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Welcome to the Macoun Field Club!

Sept. 9, 2023: Beginning of a new Macoun Club year

Many new families brought their children to our start-up meeting. We shared observations of nature accumulated over the summer. Rob presented a slide show reviewing the previous year’s activities.

Sept. 16, 2023: Salamanders in our Study Area

For some of us, this was a first introduction to our Nature Study Area in Ottawa’s western greenbelt. For others it was a return to well remembered places and scenes.

 

 

Sept. 23, 2023: Finding the finest fossils . . . and losing them

In Ottawa east, truckloads of rubble have been dumped in an out-of-the-way spot, with no official recognition of the treasures they contain. But they caught they eye of Macoun Club leader Mike Leveille, who has a special interest in the fossils of the Ordovician. Really good specimens would catch anyone’s eye, because they sometimes gleam gold on black — fool’s gold, or iron pyrites — on black shale.

But, Mike cautioned, beware of such fossils with a yellowish stain spreading out from them across the shale. It is a sign of destructive oxidation of the iron. He jokingly calls it “pyrite disease.” After 450 million years of preservation, breaking it open to find the fossil inside initiates the reduction of your specimen to dust in just a few short months.

 

 

 

 

Sept. 30, 2023: Fossils at low water in Pakenham village

This field trip had three parts: we began with a return to the Ordovician period and its fossils, shifted to lunch by a nearly dried-up waterfall, and finished with a visit to a hunter’s cabin.

The fossils, often much larger than those found last week, were in limestone bedrock surfaces exposed above and below the bridge in Pakenham village. These rocks are older than the shales seen last week. There were corals, stromatolites, and crinoid stalk fragments.

In the water running by the fossil-beds, however, were living invertebrates — stonefly larvae and crayfish — that drew everyone’s attention away from the long, long-dead remains in the rocks.

We delayed eating lunch until we reached a hidden waterfall on Indian Creek, which no sign advertises and where no trail leads. Again there were crayfish in the pools.

Pushing on a little deeper into the woods, we came to Gerry Lee’s cabin where he was almost waiting for us, ready to acquaint us with the waterfowl survey he has to fill out after shooting a goose, and why it is done. (Greatly increased goose populations, fed on southern agricultural field waste, have gotten out of balance with the limited food resources of the arctic, where they raise their families.) While Gerry and his goose were interesting, kids nosed around and came running up with their own finds — bones from rabbit and deer.

Oct. 14, 2023: What is wood, anyway?

Wood — we all know it when we see it, whether in furniture, firewood, or the logs we roll over to find salamanders. But what is it, really?  Former member Jen Line set out to answer this question, proceeding from the cellular level to the annual rings we can see in a stump.

Some kinds of plants have what it takes to qualify as wood, and some don’t. Mosses certainly don’t — they lack the microscopic tubes that carry water and food up and down their stems. Trees have these tubes. As growth takes place at the cellular level, water-carrying tubes form toward the inner side of a dividing layer called the cambium, and food-carrying tubes on the outer side. The former (xylem) become the wood, the latter (phloem), the inner bark. This process repeats every year.

But that isn’t what makes the annual rings visible in a cross-section, whether a stump or a microscope slide. The microscopic view shows a mass of big water-carrying cells that formed in spring and early summer, when so much water was needed to balance the huge and unavoidable evaporative losses from the leaves, and toward the outside of that, a band of much smaller cells of the same type — denser and darker — from when much less water needed to be moved. This pattern, repeated every year, is what makes annual rings.

Oct. 21, 2023: Our 75th anniversary party!

Not since the 50^th anniversary has there been such a gathering of Macoun Club people from past and present. Representatives from each of the past seven decades came together in the Museum of Nature to find old friends and make new ones, open the pages of our historical record, and hear what today’s kids have to say about the Club now.

