We've had higher water in the Sanctuary this year than in the last twenty, and it's led to interesting things like duck families swimming through the forest. Here are some photos from last week:
You can see the usual level of the West Lake from the remnants of last year's cattails.
This flooded forest path is where we usually take groups of school children for things like insect hunts. We're making alternate plans this time around.
The water level's come down a bit since I took this photo, but it's still a little deep to walk through. Plan to take the grassland route to get to the Wishart Trail for at least a while longer. The sign in the middle of the water, by the way, reads
Life in An Abandoned Channel.
This normally dry dip in the grassland (the continuation of the old river channel) has hosted a pair of ducks this year. When I took the picture there were
Boreal Chorus Frogs singing in there as well.
The water is slowly falling with our last few days' worth of warm weather, but since the water table is fairly high it wouldn't take much of a rainstorm to bring things back up again. Please be careful out on the trails, and let our staff know if you notice any flood damage during your walks.
Not to sound like a broken record (although I do feel like I've said this many times this year), but the recent downpours have flooded several sections of the Dr. George Trail again. This particular puddle, while it looks relatively harmless, is about running-shoe deep and can easily give you unexpectedly wet socks.
The beavers have recently started taking down a few trees in a normally dry part of the forest. I was sort of surprised that they waited this long to start feeding there, but I'm assuming that the high water has made lots of different trees more accessible to them and we just haven't noticed the busier areas yet..JPG)
One of the nicer things about the flooding has been that it's much easier to watch our muskrats at work on the West Lake from the viewing deck. Usually you'd need binoculars to see whether the brown thing swimming in the water is a muskrat or a beaver, but this year it's not uncommon to see muskrats feeding on cattails right beside the deck.
You can see the usual level of the West Lake from the remnants of last year's cattails.
This flooded forest path is where we usually take groups of school children for things like insect hunts. We're making alternate plans this time around.
The water level's come down a bit since I took this photo, but it's still a little deep to walk through. Plan to take the grassland route to get to the Wishart Trail for at least a while longer. The sign in the middle of the water, by the way, reads Life in An Abandoned Channel.
This normally dry dip in the grassland (the continuation of the old river channel) has hosted a pair of ducks this year. When I took the picture there were Boreal Chorus Frogs singing in there as well.
This slightly fuzzy cameraphone picture was taken yesterday on the Dr. George Trail. It seems that our recent rainfall helped make the abandoned river channel not-so-abandoned. Right now this section of the path isn't walkable (it is, however, wade-able), so if you're headed out for a stroll in the Sanctuary in the next couple of days you may want to go through the grassland to access the Wishart Trail.
