Doing Natural History

Visits to Branches of the Castor River   On 26 June 2020, 10h13, air temperature 24°C, sunny, Beaufort gentle breeze, we set out to check the three branches of the Castor River for Molluscs, and for whatever else.  We'd found a nice variety of Unionid mussels at the Little Castor at Rte 400 last fall, and had a nice variety on the main Castor below Russell in 2000, so the upstream branches were a surprising disappointment – a strange mixture of clay and angular rocks, a long brushy way below their bridges. Beavers were conspicuous by their absence. The main Castor below the Russell weir was totally overwhelmed with the  Viviperus  Mystery Snails which had first showed up there in 2012, but we didn't find them in any of the upstream branches. Kilometrage  for this trip was covered by our Ottawa Field Naturalists Club research grant. Quotes in italics are directly from the database narrative output from which this account is edited down. We were la...

juvenile Leopard Frog, Canada: Quebec: St-Barthelemy boatlaunch, in backwater of Maskinonge River, at its mouth on the St Lawrence River, 9.88 km SSW Maskinonge. (107m btwn wpts), 31I/3, 46.14849° N 73.07223° W Arrival and abundance of Juvenile Leopard Frogs in Bishops Mills citation of truncated version: Frederick Schueler. 2019.  Arrival and abundance of Juvenile Leopard Frogs in Bishops Mills. CHORUS: Newsletter of the Ottawa Amphibian and Reptile Association 35(7):4-6 There’s a verse in the Leopard Frog song that goes –  Let us live here in Bishops Mills On the first of every August When the metamorphs from the South Branch marsh Come and fill the fields and the gardens. - but this year the first juvenile  Lithobates pipiens  didn’t show up until the 17 th  of August, which has inspired me to see how variable the date of arrival has been by filtering our database with - RTOD(ACOS(COS(DTOR(LATITUDE-44.87246))*COS(DTOR(LONGITUDE-...

Orconectes rusticus x propinquus  working its way toward the spillway On October 3, 2017, I'd just returned from two months away from home, and Fred was eager to show me the assault on the dam at Oxford Mills, so I checked that there was still charge in the GoPro that my Dad had won by entering his "Bear Tree" video in a trail camera contest, and pulled on my gumboots. Fred put fresh batteries in the big light, and we drove the 10 minutes north to the dam on Kemptville Creek in Oxford Mills - the site of our winter "Mudpuppy Night in Oxford Mills" project. Water levels had finally dropped to wadeable, after being "spring flood" for the whole of this wet summer. For a few days he'd been collecting crayfish claws, legs, and carapaces, left by predators, and expected a repeat of last fall's mass migration of the hybrids - Orconectes rusticus x propinquus, rushing the dam against the spillway current as if their very lives depended on it. ...