The Macoun Field Club began on May 8, 1948 with just three members, but within five years numbered 60, growing to three age groups of 30 each in the 1960s. The joint sponsorship of the Museum and the Ottawa Field-Naturalists’ Club survived more than 50 years, and the Macoun Club, as this gathering showed, has survived even the periods of prohibition imposed during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The current chairman, Rob Lee, presented a historical overview under a theatre screen of classic pictures of Club people and activities past and present, and laid out a selection of historical materials for inspection: tattered and yellowing registration forms, attendance books and reports on presentations, and Little Bear magazines as originally printed.

Former chairman Dr. Ernie Brodo spoke of the sixties and seventies, formative in so many ways, during which he launched the Nature Study Area we all visit now, and the current president of the OFNC, Jakob Mueller, drew connections between the tales of adventure we heard from former members and his own personal experience.

Oct. 28, 2023: Visit to the Study Tree Woods

In the month and more since we visited our Study Trees (Sept. 16th) the forest had changed from green to patches of gold among the bare limbs. It was a now-rare warm day, and we found Garter Snakes and Spring Peepers, but under logs and rocks, though we still found Blue-spotted Salamanders, the ants and most other invertebrates had retreated underground for the winter. A burst of sunshine brought a brightly coloured Comma butterfly out, and we saw one red Meadowhawk dragonfly. Deer Ticks also woke up, and we caught three after crashing through some bushes and tall grass.

 

 

 

 

Nov. 4, 2023: The most dangerous time in a turtle’s life

You might think a turtle’s life is most at risk when it’s slowly crossing a road, even stopping to pull its head in when a massive and scary car passes by. But, as herpetologist Dave Seburn explained to us, the most dangerous time in a turtle’s life isn’t when it’s a turtle at all.

It’s when it is just one of a clutch of 10 or 20 freshly laid eggs that an adult has just buried in the ground. Turtle “nests” have to be in a particular kind of soil, so that the eggs will develop and hatch. Predators get to know these kinds of place, and when predators are numerous, turtles have little chance of surviving.

Although the mother turtle can fill in the hole and smooth out the surface so that a human can’t detect the nest, mammals with noses can smell them out. They’ll scratch open the nest, pull the eggs out, and eat every one.

Dave runs a program through the Canadian Wildlife Federation that aims to take the eggs out of this dangerous place, incubate them until they hatch, and return them to that place. This way, the second most dangerous time (when hatchlings are scrambling out of the earth and making their way to water) is also bypassed.

To do this, Dave and his coworkers (who include former member Mackenzie Burns) have to find turtles as they’re laying their eggs and wait for them to finish. Then they have to dig up the eggs without damaging them, make sure they don’t get turned sideways or upside-down, and record location information.

Maybe six weeks later, the eggs should hatch, and be strong enough to release a few days after that. And back they go to the wetland nearest to the original nests. In a good year, Dave’s group can save 1000 turtles.

Nov. 11, 2023: From bedrock geology to mushrooms

We entered our Study Area at its southeast corner and spread out when we got to the open expanse of sandstone that is filled with interesting features: a tiny quarry pit from early farming days, glacial chattermarks and polish from 20,000 years ago, and fossil ripple marks from the time, 500 million years ago when this was a beach. We also took note of the mainly parallel joints in the bedrock that we understand to be pressure cracks from the ongoing tectonic forces spreading the Atlantic Ocean apart (continental drift). The cracks are the only places where plants can gain a foothold.

But that open place was chilly in the wind, and we found a sheltered place in a hardwood forest, down below the dolomite escarpment – rocks that overlie the older sandstone. Our way was obstructed by fallen ash trees killed by Emerald Ash Borer and other species knocked over by the May 21, 2022 windstorm (the “derecho”).

Rob had a destination in mind – the western shores of the big beaver pond you would see if you visited the Sarsaparilla Trail on the east. He led along the margin of the big cedar swamp at the foot of the escarpment slope – favoured habitat of Yellow Birches and through the trackless intervening forests.

