Today we pulled into a municipal park at Lake Dore, in Renfrew County, west of Cobden, Ontario, and as I was setting aside my laptop and preparing to open the door, large shadows of slender insects fell on me – from the centimetre-long midges that had suddenly landed all over the van!
It’s the annual Chironomid Festival at Lake Dore, and we’re included! I tried to photograph one of over one hundred that were using my side door window as their staging ground, but my camera preferred to focus on the background rather than on the insect – so I sketched it instead!
Adam also did a sketch in his journal, including the vehicle from the position of the besieged.
In places the air was positively thick with dancing, whining, fluffy-antennaed males, bobbing up and down in columns. It was a windy day, and as I walked back from the lake the midges gathered in my lee, gradually including me in a swarm. I could feel them brushing against me, but they didn’t land because they were busy dancing!
As I prepared this photo for including here,
one of the Chironomids that have hitchiked with us since we left the lake, landed on my computer monitor, dwarfing the images of her relatives on Adam’s window. I laughed out loud and took another picture!
1 April finds us in a Wood Frog breeding pond which Fred calls “Site F” along Forsyth Road in Limerick Forest, Grenville County, Ontario. I pushed through willow bushes and past dry spruce boughs which caught at my sweater, stepping on mossy logs in the shallow pond edge, until I paused at one of the last two remnants of melting ice. The frogs quietened as I came out into the open, but resumed their chorus gradually as I stood still and got out my paints.
Most of them are calling from the dead cattails on the north side. Individually each Wood Frog call sounds like “duck, duck, duck” but as I made my preliminary pencil sketch, all together they sounded jubilant – a clamour like children in a playground. Later I noticed chuckling, and still later it seemed to me to have changed to laughing.
I painted the patch of ice first, but when it was time to leave I noticed that it had further melted to half the size! Fred took the water temperature over near the chorus and it was 14C, the same as the air. No breeze, but very few mosquitoes. Wood Frog tadpoles eat a lot of mosquito larvae.
On Friday, February 19th, I was wading up to my knees in the main current downstream of the dam at Oxford Mills, counting Mudpuppies. The count was 140 that night – 20 shy of our record! I was training the big spotlight on the pinkly glowing sinuous shapes of giant feathery-gilled salamanders when I was startled by a phalanx of large, ghostly grey, linear shapes moving upstream toward me.
16 September 2009
Waltham Bridge Boat Launch
17:01 This is the site of great Unionid diversity that Fred and Isabelle and JF discovered in 2001, when the river was much lower than it is now.
Just across the river from Pembroke, there is a nice picnic area that comes down by the Ottawa River. The river is 300m wide here. Where I sit there is a picturesque overhanging Maple. We followed a path through poison Ivy to a point, and then doubled back a little way along the sandy, rocky shore. Fred showed me a sandy alcove where the roots of an Alder are exposed. There is a drift of shells partially embedded in the sand – more Unionids than I have seen in one place in a long time! Read the rest of this entry »
