Where are all the Monarchs?

Posted September 20, 2013

This has been a dramatically poor year for monarch butterflies.  From the lowest number of wintering butterflies in Mexico on record, to poor breeding conditions throughout the spring, monarch sightings have been few and far between.  It was the second week in August before I saw my first monarch of the season!!  And at this […]

Greetings!

Posted September 10, 2013

Hello Everyone!  My name is Laura Ehnes and I will be covering for Sean McCammon at the Laurel Creek Nature Centre for the next little while.  Sean is doing some travelling and working on some new songs.  I got my start in Outdoor Education at the Apps’ Mill Nature Centre in Paris working for the […]

Lush Laurel

Posted July 11, 2013

According to this website, Kitchener-Waterloo has received 76 mm of rain so far in July. That’s a full month of rain in the first 10 days. We also had a very wet spring. This has made everything around the Laurel Creek Outdoor Ed Centre very lush. There are more leaves, more berries, more insects than usual. Ex-outdooredguy Ted says that […]

Dinner will never be the same

Posted June 4, 2013

This video evolves into something fairly profound. No wonder it has over a million views.  [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRNNzMZgrzs]

Blandings Turtle

Posted May 30, 2013

Yesterday at Laurel Creek we had a Blandings turtle in our parking lot. It is a medium-sized turtle distinguished by it’s yellow neck and throat. It is also a threatened species in Ontario, due to loss of habitat and cars running over them as they try to find suitable nesting sites to lay eggs. Blandings turtles live […]

Beaver lodge – many updated features!

Posted May 21, 2013

My family was at our friends’ cottage this weekend, and we were coanoeing around their lake.  Someone spotted a pile of branches in the water outside of a boat house. Beavers store branches under the water in the fall so they will have a food source when the water is covered in ice. We paddled over […]

If You Build It, They Will Come…

Posted May 6, 2013

In the movie Field of Dreams, Shoeless Joe Jackson tells Kevin Costner’s character that if he builds a baseball field, a bunch of long-dead ghost baseball greats will come to play there. In our case, we hope that building nest boxes may attract cavity-nesting birds to our fields and forests.  This week at the Blair […]

With a little help from my friends…

Posted May 6, 2013

Last week five grade 7 classes from Lester B Pearson PS visited the Blair OEE Centre studying Ecology.  We did a stream study of Blair Creek – a Class 1 cold-water stream – and a study of microscopic pond organisms.  That was the official itinerary.  With several consecutive days of beautiful weather, Spring literally exploded […]

An avian update

Posted May 2, 2013

Sean and I have been watching carefully and keeping our ears to the sky over the past four months to see who can detect the greatest number of bird species on our respective work properties. We thought we would provide an update before the influx of species that are about to return from their wintering […]

We’ve Got Mail

Posted April 29, 2013

Nice letters from a couple of students who visited Laurel Creek recently…

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