On the very shore of the pond, Macouners discovered a patch of big, gilled mushrooms (long past their prime) that were, astonishingly, heavily scented like the best maple syrup! They were called Candy Caps.

Nov. 18, 2023: What our local rocks say about the history of the world

“Why are there continents?” were Rob’s opening words, as he placed his childhood globe on the table. He then passed around fist-sized specimens of continental rocks (granite, light-coloured, and light in weight) and black deep-sea-bottom rock (basalt, dense and heavy). Continents “float,” he said, and always have – and they slide about on a current of molten rock underneath — everyone had heard about continental drift.

The globe made it easy to see how Africa was once tucked into the side of the Americas in a supercontinent called Pangea, which Macouners had also heard about. But how had geologists figured out how other parts of the world had moved about, become welded together, split apart and gone drifting again? As magma cools and solidifies, iron particles within it become frozen in the north-south orientation of the Earth’s magnetic field. Here Rob brought out his pocket compass, and tipping it sideways, showed that the lines of the magnetic field, flat at the equator, point somewhat downward in Ottawa, as well as north. The rocks, he said, also preserve the latitude of the continent at the time of cooling, and if you can figure out when that happened, you can work out the overall picture.

Rob pointed to the Gatineau Hills on the room’s big wall map, explaining that when continents collided here more than a billion years ago, the crust had crumpled, raising great mountains. So much time has passed that they have eroded away, washed down to the sea. And the Ottawa Valley – that’s where the supercontinent started to split apart, sank, and stopped – the splitting continuing where it would make the Atlantic Ocean, a process continuing to the present day.

November 25, 2023: Wintry explorations

After a mile of walking down a “Use at your own Risk” road in Lanark County, we broke away into terrain so rugged that apparently no one goes cross-country there. We knew this from the dead, dry pine twigs and branches at eye level wherever we went. It was upland country, with pine and oak trees, interrupted by long beaver ponds occupying irregular troughs in the granite exposed in every ridge.

We did not walk on the ice of the ponds, which was less than an inch thick and filled with bubbles (because it formed during a snowstorm). But it was fun pushing the limits of safety over the shallows. The shelf of ice along a stream was clear, and we were excited to watch a frog was lethargically kicking its way into hiding.

At lunchtime, firewood was close at hand and plentiful; we had two fires.  Afterward, Rob drew attention to a wide band of milky quartz running through the pink granite – the kind of thing the original inhabitants of this land might have sought for toolmaking, seeing as the commonplace granite is utterly useless.

And after lunch, we probed deeper into the hills, and crossed to the far shore of some ponds by walking on the crests of the beaver dams. We were intrigued to discover that one pond, perched high above a valley, drained out by means of an underground channel that emerged, bubbling, partway down the hill.

Along the sunny side of a frozen marsh, a frog had nosed out where the ice touching the shore had melted. Seeing us bearing down on it, the frog leapt in alarm – and landed on the ice surface, rather than below, where it should have gone. There it managed another feeble kick and stopped, suddenly too chilled to move again.  It was just a metre away, but no one dared take a step toward it. Rob rescued it, by placing two stout sticks on the ice and extending himself across them.

December 2, 2023:  Killer Whale vs. Orca – who wins?

We all know that life on land came out of the ocean hundreds of millions of years ago, and that sometimes land animals have returned to the sea, becoming seals and whales. Former Macoun member turned paleontologist Robbie Stewart wanted us to think about the anatomical adaptations these moves required.

First, of course, more robust skeletons were needed to stand up to the pull of gravity. When descendants of land mammals and reptiles returned to the weightlessness of the sea, their stronger bony structures made them tougher even than sharks.  When Orca meets Great White Shark, it is the descendant of a land animal that prevails.

December 9, 2023: Perhaps it’s better to be small

A foot of snow clung to the shrubs and branches of our Study Area, even in the treetops; we moved carefully among our Study Trees. A rough trough in the snow was recognized as the trail of a Porcupine and we followed it through last year’s blowdowns, awkwardly crawling under some of the fallen trees and clambering over others. We came eventually to a dark cavern under the upheaved roots of Phi Belley’s Sugar Maple (chosen by him on Oct. 30, 1999). The animal was tucked into the deepest, darkest corner, its prickly back turned toward the threat – us.

