Round the pond on a Sunday morning

Downy Woodpecker (Wikipedia image)

Seven of us did a circuit of Mud Lake this morning, stopping to feed the chickadees and nuthatches with the bird seed we'd brought with us. We had gloves on but discovered that the little birds––so light weight!––preferred to land on our bare hands. We couldn't leave our hands bare for long because the windchill was a biting -18ºC.

As we came to the section of the path near the Deschênes Rapids on the Ottawa River, we spotted some other kinds of birds: American robins (weren't they supposed to migrate south?) and a pair of woodpeckers. To my delight the male one flew onto my hand. Further on we saw a cardinal too.

The rapids

On Mud Lake itself, entirely frozen over, families were having fun on skates, one part of the pond having been swept for practising, another part for impromptu games of hockey. The trail we followed was shared with cross country skiers and children being pulled along on sledges. Robert and I had a chat about travelling to Siberia!

Elva, Francine, Carol and Robert at Britannia Point

A most satisfactory walk. When we sat down to brunch at the ever popular Newport Restaurant on Richmond Road, the men at one table, their wives at another, the waitress commented that we smelled like washing fresh from a clothes line. "Where have you girls been?" she wanted to know.

Mud Lake

A friend and colleague of Chris' who retired from Nortel (of his own accord!) last November has taken to walking near his house every day after breakfast, and the trail he likes to follow is the one that goes around the Britannia Conservation Area, popularly known as Mud Lake.

This morning John invited Chris and me to join him and, despite the fact that it was raining, we met for the walk at half past nine, setting off under tall, straight pines among the deciduous trees, finding many spring flowers and flowering shrubs sprinkled with raindrops, stagnant beaver swamps, glades, then wild rock gardens on outcrops of slate by the riverside with a view of the still very full Ottawa River where there are partly drowned islands and dangerous rapids. Crossing landscaped parkland around the water purification plant, we rejoined the path, seeing radiation fog steaming from the pond, a massive, bloated snapping turtle's carcass (not very nice) draped over a log, bees, yellow pond lilies, frogs, a few herons and yellow warblers of some kind. A chickadee perched on John's hand though he had no food to offer. It took us about an hour in all to complete our circuit of Mud Lake and we felt we'd made a very worthwhile discovery by exploring it, although seeing the police team on the bank near the rapids trying to locate the drowned bodies of a young couple accidentally swept down them last weekend wasn't so pleasant.

Afterwards we drove to nearby Westboro to Viva Loca, an environmentally friendly coffee and gift shop near the Mountain Equipment Co-op.

It seems rather a pity Chris isn't going to stay retired like John or we could look forward to doing this more often! Coming out of Viva Loca, by the way, we spotted the picture of an ex-Nortel friend of Chris and John, Miguel, on the front page of the Ottawa Citizen's Business News. I met Miguel as well recently when we all met for lunch in a pub. Click here to read the article, but I warn you, it makes depressing reading.