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 »
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 »