December 16, 2023: Talking about the Museum’s fabulous mineral collection

We met at Mike Leveille’s school, where Mike began by testing us on mineral identification, holding up specimens and asking for their names. Then he showed videos he had made about the famous Pinch collection that was acquired by the Museum of Nature for $3.5-million. Mike had been working as a Museum Educator at the time, and had met Mr. Pinch. We heard how he had assembled so many extraordinary specimens: mostly by trading up. Also, through his workplace at a photographic company, Mr. Pinch had had access to x-ray diffraction equipment that enabled him to identify mineral species that others could not.

January 13, 2024: Cancelled owing to heavy snowfall

January 20, 2024: Focus on fire

Everyone brought their snowshoes out to Rob’s place; we went into the woods across the road and started searching for a suitable lunch place. Rob was looking for a spot with a good supply of dead, dry conifer branches within our reach. This is not so easy in a 150-year-old forest, where the branches are high overhead.

At a transition point between hardwood and conifer forest, Rob found cedars and spruce with branches dead from being shaded out, and we soon had two fires going. Max made his using flint-and-steel, and his family kept it going steadily; the other struggled through lack of attention. We had a long, drawn-out meal.

Tracks were poor in the deep, fresh snow. One struggling mouse had taken to acting like squirrel: it had climbed each tree it met to about what is knee height on us and jumped off in the direction it wanted to go. We checked out the known Porucpine dens, but all the trails led in under snow-covered logs or up into hollow trees: everybody was home, and nobody would come out to play.

 

January 27, 2024: Fire!

“What is fire?” Rob asked. From the partial answers the kids gave, he led a discussion that ranged from the fossil record of fires during the Silurian period to what happens when a candle is lit in the International Space Station. He even lit a candle so that we could examine the components of a flame, and think about exactly what is actually burning.

Where does the heat and light liberated by burning wax (or firewood) come from? Rob told the story of his grandmother who, on a baking hot day a hundred years ago, wished she could store up some of that heat for wintertime. “But we do!” her father (who was only a lawyer, but knew some important things anyway) declared: “The trees are storing up the light from the sun, and we let it out when we have a fire.” And wax, like crude oil and coal, is a hydrocarbon, filled with solar energy stored up hundreds of millions of years ago.

What about the sun? Rob asked today’s group. “It’s a big ball of fire” someone stated.  “Is It? How can it be burning, if there can’t be any oxidation?”

And on a practical level, why is it that campfires go out just before you’ve got your food cooked? (Challenging hint: gravity is a factor.)  Why does campfire smoke make your eyes smart so much? (Free radicals.) What’s a free radical? (Only the older kids, who have had high-school science classes, had some idea about this one.)

At the end, Rob adjourned the meeting by blowing out the candle. (One more question: “How is it that you can blow out a candle, when blowing on a dying campfire brings it back to life?”)

 

February 3, 2024:

The combination of three unusual weather-related factors determined the length and location of today’s field trip: a several-week old crust of ice over 18 cm of snow; a lack of fresh snow to bury the crust; and relatively high temperatures. We went to the Study Area where we don’t need (and can’t have) a lunch fire, and made only limited forays off-trail, for just over two hours. The trails themselves were so icy that few people were out, and those who were couldn’t walk side-by-side in the slippery troughs beaten into the hard-packed snow.

We ate lunch in our Study Tree Woods, and attempted little more than a survey of the nearest Study Trees. The ice storm that had crusted the snow had not been severe enough to break any branches, so all seemed well — except for Nathan’s Eastern White Cedar. It has become the favourite feeding tree of a new Porcupine, which lives under Philippe’s tipped-over Sugar Maple, and the Cedar is looking thin. There is a well-wallowed trail between the two.

