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 »
Here are some internet natural history links that I found personally interesting during the last month. Some of these links were sent to me by other folks with similar interests. Most I found by browsing my collections of websites that I glance through daily, or from focused-interest emails that I subscribe to and come to me on a daily or weekly basis. Here are links sent by Phil Bird (CVC Specialist, Watershed Monitoring) for reporting and for data access to local detailed natural history information: (These links are also in the middle of the earlier post about Phil’s talk) The Natural Heritage Information Centre (NHIC) reporting link: natural-heritage-information-centre-nhic-observation-reporting-form CVC now has an open data portal which includes fish data: cvc-camaps.opendata.arcgis.com A separate interactive map for fish records: CVC Fish Data How a quest for mathematical truth and complex models can lead to useless scientific predictions – new research. Author: Arnald… Read more »
