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Take a walk with me – Lambton Woods

Lambton Woods along the Humber River is one of my go-to places for a morning walk. On weekends it gets quite a bit of traffic, but it’s a perfect place for a weekday morning walk. It’s not too far from where I live, there is ample parking, and I can walk a loop through the woods and back back on the path along the river.

The trail through the woods is one of the best places I know to see skunk cabbage. This remarkable plant begins to emerge through the winter, sometimes even amid ice and snow.

There has been a bridge out along the woods trail for some time – over a year for sure, maybe even longer. The city is planning to get around to making a new bridge and they are announcing it with several 5-foot wide signs around the park.

I suspect they have installed these big signs because “in advance of construction, a number of trees will be removed for construction access”. This is obviously a serious bridge. This is the monster gap the bridge will be spanning….

In my opinion a simple no-fuss-no-muss bridge made of 3 or 4 logs would do the job and be more in keeping with the natural environment. We certainly don’t need a heavy duty steel bridge in there and for sure we don’t need to destroy trees to facilitate construction. Something is wrong with this picture.

Throughout the park, trout lilies are either in bud or bloom. In amongst them there is quite a bit of bloodroot, with it’s distinctive leaves, also starting to bloom.

Lambton Woods is often a great place to look for birds, but today the dominant birds were male red-winged blackbirds.

I had forgotten all about Pipsqueak, but when I arrived at the rail trestle, I see his tags are still there. Pipsqueak needs to piss on things to mark his territory. Ho-hum. Maybe he has a deficient cerebral cortex, or perhaps an unusually small penis? You be the judge.

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The Daffodils are Not Amused

Daffodils

It isn’t highly unusual to experience cold weather around here right through April, but by this time we don’t usually see any accumulation of snow. Mother nature didn’t get the email, I guess.

Imagination Station #1

Garden Crane
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50 Years of Adventures

This week’s episode of The Agency Podcast is now available. You can listen here or find it at all the good podcast places.

This week we feature singer-songwriter-musician-YouTuber David Sawyer. Please join us. Here is David performing Beautiful Goth, which also opens the new episode.

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Take a walk with me….

I’m just headed down the street to Colonel Sam Smith Park. I feel so fortunate to live a 5 minute walk away from this treasure.

The tree swallows are all over the many nest boxes in the park.

There is a grey and white cat who I’ve seen a few times at the park. He’s got quite the playground. Last time I saw this cat, it was climbing around a tree near the pond, showing off for passers-by. Today it was snake-hunting.

Each spring, the male red-winged blackbirds return to our area weeks ahead of the females, who have now also arrived.

In between fits of laughter, the red-necked grebes are busy with construction activities. I’m not sure who is responsible for it, but for years now, nesting platforms have been provided for the grebes. Nesting is often successful, though I have seen cormorants bully the grebes away from the platforms.

I watched some brown-headed cowbirds walk about on the rocks for a while. It was hard to tell what they were trying to accomplish, but whatever it was, they were busy at it.

There were lots of mergansers around today. I don’t usually see the red-breasted mergansers on shore, but caught this one returning to the water.

The rock-stackers have been busy.

I saw a couple people with cameras watching something intently from the viewing platform at the pond. I followed their gaze and saw several black-crowned night herons up in a tree.

After I watched for a while, I got to see a couple of them take flight.