Ontario Nature Blog

One of the charms of birding is the amount of time one ends up spending at sewage lagoons. Peculiar, verging on toxic smells aside, sewage lagoons offer some of the best birding opportunities and luckily for us, southern Ontario boasts some fine sewage treatment plants! Part of the reason birds gravitate toward such manmade wetlands ...

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This summer, my team and I met with landowners, cottagers and visitors on the Bruce to dispel myths about the maligned Massasauga rattlesnake. We didn’t expect people to fall in love with rattlers, but we hoped they would come to appreciate and help protect them. After all, rattlers are as much a part of the ...

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When I think “bird-watching paradise,” Ontario isn’t exactly what comes to mind. I think more along the lines of Ecuador, Madagascar, Panama, Indonesia, South Africa or Texas. Perhaps I fantasize about those places because they’re so remote and I haven’t been to any of them. I wonder why we find it easier to dream of mythical ...

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Most people try to avoid encounters with venomous reptiles, but that wasn’t the case for the team of Ontario Nature staff that I accompanied to the Saugeen-Bruce Peninsula last week. These herpetologists and avid naturalists ventured fearlessly across tall-grass meadows, forest clearings and rocky beaches in search of Sistrurus catenatus, commonly known as the Massasauga ...

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During Monday night’s extreme weather event in Toronto, I scanned the Internet for images of flooded subway stations and submerged trains, amazed at how suddenly this inundation of water ground the city to a halt. Now that the water has mostly drained and city operations are returning to normal, I am reflecting on how Toronto ...

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