With the summer solstice just a few weeks away, we will soon say goodbye to a very bad winter and a very strange spring. All the spring firsts were delayed this year, from the first sightings of red-winged blackbirds to the long-awaited display of spring ephemerals like trout lilies and… Continue reading
I promise I won’t dwell on the negatives! In my column for March of this year I wrote that this time of year was always two steps forward and one step back but this year it seems more like one step forward and three steps back! But to be positive… Continue reading
The Royal Ontario Museum’s Dr. Mark Peck will talk about how climate change is affecting which birds we see – and which ones we don’t see anymore – at the Historical Society’s Annual General Meeting on Thursday, May 23. All are welcome at this gathering in the Fireside Lounge at… Continue reading
What a bad winter for ice! The cold weather began rather early; but after an initial snowy period the snow disappeared until recently. Unfortunately along with the dramatic rises and drops in the temperature we got quite a bit of rain. And when the resulting standing water froze it produced… Continue reading
Happy New Year to everyone in Cavan-Monaghan! On the last Saturday of the old year I felt the need of a walk and so, in the late afternoon, I headed out to walk the Baxter Creek Trail from the Millbrook fairgrounds to Medd’s Mountain Park. It was a frigid but… Continue reading
On the night of November 23 I watched a beaver soar high into the sky from behind Medd’s Mountain. It rose silently, purposefully, and climbed into the starry night over the mill pond. In the unseasonably frosty air its face, turned toward me, was cold and bright and so big… Continue reading
A team of film-makers, runners, and pollinator advocates are working on a new documentary to tell the story of the flight of the monarch butterfly seen through the eyes of ultra-runners who will follow a similar path of 4,200 km from Peterborough to Mexico next fall. Entitled The Monarch Ultra,… Continue reading
First off, a big thank-you and well done! to Lisa Stefaniak for her splendid column last month on Monarch butterflies, “What’s in a Weed?” I hope you all enjoyed it and I hope you noticed that it was a guest author! Most of our native trees are pretty well leafless… Continue reading
As October looms, we have just left behind what anyone with functioning sweat glands must agree was a very hot summer. As I write this, on the first official day of autumn, two words perfectly evoke the new feeling in the air and the new quality in the sunlight: sweater… Continue reading