Most mammals seem able to travel over the ice crust: only we and the Deer punch through it. Somehow the Grey Squirrels are able to penetrate it and retrieve buried acorns that they must find by memory — surely no acorn smell can come up through the ice.

The woods were empty of birds, but on our way out, we found a second Porcupine in its den — the little culvert under the east-west access road.

February 10, 2024:  But where does it go on the Tree of Life?

Have you ever held a spider or a scorpion, a shark or a dinosaur? For most of us these creatures appear as two-dimensional images on a digital screen. Today we got to handle small plastic models of hundreds of different creatures, and feel how their bodies are put together.

Mike Levielle has acquired vast numbers of realistic models over the years, yet Macouners seemed to recognize everything he could throw at them. Then the question was, where do they go on the Tree of Life? What goes with what, and did its group branch off early or late in the course of evolutionary time?

After an hour or so, everything had found its right place.

 

February 24, 2024: Why do campfire embers glow?

Three weeks ago, Rob had led an exploration into the nature of fire. Hours afterward, he realized that he himself didn’t know why exactly things like flame glow. Things like campfire embers and stars, too. This turned out to be a very tough problem in physics.

Why should a campfire ember – a lump of carbon — emit light and heat, which are both forms of electromagnetic radiation? Even when it has cooled enough to look grey to our eyes, but is still hot, we can still sense its infrared radiation with our skin. In fact, anything with a temperature – anything above absolute zero – emits electromagnetic radiation.

Rob proposed a thought experiment in which Macouners can prove that even they glow with electromagnetic radiation.  Suppose, he said, that you go into a windowless room and close the door. Fumbling in the dark, you open a box and reach into it. Then the rattlesnake you keep inside will very accurately bite you, because it is a cold-blooded pit viper and can sense where your hand is from your warm-blooded infrared – electromagnetic — glow.

Rob demonstrated the underlying reason for what is called “black-body radiation,” which approximates the glow of soot particles in flames and the shining of stars, by moving a random object about in a tray of water, generating ripples. Within all substances, he said, the electromagnetic fields of charged particles (like electrons and ions) are disturbed by any kind of acceleration, and the disturbance within the field moves outward as an electromagnetic wave.

March 2, 2024: Making maple taffy

Rob has tapped his trees earlier than ever this year (February 25^th) and will be making syrup once enough sap has flowed into his buckets.  In the meantime we made do with last year’s syrup.  We suspended a little pot (no more than one-quarter full) over a campfire and boiled until it threatened to froth over.  Then we ladled spoonsful over bowls of granular snow for everyone to enjoy this seasonal treat – until it was gone.

March 30, 2024: Long weekend (Easter): no activities

March 23, 2024: It’s a “Wildlife Garden.”  What’s that about?

The fundamental purpose of the Fletcher Wildlife Garden is to demonstrate how well-thought-out gardens stocked with native plants can attract and support welcome wildlife: butterflies, pollinators, birds.  Sandy Garland came in to explain how the Fletcher group gathers plant seeds in the wild, starts them indoors in the Resource Centre, and sells the seedlings to the general public in June.  Berit Ericsson became a wildlife gardener in this way, and she recounted with amazement and pride how her small effort became an instant magnet for unexpected insects and birds, even in the midst of a typical urban desert.

April 6, 2024: First frog chorus!

Taking the old farm lanes to almost the geographic center of our Study Area (which is a mile across), Rob led off-trail into what were once familiar roaming places.  In the hour it took to come out again, only one beautiful little forest glade seemed unchanged across a half-century.  There the shaded ground was grassy and open, ringed by old Eastern White Cedar trees and bordered on three sides by wetlands.  The rest turned out to be tangles of Buckthorn thickets (invasive) and downed timber (blown over by the “derecho” storm of 2022).  Somewhere in there a Black-legged Tick crawled onto Niccolo’s clothing.

