in for us to examine.

For comparison, Margaret held up the jaw of a present-day Canadian Beaver side-by-side with the jaw of an extinct Giant Beaver. Close examination revealed that they differ not only in size, but in the relative proportions and the ridges and hollows of the parts.

Lots of us have trouble telling artists’ drawings of Woolly Mammoths apart from American Mastodons, but their teeth were totally different: you could see how a paleontologist would know their fossils at a glance. (Briefly, before these animals died out, they came into Ontario after the ice sheet melted back enough.)

 

November 23, 2019: winter retreats a little

After a few warm days, there wasn’t enough snow left for animal tracks anywhere, but all the ponds were more or less frozen. The ice was cloudy, because it had formed as snow fell into the water, but was nonetheless thick enough (4 inches) to support our weight without cracking.

Today we sought out some of the more notable trees of our Nature Study Area. A tape measure showed us that, at 34 inches in diameter, the largest Sugar Maple in the whole square mile has grown three inches thicker in the past 25 years. Nearby, we were dismayed to find that a well-known American Beech (31 inches in diameter) has become heavily infested with the generally fatal Beech Bark Scale Disease. The insects were first discovered in 2016, a mile away, at the other end of our Study Area.

It took much searching to find the Study Area’s only Eastern Red Cedar. The whole surrounding area has grown up in thickets and young trees that tower over the 23-foot-tall conifer. Having been overtopped by a vigorous Sugar Maple, it seems to have spread out sideways rather than growing taller.

Looking up led to the discovery of a seldom-seen atmospheric phenomenon – an “upside-down rainbow.” Its arc opened away from the mid-afternoon sun. Wikiepedia explains it as a form of halo that displays colours purer than a rainbow, owing to refraction through well oriented plate-like ice crystals rather than raindrops. Some of us counted seven colours.

 

November 16, 2019: Through the Southern Ocean to Antarctica

How doyou get to Antarctica? Roy John outlined the possibilities before showing his most recent route by ship. He began with the remarkable birds he’d seen in New Zealand, where he had embarked. The ship subsequently touched at McQuarrie and other isolated islands, and as they proceeded, the diversity of petrel, albatross, and penguin species perceptibly diminished. Roy’s ship rolled so much in heavy seas that he and his fellow passengers suffered bruises and broken bones. Eventually they began to see tremendous icebergs; Roy explained that Antarctic icebergs differ from those calved in Greenland in being flat-topped. Greenland ice gets rolled and rounded as currents push them through shallow water.

Just as interesting as the birds of the southern ocean were Roy’s accounts of the first Antarctic explorers, notably Robert Scott, Roald Amundsen, and his childhood hero, Ernest Shackleton. Roy had been to the places these men had established their bases for exploration, and, in the case of Shackleton, the tiny beach on Elephant Island where they took shelter after their sailing vessel had been crushed in pack ice. The buildings these famous men had put up have been preserved by the perpetual cold, together with their furnishings, cans of food, and even a partly dissected penguin specimen, which has been lying on a wooden table for more than a century.

 

Nov. 9, 2019: Ground-proofing our new map

Last week Macoun Club members traced the outlines of different habitats in our Study Area for a map. Today we went out there and made note of what was on the ground, taking a route marked in pink. On this version of the new map, blue represents open water, of course: beaver ponds III, V, and VI (pond IV is obscure). Yellow shows marsh vegetation. Brown is for deciduous forest, and dark green for spruce. Light green shows cedar woods.

Along the way we saw a flock of Common Goldfinches and Pine Siskins, a few Blue Jays, and two Ravens chasing one another. A Red Fox had left footprints in the light snow cover of a small field, and Red Squirrels had run along fallen logs in many places. We rolled a number of logs and found a most surprising thing under a chunk of wood in the middle of a muddy bicycle trail: a hibernating frog. Some thought it was dead, but taken in hand, it slowly, slowly opened its eyes, and shortly began to crawl away. We gave it a new log to hide under.

Nov. 2, 2019: Map-making and more

How do you make a map? Rob Lee was part of the group that made the original vegetation map of the Macoun Study Area back in 1972. That being before satellite images were easily available, they started with an aerial photograph taken from an airplane. Laying a sheet of clear plastic over the picture, Rob and the other Macoun members chose the boundaries and marked them with ink, and then traced the outlines of beaver ponds, fields, and forests of different types.

So much as changed out there in the woods that today we started all over again. But we started instead with a Google Maps image and projected it on a whiteboard on the wall. Using washable markers, we traced the outlines of ponds and the course of footpaths that didn’t even exist back in 1972.

The next step is to transfer the outlines to paper (via digital photography) and have in hand a blank map that we can begin to fill in on our next field trip.

There was enough time left over to run the Bill Mason film “Rise and Fall of the Great Lakes,” with Rob pausing it every time he thought there was something worth commenting on – eskers and drumlins, and glacial striations in bedrock, and water pollution of a kind (phosphates) that got cleaned up in the 1970s.

