County Park Tour #6: Ervin-Stucki Preserve

Calvin and I decided that a great project or goal for this summer would be visit all of our county's parks and preserves. Several of them we are already familiar with and visit on a regular basis, but following an event that took us delightedly into uncharted territory, we decided to become more familiar with our area's offerings. Of course, it is already August and so far we have only visited only 2 of the 10 parks, and 4 of the 15 preserves, albeit some of them more than once. I am comforting myself with the knowledge that we did visit three National Lake Shores and will be camping at a state park next week, but fall should be a good time to take on the rest of the county parks anyhow.

Yesterday we went to the far southeast corner of our county to visit the Ervin-Stucki Preserve. It was a small park, with only a third of a mile of marked trails, but it still provided us with many beautiful sights. Part wetland, part wooded area on the river's edge, much of the trail was a narrow path between two privately owned farm fields, and that added to the variety of wildlife sightings, like Sandhill Cranes. We were also reminded that it is getting to be serious butterfly time around here.

the bluebird's tree...

Bluebird

Cattails

Sandhill Cranes

Checkerwing butterfly

Cedar Waxwing, watching me closely

Viceroy Butterfly

Viceroy Butterfly

Orange Sulphur Butterflies

County park tour—Burns Stokes Nature Preserve

We checked another county park off our list today—a park only five minutes from our house that, strangely, we had never visited before. The preserve is sandwiched between the river and the railroad and has both wooded areas and a meadow. We went all together during the early evening and expected to see song birds, since that is a busy time for our feeders at home, but our biggest score on this trip was in the wildflower area. Calvin collected pictures of around ten different wildflowers, although we have only been able to identify about six of them so far.

Most of the wildflower shots are from Calvin.

Burns Stokes Nature Preserve

Huron River

Motherwort

'shroom

evidence of beavers?

Aphrodite Fritillary

Common Yarrow

Sulfur Cinqefoil

unidentified spider with crazy orb web

Hiking season

Though we will take advantage of local trails and pop into the woods on the occasional winter day, mud is a general deterrent for me, and we reserve most of our hiking for the summer and fall. But during what I call hiking season we do our best to make the most of the cooperative weather and we'll often be out and about multiple days of the week.

This year we are hiking with a couple of goals in mind. First, Calvin has signed up to produce several different projects for our county's 4H fair at the end of July. One is a collection of information pages on at least five different critters he espies while out and about, another is the same but regarding wildflowers, and a third is a collection of leaves from at least 15 native trees he has seen and identified. Plus we have a longer term goal as well, of hiking all the county parks at least once this year.

So far we've been successful on multiple fronts. This week we started our tour of the county parks with a stop at one of our favorites—the Scio Preserved Open Space, with about 2 miles of hiking trail through woods and open meadow, over some small streams, and alongside a pond. We took lunch and ate by the pond, which was pretty, but the best part of the trip was the hike itself, and Calvin found lots of things to add to his wild lists, including three bird species that were new to both of us.

Oxeye Daisy (not technically native, but an "introduced wildflower")

Great Crested Flycatcher

It's a slug race, with a green beetle spectator

snail

Five minutes of quiet often produces an array of creatures that were just waiting for us to be gone...

Indigo Bunting

Song Sparrow (common in wet areas, but not a typical feeder sparrow)

In search of fall

Niagara Whirlpool and Glen

Today, after getting up and again enjoying coffee by the pool while Calvin swam, we packed up, checked out, and said goodbye the falls. Yesterday we walked along the class 6 rapids about two miles north of the falls, and today we went even further north to the Niagara Whirlpool and Niagara Glen.

The Niagara Whirlpool is just down river from the class 6 rapids we saw yesterday on the White Water Walk. It's a large pooling of the water in the elbow of a ninety degree turn it makes before heading north again toward Lake Ontario. Watch the water and you'll see the entire pool steadily turning counter-clockwise. Apparently at night, when they divert more of the water for the power station, the rotation of the pool is reversed.

The Whirlpool Aerocar travels over this pool of water (not over the river, so it stays in Canada) and is another of the tourist excursions on the list of things to do around the falls. Jump on their new WeGo bus line in town and the Aerocar is a quick ten minutes to the north. It's also only a 12 minute ride, but if you're following the path of the water like we are, this is the next stop: from Lake Eerie through the falls, down river to the rapids, swirling through the whirlpool at a ninety degree turn, then down river to Lake Ontario.

Have I ever mentioned that I'm not fond of heights? I won't say phobic, but uncomfortable wouldn't be a stretch.

No matter, it was worth the shaky knees.

Then, just a hop farther down river (north) from the whirlpool is the Niagara Glen. Standing on the ridge above the glen and looking back, you can see the whirlpool back behind us.

The glen a Carolinian microclimate full of beautiful plant and animal species, amazing rock formations, and even a few fossils. It is crossed with a variety of paths and trails, none of them paved, all of them rocky, and most of them steep. The Welcome Centre, also a great education center and small gift shop, offers guided hikes, which we took along with a few men who eyed Calvin suspiciously when we joined up, and with a newfound respect at the end.

I think that hike may have been my favorite attraction of the entire trip.

After the hour plus long hike we ate a picnic back on top of the ridge, then enjoyed the educational room in their Nature Centre.

Then...did I say we'd said goodbye to the falls? Well, we were done with the hike earlier than we'd thought and still had use of our two-day bus pass, so we took the WeGo back into town for a snack at the Maid of the Mist food court, one more relaxing look at the falls, before heading back to our car on the bus and straight out of town.

On our way to Kitchener we made one more stop drawn by the image of Toronto as a floating city on the lake. And a ghost ship to boot. Tomorrow is dinosaur museum time.