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Pastimes : NNBM - SI Branch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: abuelita who wrote (47125)	9/29/2005 8:50:55 AM
From: Crocodile	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 104157

rose~ you must wake up each morning and marvel .... yes, that's very much how it is. there's always something to see, at least from spring through fall. winter is the most difficult for me as i find less to look at. a couple of winters ago, i spent a few weeks photographing lichen on trees, fence posts, rocks, or just about anything else sticking out above the snow. i also photographed tree bark and rock textures at very close range. however, that does get a little tedious after awhile. <g> i'm thinking of spending a few weeks elsewhere this winter. there are a couple of places i've been before -- south-east corner of arizona and the northwest corner of california that I have wanted to revisit to spend more time photographing the flora and fauna, so i may do that this winter. just sort of mulling things over for now. you live in a wonderland and its only because you can SEE it and FEEL it and APPRECIATE it. that's exactly right. the truth is, that almost any place is a wonderland -- depending on how you look at it. a few times, i've been stuck waiting around for someone in the city and it usually doesn't take too long for me to start wandering around checking out the "weeds" growing on the edges of a parking lot or in a ditch in a park, and next thing, i'm finding interesting insects and all sorts of cool stuff. a year ago last spring, while doing urban and rural frog pond surveys for a grad student who was conducting population comparisons, i visited this pond in a park -- very sheltered from the paved footpaths by willows and manitoba maples. i pushed through the trees and stood around for a few minutes at several points around the perimeter, watching and listening for frogs. found a mother Mallard duck with 8 ducklings, several turtles, tons of dragon and damselflies, 4 species of frogs, lots of unusual spiders, many wild aquatic plants... a real treasure trove. then i would push my way back out through the trees and find myself in this "different world" of joggers and cyclists and people pushing strollers, and with some kind of music blaring out over the speakers at the tex-mex cafe a couple of hundred meters away. I'd look around and feel like shouting, "Don't you realize what cool stuff is in the pond behind these bushes?!" but then i would think.. no... maybe it's just as well that not too many people have looked inside of here -- or then the vegetation would be all trampled down, and maybe the ducks and turtles would be getting chased by dogs.. and so on.. however, it's just interesting to see what lives on even the smallest sliver of land overlooked by humans. reminds me of another day, when a friend and i stopped to do a brief visit to a vacant city lot which someone had applied to develop into 3 house lots. it was kind of sad -- lots of beautiful wild plants, and in the midst of it all, in the sandy ditch, there was a fox and her kits -- she had a den dug out of the bank next to a culvert. i was just by that lot last week and the culvert is paved over and there are 3 big houses where the fox den and the wild plants were. fortunately, for now, there are still many wild places. but it is scary -- the relentless march of development. each time a new Ontario road map comes out, I buy one and compare it to the last 2 or 3. amazing (and somewhat distressing) to see the network of roads growing thicker and thicker every time the latest map is issued. and the growth is speeding up now. seems almost to be doubling. the patches of "green" for parks, conservation areas and crown lands, seems to be increasingly squeezed. anyhow.. hmmm... this post didn't start out to be a treatise on development, but i suppose it's just on my mind a lot these days. sounds like you're in a good place to be -- one that won't be vastly altered any time soon. btw, i loved the shots of the scallops and agates. (-: ~croc