Rebecca's Trail
A Section
of the Grand River Trail through Kitchener, Ontario
In Autumn
By
Lenny Everson
rev
1
Copyright Lenny Everson 2011
For Rebecca
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The Trail
In 2006, my daughter, Anita, and her daughter, Rebecca volunteered as trail monitors for a section of the Grand River Trail through Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. So I named the section of the trail for my granddaughter.
The section goes from Victoria Street (Highway 7) to the next road, Bridge Street East.
When I walked it with my friend, Al, in the fall of 2006, I had not expected much: this is a major urban area, and what isn’t strip malls is usually corn fields. But I was, from beginning to end, delighted with this section of the trail. Most of it follows hillside and woods, with part along a farm road.
This chapbook, like the Spring and Summer version that is planned, is a “casual” guide. I’ve tried to keep my facts straight, but I’m a poet, not a biologist, so I guarantee nothing.
The book doesn’t try to follow the trail as you will experience it, since I don’t know whether you’re starting from the south end or the north end.
That being said, the sections of the trail, starting from the north end, are:
Following the creek through a field
Across a wooden bridge through a scrub forest
Beside and through a large buckthorn forest, part of it along high rolling fields (Al’s favourite part)
Through a hardwood forest
Across a stile, over an iron culvert, and uphill through beech trees
Along a farmer’s lane (my favorite part)
Down to the river
Along the river
Up stairs to a lot awaiting development
At the south end, there’s parking across the river.
At the north end, you can park beside the highway.
South Entrance
At the south end of this section of the Grand River Trail is a section beside the highway that’s currently up for sale. I don’t know what will happen to the trail when it’s sold. But it’s all gravel and rock at the moment, and suitable for tansy flowers.
Tansy
Tansies are August flowers, but the dead stems remain standing through the fall and well into the winter. When in bloom, they look like tall daisies that have somehow lost their white petals, so only the golden centre remains.
In the Old Days gift flowers had meanings, as any florist will tell you. A bouquet of tansies can still be used to tell someone, “take a flying leap,” “get lost,” or “just leave me alone, eh!”
You could also invite that person to taste them, although I suspect they’ve lost most of their flavour by this time. People make teas out of it, and wine, and it has some real medicine in it. Of course, a few people taste it and die, but you can’t have everything. Anyway, someone dies, you can use tansies (so they say) to keep a body from decaying. It’s got a long history and a million uses.
Tansy flowers and buckthorn thorns
North Entrance
The north entrance is along Waterloo’s Bridge Street East. It’s near Cressman farms, at the bottom of a dip. An unused silo is on the ridge above the trail. You can park along the road: the margin’s wide.
Common Buckthorn
One of the most fascinating parts of the trail is a whole forest of Common (or Purging) Buckthorn. They’re a purgative, so if you want your bowels emptied completely, you can try eating the seeds. On the other hand, there are safer ways to start a movement.
I have some of these bushes at home, and they’re very difficult to kill. I never imagined forests of the darn things.
Most governments list them as invasive bushes, which means they wish someone hadn’t brought them over from Europe to use as hedges. Especially since soybean aphids spend the winter in the buckthorn and the summer sucking soybeans dry. It is against the law to import, sell, or transport buckthorn in Minnesota, among other places. They’re blamed for degrading wildlife habitat, threatening other plant ecosystems, multiplying like crazy, and not having any natural controls over here.
On the other hand, they absorb lots of carbon dioxide, which is good for combating global warming. (Unlike that other import, humans, who degrade wildlife habitat, threaten ecosystems, multiply like crazy, have no natural controls, and produce lots of carbon dioxide as well as other interesting chemicals. Think of Buckthorn as assort of a better cousin.)
South of the wooden bridge over Becky’s Creek (I found no name on the map, so I named it after my granddaughter: feel free to rename it each time you cross the bridge) you’ll find yourself along the side of the buckthorn forest. In fall and winter there are black berries in them, and the occasional bird’s nest.
Further south, you’ll be traveling through the middle of a buckthorn forest.
The thorns don’t look like thorns; because of the little cross-pieces on them: they look more like short branches. But I find them sharper than hawthorns.
Scotch Pines
A woman I knew once explained to me, “Scots are the people; Scottish is the culture. Scotch is the drink.”
I can’t see any reason not to celebrate a drink that keeps me warm on cold days, so I call the trees Scotch Pines like most people in Ontario.
Most of the rest of the world calls them Scots pines: they used to be common in Scotland and are still common all over northern Europe and Asia (they like cold climates).
There’s a bunch of them on the hill to the north of the highway; you can tell them by their pinkish trunks.
They’re immigrants, just like you and me, brought over from the old country, and slowly spreading here and there.
