Harvest is well underway

The cecropia moth (Hyalophora cecropia) is the largest North American moth with a wing span 5-6 inches.  This cecropia caterpillar will have shed its skin 5 times or 5 “instals”. Each time it sheds its skin the caterpillar will change its appearance. My neighbour brought me this beautiful one. Here is a link to an excellent web page http://www.performance-vision.com/cecropia/cecropia.htm

Fields are full and the tops of maples are showing the first blush of colour to come

The creeks are full and their vegetation has reached its climax

and the Silver Maple has raised its  red flags warning that winter shall come again

Where the great Blue Heron Preens

The places where herons preen are as wondrous as they.  

Great Blue Herons are the largest species of North American Herons. The feathers on their neck and chest continue to grow and fray, but it is the down that they collect with their fringed claw on their middle toes that protect it from disease . Herons use their powdery down like a wash cloth to cleanse fish oils and slime from their feathers. It is not, however, just fish that they eat! Great Blue Herons eat nearly anything including fish, amphibians, reptiles, small mammals, insects, and other birds. 

American Black Ducks

Sugar Maple, White Pine, and the lake

Duck Potato

Swamp Milkweed

Goldenrod and Purple Loosestrife

No Hunting on Settlement Road

The apples are red, and there are beautiful chocolate coloured cattails on Settlement Road. There too, glistening in the morning sun, you can see the mottled jewelweed flower and remember the days of rubbing its leaves on your itchy skin to relieve the pestering itch of mosquitos. 

Red squirrels eat it all: Nuts, seeds, buds, bark, fruits, mushrooms (which are often hung to dry in tree branches), bird's eggs, nestlings, voles, young rabbits, frogs, salamanders, and insects. In fact, they will eat anything that will not eat them.

Red squirrels are usually born in April, after a seven-week gestation. The nest into which they were born would have been built of twigs and leaves or could have been in the hollow of a tree.  They are blind, furless, tiny, pink, creatures and would have two to four siblings. Their eyes would not open until they were twenty-seven days old and in another three days they would be fully furred. Red squirrels moult twice each year. Their thick dense winter coat that grew in September gives way to the lighter shorter summer fur in the spring. Only 25% of the litter will survive to adulthood but those that do, can live to be ten to twelve years old. The usual life expectancy of a red squirrel is three to five years.

The young squirrels will need to establish their territory and find or make suitable shelter for the winter, for they, unlike other squirrels will not hibernate.

Jewelweed also known as Touch-me-not

Queen Anne's Lace

Red Squirrel

Goldenrod

Golden Eagle

Stunning creature

On the Blue Goose

Board the Blue Goose on a pristine morning and glide the ten kilometre Tay Canal.  Your host and captain, Frank, is charming in the ways that only great story tellers can be, and you listen. You hear his telling of the last the last duel in Canada, the building of the first Tay canal to join the Rideau at Bevridges Lock, of the old  locks and by ways, and of the wildlife in the 135 acre Tay Marsh. He tells you that the water you are plying was once known as “Haggart’s Ditch in recognition of John G. Haggart MP minister of Railways and Canals. You hear that it was Haggart who was responsible for upgrading the first canal with its five locks and a drop of sixty feet to  the Rideau Waterway, and you learn that Haggart had this done between 1882 to 1891. It was also Haggart, who, as leader of the House of Commons in 1892, following the death of Sir John A. MacDonald, had previously used Government money to extend the canal connect to his profitable flour mill.

The stories heard, and the sites seen of juvenile grebes, great blue herons, kingfishers, Pickerel Rush, Purple Loose Strife, and Water Lilies will stay with you for a long time. Never, you know, will you ever forget that day on the Tay.

http://www.taycanaltours.com

Looking up the Tay

Pickerel Rush

Last Duel Park

Along the way

"The first Tay Canal opened in 1834, only two years after the government-led (and well-funded) Rideau Canal system.  It consisted of five rubble locks and adjoining dams, located between its origin at Port Elmsley and the Town.  Three of the locks were close together near the beginning, and the fourth several miles upstream.  Despite its less-than-optimum quality, it did open up transportation and markets for the area.  Eventually, however, canal fees not being adequate to maintain it, the canal structures began to deteriorate, and for a period it served only log rafts.  In the 1860s, a movement began to re-build it, with government funding.  This time the lower portion of the canal was re-routed to Beveridge Bay, by-passing the traditional entry to the Tay system at Port Elmsley, and requiring only one set of locks.   

(The sources of this history are ‘History of the Tay Canal’, by Susan Code, and ‘The First Tay Canal’, by H. R. Morgan.  The source of picture: Perth Museum)” http://www.tayriver.org/tay175/documents/tay_175th_handout_sheet.htm

The site of the first rubble lock in the first Tay canal

Juvenile Grebe

White Waterlily left foreround. Purple loosestrife in back

Ring-billed Gull

Great Blue Heron

Cattails

Upper Bevridges Lock

Captain Frank and Will

Fog

The sun rose at 5:57 this morning although you would hardly know it. The rolling fog steeped us in its dampness even before we rose. That brought me a shuddering stretch at the birthing of the day.

It has been so long since Alanagh, Molly and I have been at water and roadside taking pictures that we decided we would go this morning despite the light or lack thereof. “Sometimes,” I mused, “There can be some interesting shots through the fog.”  

Scotch thistles are particularly lovely this time of year and when its purple mingles with golden rod the colours are gorgeous. These flowers are harbingers of fall, and so I was truly pleased to see a female Mallard and her brood foraging for aquatic vegetation, contented to have me enjoy them: a flash back to warm spring mornings. If the Mallard’s first clutch is early enough there can be another. 

Mallards are "dabbling ducks” and seldom dive, and these beauties are the ancestors of almost all domestic ducks. Generally monogamous, males will frequently force themselves on other male’s mate.

This so called “extra-pairing” copulation is common amongst many birds and is often consensual. Mallard males, however, care not about a female’s consent.  Pairing takes place in the fall and the romancing continues throughout the winter months. It is only the female, however, that incubates her eggs and cares for her brood.

When I hear an osprey call I must go to see, even through the fog. For not to look for the majesty once heard, would some how be a

sacrilege.