The only other easy walking and feature familiar to Rob was the beaver dam holding back the waters of “Pond II.”  That “pond” always was mostly marsh, but there is one small area of open water right by the dam, and in it stands a currently occupied beaver lodge.  A single frog peeped.

Later, as we walked the roads past Ponds VIII and XIV, Wood Frogs launched into the year’s first choruses.

April 13, 2024: Mike’s visit to Costa Rica

Mike Leveille has visited Costa Rica in Central America more than once, most recently this spring, and has created a series of short videos through which he shares his interests and experiences. He began with a video featuring a tour guide, who provided an overview of this tropical country, and then a one of a riverboat ride in search of Crocodiles (they found one, hauled out on a mudbank). Other videos focused on some of the country’s export crops that might interest Canadians: the production of coffee, pineapple, and chocolate (he passed around samples). Finally he showed a video focusing on the volcanic aspect of Costa Rica’s geology. It is a small country but has a half-dozen volcanoes. None were active during Mike’s visits, but he did visit some hot mud volcanoes that bubbled and plopped.

 

 

Also April 13, 2024: OFNC Awards Night

Every year the Ottawa Field-Naturalists’ Club hosts a social event at which Macoun Club plays a prominent role. Macoun members have the opportunity to create and present displays on some natural subject of their own choosing. This year Corbin took the opportunity to explain to the adults circulating the room the natural history of local ants in the genus Lasius.

The formal part of the evening traditionally begins with a speech by the Macoun Club president. This year Miranda had the idea of a joint address by herself as president, Mozz as vice-president, and Corbin as enthusiastic general member. This proved very effective.

The evening finished with a nature quiz hosted by Macoun Club volunteer Mike Leveille: he challenged the adult naturalists with samples of tree bark (what species?) and beetle galleries (again, what species?), bird and mammal skulls, and mineral specimens.

 

April 20, 2024: Where did spring go?

After the early warm weather, today took many Macouners by surprise as it was much cooler than expected. So for once Rob found an excellent reason to stay longer on the large wide trail… to run up and down it to warm up!

There were some spring ephemerals out but our log-turning uncovered a Widow Yellowjacket (Vespula vidua) queen who was still decidedly sleepy and not yet ready to start a new colony. Finnie had an eye to the ground and started giving her own names to various clumps of mosses based on their softness and other visual characteristics. Within the leaf litter she also found a land snail which we identified as a Flamed Tigersnail (Anguispira alternata) and we all admired its large umbilicus. Who knew that some snails had “inny” belly buttons?!

Corbin found a Blue-spotted Salamander, Miranda ended up with a Red-eyed Vireo nest, and a Fairy Shrimp was fished out of one of the vernal pools. We also saw a number of different mushrooms and then Rob took us to a limestone ledge that provides a very specific habitat for one of the less common ferns in the Ottawa area – the Maidenhair Spleenwort. And as a final reward for having made it out on a bit of a gloomy spring day, we spotted a Porcupine up in pine along the trail as we were heading back out.

April 27, 2024: Plunging into aquatics (figuratively)

The meeting was running normally, until Rob set a large glass jar on the table: large things (the size of substantial caterpillars) were moving around inside. And he had smaller containers, clear glass vials filled with water, dead leaves, dying grass, and moss. When examined closely, tiny things – different things — were moving around inside them, too. The meeting proceeded in disorder, with kids (and their parents) keeping Rob running from one to another for more than an hour.

These water samples came from Rob’s swamp, a vernal pool that has no fish, because it dries up every summer. (Fish, even minnows, are predators that would eat up everything in sight.)

Then we brought out the microscopes – “dissecting scopes” – that let you look with both eyes at once. Before we could see anything, however, we had to have light, and then learn how to focus both the eyepieces and objective lenses.

Gradually, we saw enough of the mysterious creatures that they began to make sense. The chunky cylinders of carefully arranged plant debris were only the homes of Caddisfly larvae. We could see the front half of their bodies whenever they poked their heads out. Other creatures were fully exposed: mosquito larvae and mosquito pupae, red water mites, smoothly gliding flatworms.

