January 9th, 2007
beaver, deer and mossy rocks at black ance road
In early January, one might expect to be hiking through a snowy landscape. However, that was far from the case when we hiked a slow circuit of the trails along Black Ance Road at Murphy’s Point Provincial Park yesterday. We found the shorter grass in the meadows and forests looking quite green. Open water was seen just about everywhere except in some of the shallow, rocky pools shaded by forest.
Shortly after noon, we set off walking west along Black Ance Road, stopping occasionally to look for signs of frog or turtle activity in the streams, ditches and pools alongside the roadway (we did not see any frog activity). At the largest pond, a thin layer of patterned ice reflected the cool sunlight in an interesting way. Arriving at the point where Black Creek passes beneath Black Ance Road, we found the water level quite high. It seemed almost like a springtime scene, but with the tall grasses along the shoreline looking dry and brown.
Don spotted a mature Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) ermerging from the tall White Pines to fly upstream above the creek. Unfortunately, I wasn’t quick enough with my camera, so no photo.
We left the roadway, turning north to follow one of the hiking trails that leads between stony ridges and hardwood forest. Along the way, I happened to notice what I have come to refer to as exploding trees. About 9 meters (30 feet) above the ground, the tree, an aspen, erupted into a pair of wild looking “explosive” rings of growth. Above, the tree continued on with perhaps another 8+ meters (25 feet) of fairly normal looking top growth as can be seen in this photo. We’re still not entirely certain of the cause of this malformation, but have heard several theories. If anyone reading this happens to know the cause, please do leave a comment. Wild-assed guesses are also quite welcome. (-:
After examining and photographing the misshapen tree, we decided to wander up onto the high ridge that overlooks the marshy south end of Loon Lake to see if there was much beaver activity, and indeed, we found that there was plenty afoot.
Looking north from our vantage point atop the ridge, we could see a low dam blocking off the southern tip of the lake. Further up the lake, we could see signs of recent tree cutting activities. We continued along the ridge for a better view of the dam and what turned out to be some very ambitious tree felling on a small island near the south end of the lake (see above). Several large trees were at various stages of being brought down.
While standing atop the ridge, Don noticed a weathered deer skull and a few leg bones lying nearby. I took several photos including some macro shots of the upper molars. Leaving the ridge, we returned to the ski trail and then made our way along the main trail towards the MacParlan House cabin. When we reached the inlet at the end of Hogg’s Bay, we found a good-sized White Pine (Pinus strobus) tipped over and fallen into the water. Quite a large circle of earth had been turned up when the tree was uprooted.
Just before we reached the footbridge over Black Creek, we stopped so that I could take a few photos of the moss and lichen-covered rocks that were looking very alive and well saturated on this day (see top photo in this post). I particularly liked the pattern of moss growing on this rock as it almost looked like it could have been shaped by Andy Goldsworthy.
As on our last hike along this trail, we found the water level in the creek to be quite high and flowing with great force as it passed beneath the footbridge. We completed the last leg of our walk and returned to our parked vehicle about two hours after setting out on our walk. The temperature was about 4C (39F), and with no snow on the ground, we both felt that it seemed more like an early November walk. On our return home, we noticed that our neighbour’s cattle and the lone llama were out grazing in the pasture — definitely a very rare and unusual sight in January in eastern Ontario. We did get a bit of snow last night, but it melted away this morning and we’re back to bare grass once more.
Note: I’ve tried something new this time and am hoping it works okay. I’ve posted the large versions of the photos and additional photos in my online photo gallery and have linked to it from my blog. I don’t think there should be a great difference in the speed at which the photos will load when called up from the above links. The small photos used in this blog entry are stored on my regular server account the same as usual. For anyone who might be interested, there are a few additional photos from yesterday’s hike posted in this gallery.
Tags: Black Ance Road, Bald Eagle, Haliaeetus leucocephalus, Castor canadensis, Beaver, beaver dam, Odocoileus virginianus, White-tailed deer, White Pine, Pinus strobus, Murphys Point Provincial Park
January 9th, 2007 at 1:13 pm
I enjoyed looking at all your photos. Glad you posted them in the other gallery. The beavers take down substantially sized trees. Do you think there are too many beavers? I have heard that said around here, but that is perhaps because they are encroaching urban areas. They really can alter the flow of streams with their dams.
January 9th, 2007 at 1:29 pm
Bev – the mosses are certainly bright green! They love the cold and moist weather down here too.
I’ve seen and wondered about those odd structures on a number of trees down here too. Mostly they seem to occur on our tulip poplars (Liriodendron tulipifera) above a certain age and size, but not uniformly so. I’ll have to photograph them and present them.
