Super Sappy from the Sugar Shack

Posted March 12, 2013

I am typing this from inside the sugar shack where I am boiling off the sap that was collected yesterday, approx 700L, and the first batch of syrup for the day is really close to being ready. I should only be a few more minutes before I am filtering and bottling. It is an interesting […]

Avalanche!!

Posted March 12, 2013

Snow and ice on the roof of the sugar shack at the Camp Heidelberg Outdoor Ed. Centre has been creeping down the metal slope like a glacier to the sea.  With the sun and warm temperatures this past weekend, we were ducking and dashing through the doors so as not to be buried under the […]

Yearly visitor

Posted March 11, 2013

So every year at the Laurel Creek sugar bush, a lady shows up, walks out into the bush, dips a collapsable cup into a bucket of sap and drinks it. She says it’s good for her health.  This year, Fire Todd and Mary-Anne and I saw her walk in and stopped her for a picture.  We […]

Young & Sheppard

Posted March 1, 2013

Survival Day! (Because of Hatchet) Our class from Sheppard Public School read the novel Hatchet about survival.  We had the best day at Laurel Creek Outdoor Ed Center on February 11th 2013. First Sean took us in the woods to build shelters. Each group was trying to make a shelter the whole group could get […]

Snow White

Posted February 28, 2013

As you can imagine, last night’s snowfall provided a beautiful backdrop for the early part of the day. Every branch on every tree was coated with snow. I admired it as I drove to work and could not resist getting out of the car near the top of the driveway when I arrived. As I […]

Parkway Q & A

Posted February 26, 2013

A student from Parkway Public School sent me a few questions for a project she was working on. Here are her questions and my answers… Do you think we will survive global warming? Yes! Human beings will be around during and after global warming.  Maybe not as many as now, but certainly we’ll be around.  The […]

The Sudden Den Site

Posted February 15, 2013

There is an animal den in the Sudden Tract, very close to where my classes go to play the Instincts for Survival game.  In the past I have found Coyote tracts going in and out of the den.  However, this winter the Coyotes are gone and something else has moved in.  I used a Bushnell […]

Ground Zero

Posted February 14, 2013

Yesterday we found a great story in the snow – the remains of a mourning dove that had been caught and eaten by a Cooper’s hawk.  At first we noticed fox tracks, making the shallowest of impressions on the surface of the snow, then some scattered feathers, then “ground zero.”  The fox was a red […]

January Bird Round-up

Posted February 6, 2013

As we reached the end of January, I thought I would provide an update for the 2013 Property Big Year. I had hoped I could reach 25 species by the end of January if everything fell into place. Well, on Jan 22nd during the last cold-snap I spotted a Rough-legged Hawk ‘floating’ motionless in the […]

Citizen Science Comes to a School Board Near You…

Posted February 5, 2013

You may be familiar with some of the “citizen science” programs in which non-scientists like us can contribute our observations of things in nature to the real scientists.  For them it’s like having thousands of researchers out in the field gathering data. So we thought it might be fun to start our own citizen science […]

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