Encouraged, Macouners raced outside with empty vials to collect from the tiny pools in the Fletcher Wildlife Garden. The initial results were disappointing. Rob hadn’t told anyone that it had taken an hour of patient observation to make his catches.

 

May 11, 2024: Morgan’s owl-pellet workshop

After listening to a very brief introduction to owls, all the Macouners present fell upon the pellets set in front of them with enthusiasm.  (Rob hurried outside and whittled little sticks into dissecting tools.)  The tiny skulls and identifiable bones (and sometimes feathers) of a variety of prey animals gradually emerged from the dried out, sterilized wads of fur.

May 18, 2024: Return to the Billings Shale

We came armed with hammers this time, and whacked away at the blocks of black shale lying in heaps where they’d been dumped (just to get them out of the way).  Everyone was finding small (3” long) nautiloid fossils; one strking specimen, 6” long, was plated in fool’s gold (its finder, 9 years old, was so excited that he declared, “I’m think I’m going to have a heart attack!”)

Rob began to wonder why all these orthocone shells had been flattened, as though crushed before becoming fossilized.  Most were surrounded by a diffuse halo, which was interpreted as organic juices that had oozed out.  Robbie Stewart suggested that sudden burial by masses of sediment (a “turbidity current”) might have done it.

May 25, 2024: Artists take to the field

Nowadays it’s easy to take photos of things we see in the field but today Rob asked why one might chose to use drawings instead. The obvious answer is of course that it’s fun to draw! But there are also other reasons such as drawing what one sees through a microscope, being able to incorporate all the identifying aspects of a species, or creating composites from various photos.

Soon both the meeting room and the gardens at Fletcher were full of artists capturing scenes from memory, reference books or nature itself. The chipmunks and birds at the feeder were particularly challenging as they scampered and flitted around. Oskar demonstrated the technique of using multiple specimens to draw all the aspects and stages of a columbine flower. Inside Mike showed us his nature journals and Zelda conjured up a painting of birds and plants all the way from New Zealand.

June 15, 2024: Last field trip of the season

On Indian Creek, the water had gone down enough for the whole group to cross on stepping stones to an island for lunch, with running water all around us. There were crayfish in pools of water trapped in the rocky slope, and net-making Caddisfly larvae in the spillway beside the waterfall.

With the whole afternoon before us, Rob led southwest over trails in the Pakenham Hills that turned out to be remembered rather than seen, they have been so long unused. We passed “Rock-wall Pond” and other landmarks that kept Rob on course, until we had to detour around a fallen tree, and then Rob saw  an Ovenbird fly up off its nest. Detour piled on detour left him unable to pick up the thread of the old trail. But we broke out in the south end of an old field just the same.

Rob meant to take the group over a beaver dam and climb the hill beyond to a favourite place, but recent rains and fresh beaver work made the whole thing a path over watery mud. Change of plans: we walked the length of the field and tried another trail, better maintained. It led to a hillside over a long beaverpond covered in the green leaves of Watershield, Yellow Water Lily, and White (Fragrant) Water Lily. The shoreline had been thoroughly dug over by turtles laying eggs, and by Raccoons digging for those eggs. Scraps of eggshell littered the bare soil.

By now the afternoon was far gone, and Rob led off in a third direction to take us home. We passed the crumbling remains of log buildings (occupied from about 1870 to 1950).

Yielding to children’s pleas to visit a trapper’s cabin (so that they could search for animal bones), Rob brought the group to a much newer and currently occupied building, and that proved so interesting that we dawdled for more than an hour. It turned out that the owner, Gerry, had had a long career in the Canadian Wildlife Service: “I don’t think I ever felt like I was working; I was doing just what I’d always wanted to do.”

For what we did last year (Sept. 2022 to June 2023), look under “Past activities” in the black menu bar above

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