A Hike In The East Track Bog of The Vermilon River. A Post To WBW.

East Track Bog.

Something a bit different today. We got out during the two day good weather interlude that we had, and actually got into the East Track Bog. To avoid confusion, probably for me, since I haven't taken any geography since the ice age, we live in the Canadian shield, and the Vermilon forest is a Great Lakes-St. Lawrence forest,simply put a mixed forest but leans to softwoods. The Carolinian forest lays to the south, a bit along the north edge of Lake Ontario, with most in the US. It is mostly gone, except for small pieces preserved in parks.To my north lays the Boreal Forest, a forest distinguished by tundra or muskeg. The Dark-eyed Juncos are Boreal Forest dwellers and migrate through here. I suppose officially here we have wetlands or bogs. I define the difference in this blog as a wetland being covered in water all or most of the time, while a bog merely some of the time. Bogs in the UK are acidic and form peat. The only one in Ontario that I am aware of is the Byron Bog near London, Ontario that fulfills that definition.The East Track Bog may not be a true bog, or true muskeg, I don't know. But it's as close as most of you are going to see. In photo two, you can see the black earth which is the soil formed here. This soil is harvested and sold to the mining companies to start the regrowth process and cover the damage that mining does, i.e, the slag heaps for instance. The soil needs endless time to reform in the bog and this is just an other curse of mining. An aside: the Alberta Tar Sands are in muskeg, but the look is the same, and you can see the contamination possibilities,and understand the fragile environment. It doesn't duplicate, although the oil companies and the governments would have us believe that. The efforts to redo the muskeg are failures in every way, and water contamination is enormous. This is all to the shame of Canadians who facilitate it, the Norwegians, and the Dutch who claim to be green and maybe are in their own countries. And to the Americans south of us who have an insatiable thirst for oil even to the destruction of their own country.

Boom And I are in here because the bog is dry, otherwise we'd sink, and there are no insects now which would eat us alive in the spring or summer. Not all the photos were taken on this hike.  A Post to WBW @ http://pineriverreview.blogspot.com/  Click on photo for slide show.

Shows the black earth.

Dark-eyed Junco, a member of the sparrow family.

Dark-eyed Junco

Dark-eyed Junco

Junco in Slate Gray, same species.

Slate Gray Junco

White Breasted Nut Hatch.

White Breasted Nut Hatch.

White Breasted Nut Hatch.

Downy Male Woodpecker.

Downy Male Woodpecker.

Male Hairy Woodpecker.

Immature White Crown

Mature White Crown

Tree Sparrow

Blue Jay With Raised Comb.

Blue Jay.

Black-capped Chickadee.

Black-capped Chickadee.

Black-capped Chickadee

With the migration of warblers etc. underway or finished, I start to look for different birds and these are some of them. It is not the first time that I've see or photographed a nut hatch, but to me it's a winter bird as are the others. The Juncos come in both a dark and slate gray as above. There is no difference.