Looking at that photograph it really looks like the bark has essentially been exploded outward, and yet it doesn’t look to me like the underlying xylem has undergone any growth that would explain that. The simplest hypothesis to me is disease, perhaps even Agrobacterium tumefaciens, that has caused a massive increase in growth of the cork cambium at the site of infection. Or something like that.
I’ve done a little googling using keywords like “warty outgrowths”, burls, boles, but with no real results. Weird!
January 9th, 2007 at 4:00 pm
Ruth – Yes, beaver can fell a very good-sized tree. As for your question of whether there are too many beaver around – I guess that depends on how we define what is a good number. Beaver and humans have some problems co-existing because of how both are capable of altering their environment. Beaver families can do a lot of tree cutting in an area, and when that food supply is exhausted, they move on. Also, they do alter the shape of watersheds with their dams. We probably wouldn’t notice any of that if they were off in the bush somewhere, but now that we’re trying to use these same areas for housing, their activities often seem obnoxious (both the flooding of areas, as well as the tree-harvesting activities). In wild places, their dams create large ponds which other creatures depend on for survival. By the way, I found a .pdf version of a paper entitled Spatial and Energy Requirements of Beaver. Quite interesting stuff regarding area of ponds and forest needed to support beaver.
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Wayne – I love the bright green mosses and rich colours of lichens in late autumn and early spring. In winter, we wouldn’t normally see them looking quite like this as it would be too cold and they usually look dry or frozen, so this is a bit of a treat.
I think you’re onto something regarding the tree species – up here, I’ve seen this mostly in aspen – and also the cause. It seems to begin somewhere within — with the tree bulging up somewhere, and then the bark gradaully breaking open and curling back. Seems like it would be related to insects or fungi or something. I’ve looked around for the cause, but I don’t think I’ve found a definitive answer as yet.
January 9th, 2007 at 4:02 pm
The photo of the light reflected in the pond looks so much like the pacific northwest. Oh that gray, those black trees, the way the light filters through it. Beautiful. When I first saw the photo of the deer molars I thought it was a type of white shelf fungus. Interesting to see that it wasn’t, and to learn what it was! We’ve been seeing shiny bright green mosses on our walks too. Some things do love this cool, damp weather. Looks like you and Don had a great walk. I love tagging along like this!
January 9th, 2007 at 7:17 pm
robin – i was thinking about how that photo of the pond with the gray skies looked like the PNW – i was even thinking that while standing looking around me that day. Interesting how light and other aspects of a scene can transport us. Aren’t the deer teeth interesting when seen up quite close? So many shades of gray. And yes, we did have a great walk yesterday — we seem to see so much every time we go out wandering around.
January 9th, 2007 at 10:00 pm
Just like Robin andrea – I thought: shelf fungus – then the reality. My – elegant design. I punish myself that reflexively I feel sadness. I fail again at the ‘circle of life’ mindset that could allay this discomfort. I think winter light exacerbates the tendency.
The gallery is a lovely walk with you.
January 10th, 2007 at 12:55 am
Your photos, and your descriptions of what you see, are always so intriguing; they always transport me. They take me to worlds that are so uttlerly unlike my environment in the city. On first glance at the deer molars, I thought I was looking at a cluster of oyster shells. I suppose our sense of sight substitutes visual memories when confronted with something unfamiliar; for me, it took me back to the oyster beds in the bays along the Texas coast. Thanks for drifting by my blog…your comments are welcome and most appreciated.
January 10th, 2007 at 1:00 am
Cathy – Your mention of the winter light is interesting as part of me felt an odd twinge as I was standing looking about at the bones in the leaf mulch. The scene seemed a little melancholy in that light. At the same time, I also looked at the deer skull… that of a adult that, by its teeth, looked to be a good age. By its location at the very peak of a high ridge overlooking the lake, I think it must have died on that spot. Seemed like a good place to die. I guess that I’ve photographed so many dead animals to document certain things, that my camera distances my mind a little from the subject. I’ve noticed that feeling occasionally when I’m photographing road-killed animals — a sort of respectful quietness but twinged with sadness over what I see as largely needless death.
January 10th, 2007 at 1:14 am
John – I find it interesting to hear how others respond to my photos. Often, I respond to them in unexpected ways when I sit down to look at what I’ve shot earlier in the day. Although I’m rarely conscious of how I shoot, I’m aware of how I use my camera to explore and reveal details that are not that apparent to the naked eye. I learn about things through my camera…seeing things in the LCD screen that I can’t possibly see with the naked eye. I found the deer teeth surprising in that they looked like “something else” — I was thinking seashells, so not far from your oyster shells. Something about them reminded me of an odd beach in California – one that had gray sand and little bits of white stone strewn through it. As you say, perhaps our sense of sight does substitute or suggest other visual memories, or try to make those associations for us.
