Revisiting Joys of Spring in Summer

In my second Blogger attempt on July 6 I published a piece I called The Joys of Spring. It was my first experiment with adding pictures from my files and the pictures ended up messing up the descriptions. Still the three shots showed various spots along my favourite walking trail as it appeared in February, in April, and on May 29 of this year.

This park is one of the most popular recreational areas in my community. It is well used through every season, though less so through the winter when we often have wet and cold weather. The city has done a great job of expanding, improving and maintaining the grounds and facilities and its cost is one item on my local tax bill I gladly pay.

We are now into our hottest summer weather and high afternoon temperatures through the second half of July are expected to range between 25^o C and 35^o C, which in the Fahrenheit scale is from 77^o to 95^o. Yesterday and today our highs have been around 30^o C with a high humidity. We consider that hot and for an old guy who needs a cane for support likely not a good day for any extended walking. Still, my camera needed some exercise after a month or two on the shelf, so I drove to the park and walked around for a half hour or so to take some snaps in the locations depicted in my July 6 issue, just to compare them with their July 16 appearance. My attempt to insert them along the left margin in sequence didn't work. Photo 1 and 2 now appear from right to left in row 2 at the top. They were taken from a picnic table off the trail where I took the February shot. Photos 3, 4, and 5 now appear from right to left in the upper row. No. 3 shows the spot where I shot the mating mallards in April. No. 4 is the family of Canada geese described below and the fifth shot is the same location as the one shot May 29 depicted in the July 6 issue.

All these pictures were taken between 7:30 PM and 8:00 PM our time last night. The camera records it as an hour earlier because I didn’t program the change from Standard to Daylight Saving. The temperature at that hour was still around 27^o C. The trail, the playground areas, the picnic tables, the resting benches scattered all around the 2 Km trail perimeter were well populated with seniors strolling and chatting along the trail and resting on the benches, young couples walking their babies, groups of young mothers wheeling strollers, joggers, the odd bicyclist dodging walkers, couples walking their dogs—everything from wiener dogs to Labs and even a group of three obstreperous and hard to control greyhounds. Leash and pooper scooper rules are in effect and generally observed. The first picture is a view east on the south side of the park from a picnic table on the grass beside the trail near the southwest corner of the park where I took that February shot of the lone walker entering the shady portion of the trail. If you look closely on the right side of the photo you’ll notice a rather lonely looking young lady sitting at a picnic table strumming her guitar with the passing parade on the trail itself to the left. From about the same spot I snapped a view of the playground and outdoor swimming pool area, looking into the area of the setting sun.

Earlier I had visited the playground area along the middle of the south side of the park and took the third and fourth pictures inserted above from the lake’s outlook area. That is where I showed the mating mallards along the shoreline back in April. I saw only two mallard hens there, one of which was hiding behind the shrubbery. I suspect they were both offspring of the April mating pair shown in the July 6 issue. I took the fourth picture of a large family group of Canada geese, most of them hatched this spring. I saw only two or three adult geese in this particular flock, along with a great white goose whose genus is unknown to me, who has attached himself to this family for several years now as a protective guardian. I call him Aflac after the one in the commercial. He is huge and quite aggressive and the only white bird of its kind I have seen at the park.

The fifth picture shown depicts the same area of the trail shown in the May 29 photo included in my July 6 issue, just as it appeared last night. It’s possible I will revisit this park from time to time in this publication as it is reasonably accessible to me without extensive travel, but for this issue, I will limit my comments to last night’s walk.

Bill

17/07/2009 5:58 PM