Sue and I drove to Toronto this weekend for a wedding. On our way home on Sunday (after a detour to Soma for the World's best chocolate), we stopped at Oshawa Marsh and the McLaughlin Bay Wildlife Reserve for a short hike. The noon sun was warm, while a breeze kept us comfortable. We walked to the viewing platform on the east side of the marsh, admired the many cormorants sunning themselves on the many perches and platforms, and counted the great blue herons stalking through the lilypads and cattails. I watched a northern harrier hunting low along the far shore, hovering stationary for a few moments in one location, swooping quickly to the next, and then dropping on some unsuspecting victim in the reeds. I was pleased to see no evidence of the ethanol plant proposed several years ago for the west shore -- the EA for which I briefly worked on as a consultant. The wrong idea in the wrong place, as the harrier would no doubt attest.
From the viewing platform, Sue and I wandered south along the trails through thickets of golden-red sumac, and then down under the maples and willows of the Cool Hollow Trial. The huge, aged trees -- a relict hedgerow from the days when the area was agricultural land -- seemed wonderfully decadent in comparison to the younger, adjacent forest. At the lakeshore, a stiff wind blew off the water, raising small whitecaps on the lake and ruffling my hair. In the distance, a line of more prominent whitecaps seemed to mark the edge of the bar off the point, but when I focused the binoculars I could identify them as a dozen mute swams bobbing on the waves. Sue and I walked along the shore, slipping pretty cobblestones and fragments of slate into our pockets for later use in one of Sue's mineral identification workshops. Four shorebirds flew and dipped along the beach ahead of us.
Leaving the beach, we followed the trails around to the west side of McLaughlin Bay, passing into dense fields of goldenrod and asters. It took a few moments for us to notice the monarchs. We had already seen some in the sumac thicket, flitting across the trail or above our heads. As we moved deeper into the wildflowers, we began to see more of them fluttering this way and that. And then a group of five, lifting and dancing together. Looking more closely, we realized that they were all about us, hanging like orange fruit from the bouquets of white, blue and yellow flowers: hundreds of monarchs, maybe thousands over the fields. At any point, we could have stepped off the trail and found five or ten of them within arm's reach.
In retrospect, we shouldn't have been surprised to find so many monarchs at this time of year. The north shore of Lake Ontario is known as a migration route for monarchs in the autumn, and what better place to rest and feed than at the McLaughlin Bay Wildlife Reserve? Nonetheless, their poise and lack of timidity surprised me. I've chased after monarchs many times, trying for the perfect photograph. On this day, however, they posed tantalizingly still on each flower, slowly opening and closing their clean, perfect wings -- allowing us to admire them in detail, but seeming also to taunt us for our lack of a camera. Sue and I resolved to find some reason to return to Second Marsh next year at the same time -- ready to capture the spectacle.
No comments:
Post a Comment