January 10th, 2007 at 4:44 am
Bev – your photos are worth enjoying however long they take (of course, I also enjoy a fast download, BUT IT’S ONLY RECENTLY THAT THAT IS THE CASE! ;-) )
Nonetheless I know that I have been less considerate at keeping my photos small, and it wears heavily on my mind at times.
Still there is one thing that is absolutely good to implement as a matter of course: a height and width attribute in your markup. This allows the place for the photo to load immediately and the text remains stable in the browser so people can read your writing without it dancing up and down as photos appear.
(Note that I say “you” and “your” but have not actually noticed this problem with your page. I mean the generic 2nd person.)
The form of the markup is:
I suspect that the jiggling of the browser is more apparent to slow connections but even so there are some sites where the dancing around is evident and extremely annoying even on fast connections.
Here’s a couple of other things I’ve noticed:
Some folks maintain dozens of posts on their front pages before archiving. It takes forever to be able to click on the comment link. I’ve got it down to five per page and have even thought of taking it down to three. Obviously you (this time it’s personal) don’t cram your front page with old posts. When you run into that though, you can get the comment link by right clicking and opening into a new window without having to wait. Just a tip.
(A similar thing happened, as you’ll recall, to me when I used the permalink my blogging software provides – it opened up the entire month to download. Fortunately I discovered I could edit that link to just allow the single post to download.)
Lessee, one other thing: I don’t see this a whole lot (other than members of my family who still, after years and years, send unreduced mind-bogglingly huge photos by email, and aren’t those fun to scroll across to get from one eye to the other?) but occasionally some folks still do no photo reduction at all, relying on their blogging software to do it for them. I find that for a photo the max width on the blog page is 600 pixels, and I don’t use it very often, trying for 500 or 400. If the photo is taller than wide, the max height should be about 500.
It also helps with jpgs (useful for photos) to ratchet the compression to medium when you save the pic, rather than leaving compression at the lowest level – sometimes the pic size is 2-3 fold lower without any noticeable degradation. Photoshop programs should give you the option to set this feature when you save the image.
For line or cartoon drawings (NOT photos), use png formats, which don’t compress and are very small size. Gifs and jpgs compress, so continually editing and saving gradually degrades the image. Pngs don’t do this.
I just realized that with those fake markup examples they might appear on the page and the universe might collapse. Let’s try it and see.
January 10th, 2007 at 4:46 am
Yep – the image markup example for using height and width attributes disappeared. Here it is without the brackets:
img height=400 width=500 src=”http://blah.blah.blah.jpg”
January 10th, 2007 at 5:41 am
Wayne – Thanks for taking the time to write about the use of photos in blogs. This is all really good information. In fact, I think it would make for a good discussion — what you’ve written and what I’ve written below, so I might try to cobble it all together into a post in the morning when I’m a little more awake. Anyhow, on to my own comments in response to yours.
As you know (and some others who read this blog also know), I struggle along with a very clunky net connection. You may laugh at the silliness of this, but when it rains a lot, our phone lines crackle so loud that we can’t converse with anyone, and at those times, I’m lucky if my connection is doing better than 14,000 bps. Top speed on a dry, sunny day is 44,000 bps. I definitely notice when graphics are loading very slowly on someone’s blog. Sometimes they “stick” — I have no idea why — and when that happens, I sometimes can’t get them to load until some other day (perhaps when my connection is better).
I too have been considering dropping from 5 to 4 posts displaying at a time. My reasoning with leaving it at 5 is that I often have at least 2 posts up that have very small, fast-loading images, so it probably doesn’t make a great deal of different between 4 and 5. I may yet go to 4 though, as I know there are still a few long-suffering individuals such as myself, who are stuck with dial-up.
My usual M.O. for photos is to go with a 504 pixel wide image when creating the images that fit into the white part of my page. I generally create a second larger image, not necessarily the same crop as the smaller one, and link the small one to the larger one for those people who might be interested in taking a closer look. Until recently, I’ve been making those images about 875 pixels wide (or sometimes less). However, I’ve just gone to 1,000 pixel wide this week — I’m sort of giving it a try as my new MacBook has a different shaped screen — wider than my iBook — and I guess this is the shape of things to come in computer screens. I read something recently about average screen widths now being 1024 pixels wide, and, yup, these 1000 pixel wide photos do look nice on this screen. Incidentally, this screen is wider, but shorter, so I’m already finding it’s changing my way of wanting to crop photos as far as aspect ratio.
Well, I was going to write a bit more tonight, but (*yawn*), I’m tired…. so it’s going to have to wait until tomorrow.