On the early evening of 2023 January 14, we had ten of us out watching while Orion “came up sideways, throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains” last night. (Robert Frost, “The Star Splitters”) Thanks for coming out to Island Lake and sharing my enthusiasms about the night sky! Let’s do this again with a different part of the sky. (See below about the coming ‘green’ comet, Comet C/2022 E3 ZTF. If we get good viewing conditions, I’ll set up another field trip on short notice.) It was cool on January 14th, but the skies were remarkably clear. It seemed like none of us had seen the clear night sky for months! Sirius was an absolute glory to watch as it cleared the ridge across the lake, twinkling ecstatically and flashing brilliantly in the full glory across almost the whole rainbow of colours. It truly seemed to dance… Read more »
The Christmas Bird Count was on Dec 28, a calm day after a week of bitter cold, snow and howling winds. The temperature was from -2ºC to +3ºC. Unfortunately waterways were frozen from the prior cold spell. The area that Headwaters Nature and friends cover for the annual Christmas Bird Count is officially labelled ‘ONCD’. It covers much of Caledon as well as parts of Orangeville and Erin. This is the 31st count, beginning in 1987 with a few missing years. We had a total of 11 teams, each with part of or the whole of the various Areas outlined in the above map. There were also 4 Project FeederWatch reports submitted to Headwaters Nature. We had 48 species which is the best since 2005 (average 39.4 the last five years), but a number of these species are only represented by one or two birds. Our total count of 3135 is… Read more »
The always engaging Don Scallen will be our speaker for the upcoming November 15th meeting! He will present an illustrated nature talk. A well known local naturalist, Don is a regular contributor to In the Hills magazine, and author of Nature — Where We Live. An autographed copy of his book will be given away as a door prize on November 15th. I personally admire Don Scallen for exemplifying the theme of one of my favourite poems, in this case the last stanza of Robert Frost’s Two Tramps in Mud Time. Don is one of those remarkable people who delve so deeply into the richnesses of the natural world, and then reaches out so broadly to infect the rest of us with his sense of understanding and awe and wonder. For me, he admirably combines his former vocation as a teacher with his deep love of nature. “But yield who… Read more »