 

Oct. 26, 2019: Field trip in the autumn sunshine

Though the peak of colour had passed, the forests of the Pakenham Hills still glowed as we walked into them — and not only the oaks and poplars, but the low shrubs of bogs and rocky shorelines. Leatherleaf foliage takes on a reddish hue in autumn, and we ate lunch on the shores of a floating bog. Determined searching of the waters netted an Eastern Newt, its spotted belly a warm yellow

We had found a dead Red Squirrel on the road where we parked, and Rob carried it in for examination. After lunch he opened it up with his knife, showing all who were interested the heart and lungs, liver, and the stomach and spleen. The sharp edges and ends of broken bones in the pelvic area showed that it had been run over by a car; the small amount of coagulated blood that it had died very quickly. He left it for Raccoon or Raven.

 

 

October 19, 2019: Edible plants

Everybody wonders, from time to time, whether this berry or that mushroom seen in the outdoors is edible. Today Macoun member Priya gave a personal account of her experiences with edible plants. She covered equipment for foraging, the necessity of correctly identifying plants (to avoid eating poisonous ones by mistake), and the different parts of various plants that may be eaten. She explained food preparation, too: drying, powdering, boiling . . . and recipes. And then she offered a plateful of crackers, made from the dried, powdered and baked inner bark of Eastern White Pine.

“Isn’t that a starvation food?” someone asked. “Well, some people think so, but I like it,” replied Priya. And she has been known to strip the outer bark off a fresh twig and nibble it on the spot.

 

 

Oct. 5, 2019: Developing map-reading skills

We had a two-part session today, with two age-groups taking turns working on map-reading skills with leader Jen Line indoors, while the other made a casual tour of the Fletcher Wildlife garden. Jen described the basic features of maps and related them to the real world, and then had members find their own homes on fold-out maps.

Meanwhile, the other group worked its way around the FWG trails, pausing often. We looked under logs (finding introduced types of millipedes (Julidae), earthworms (Lumbricus terrestris), and land snails (an unbanned form of Cepea nemoralis, with a purplish-brown flared lip). We spotted the last bloom in a patch of Purple-flowering Raspberry, tasted the fuzzy berries of Staghorn Sumac, and worked out by examination how long Eastern White Pine keeps its “evergreen” needles.

In a small, artificial pool or pond that was almost covered with Duckweed, members of the older group spotted a large Green Frog. The younger members found a small Garter Snake, hatched just this year judging by its size. It was cold and docile, and slithered easily from hand to hand between us all.

 

 

September 28, 2019: How to, today, plant a tree 25 years ago

On an unpromising trip to the Study Area in the rain, we did surprisingly well. In addition to the Wood Frogs and Spring Peepers one might expect in such weather, Macouners caught a Garter Snake, heard Blue-headed Vireos singing, and saw a Coyote!

The Butternut is an endangered species because of an invasive fungal blight. One of the surviving individuals in our Study Area produced an exceptionally heavy crop of nuts this year, which, having matured, had just fallen. Some clusters held three or four nuts each; thousands carpeted the ground. (Within a week, the resident Red Squirrel had cleaned them all up, caching them for its winter food supply.)

In these times when reversing deforestation has a global urgency, we twice took the time to rescue small trees that had been dragged down to the ground when bigger ones fell on them. They had not been down long enough to be permanently flattened, and only needed help standing upright again. If the best time to plant a tree is 50 years ago, then today we managed something close to this, for these Sugar Maple saplings are each about 25 years old. They have already proven their genetic strength, having survived insects, deer browsing, and drought.

Sept. 14, 2019: Apples and bees go together

Almost a year ago to the day, we launched a survey of wild apple trees in our Nature Study Area. Returning to the same area, we now found fruit on trees that had been barren, and bare trees from which we had collected apples last year. Sadly, the only wild apple tree with sweet fruit has died; it will never produce again. But a tree that was bare last year has turned out to bear apples bigger than any we found last year (up to 7 cm).

We couldn’t see much of the Big Pond because the whole shoreline is hemmed in by tall hybrid cattails (the observation dock, which we would normally use, had been vandalized, and barricaded by the authorities).

Those of us who have been around for years realized that the entire Sarsaparilla Trail area has become hemmed in by another invasive plant, Glossy Buckthorn. Up until ten years ago – even five – we could roam around pretty much anywhere. But dense stands of this shrub have made almost everything off the trails impassable.

Our most unexpected find was a wild Honeybee colony, with bees streaming in and out of a woodpecker hole. They were so intent on gathering and storing nectar that they ignored us, no matter how close we stood.

 

Sept. 7, 2019: Start of a new Macoun Club year

Observations ran overtime, and leaders talked too long about the things they’re interested (the dire effects of DDT on birds 50 years ago, the way birds have planted a whole backyard full of wildflowers, and how to tell a falcon from a hawk in flight). But these first-hand accounts served to give the many new members a good idea of what to expect from those around them.

There was talk of what we might do in our Study Area’s 50^thyear, coming up.

And Rob directed attention to the giant topographic wall map of the Ottawa region, with its hills to the north and flatlands to the south, ancient fault lines (the southern boundary of Gatineau Park), and evidences of the last Ice Age (the cultivated sand plains north of the Park, in an otherwise rocky territory).

We also found where our Nature Study Area is (just behind the head of the boy in blue).