The Hawthorn Forest
As you go up the hill from the river level to the farmer’s road, you’ll be between a fence and a hawthorn forest. Hawthorns are good for steep hills, to control erosion. You’ll notice that the trail has eroded a bit, and after a rain you’ll likely find deer tracks in the mud.
I like hawthorns, especially in winter because they’re such a pale gray that they look like ghosts from a distance. The haws are little red fruit and the thorns are up to three centimetres long. Mice, deer, and a lot of winter birds eat the haws in the winter.
Actually, a lot of people, including the Chinese, believe the haws are not only good for jams, but help your heart, blood pressure, and circulation too. Some testing has been done, but scientists aren’t convinced.
Legend says the haws can cure a broken heart, so you might want to hand some to the person who got your tansy bouquet. Legend also says they’ll keep vampires from returning to their graves. You can try it some time.
Legends in Europe say a hawthorn woodlot like this can be the entrance to the underworld, so you might want to come back around midnight, sit on a rock, and listen carefully.
The wood is very hard and resistant to rot. Pioneers knew they made good tool handles and fence posts, but I think I’d pick on less thorny trees first.
Willows and Manitoba Maples
Two of the most common trees along the riverbank are black willows and Manitoba maples.
I think the most interesting thing about willows and Manitoba maples is that they have a lifespan about the same as human beings. A 75-year-old willow or Manitoba maple is a real old codger. (Or codgerette – each is either male or female, not that I can tell the difference unless it has flowers or seeds on it.) So if you see a big old willow or Manitoba maple, you’ll probably outlive it. Give its trunk a pat and say, “Hi, old tree.”
Black Willows
Most trees can’t live with their roots in water (because their roots need more oxygen) but willows insist on it. Young willows have no problem spending a week under water when the Grand rises after the snow melts.
Willows will grow in almost any soil (as long as it’s wet) but they adore sunshine and will die if they don’t’ get lots. They grow fast, soak up lots of sunshine and water, and die young.
If you see rows of little holes in the bark, you’ll know that the yellow-bellied sapsucker has been there, drilling for sap. And hummingbirds – you always wondered what they did in spring before the flowers came – come to the same holes for sweet sap.
The wood is lightweight and doesn’t splinter easily, so it was once the favourite wood for wooden peg legs.
People also liked it to stop stream erosion. It was easy to break of branches, stick them into the soil, and watch them become trees. In 1962 Australia imported some to control erosion. You’d think they’d learn; willows are now a major pest there.
In winter you can recognize old willows by their deeply-furrowed bark. Apparently, you can taste aspirin if you chew the twigs: I must try it sometime. It doesn’t bother deer, mice, or rabbits, which eat the new shoots, or beaver, which eat any part they can get at.
Manitoba Maples
The Manitoba maples share the riverbank with willows, but they don’t really like their feet wet all the time. They just like open spaces, and spring flooding and cattle clear nice sunny areas along the river.
Like the willow, these trees need lots of sunshine. They’re happy taking over places that humans have cleared, so you’ll find them around abandoned farms or vacant lots. They’re happy with poor soils. They grow like crazy – I’ve got one that shot up four metres in a year. They don’t live any longer than willows either.
The female Manitoba maples keep their seeds in the branches all winter. A lot of birds, especially evening grosbeaks, depend on them. Take a few seeds home and plant them: a couple of years from now you’ll be fighting the shoots with a flamethrower.
These are real maples, even though they have compound leaves. I once tapped one and made a little bit of syrup. Some guy in Saskatchewan (Manitoba maples originated in the prairies and are the only maple that grows well there) taps 80,000 trees out there, and plans to tap half a million trees. The sap is more watery than sugar maple sap, so you have to boil it longer, but they claim the syrup is tasty, even if it tastes different than the syrup we’re used to.
White Cedar
I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with eastern white cedar, which I knew as swamp cedar. Walking down a hillside into a grove of them with sunny spaces between the trees was like being in a giant natural garden.
Then, of course, the grove would get thicker and I’d be floundering through, with branches stealing my hat and trying to poke out my eyes.
And then, swamp or a creek to cross. Cedars like the hillsides above water. I associate swamp cedars with rubber boots full of cold spring water.
People call this cedar tree “arbor vitae” – the tree of life. It provides shelter to rabbits, porcupines, and red squirrels in the winter. And deer rely on cedar as food in the winter. Besides, you can boil the needles to make a tea that’ll cure scurvy.
The big trees you see on Rebecca’s trail can get pretty old, but not like the ones that grow on the cliffsides of the Niagara escarpment, which can live a long time. One, up on Flowerpot Island, is more than 1050 years old.
History
If you’d been here about 11,000 years ago, facing northwest, you’d be standing near the edge of a large hill of mud and stones to your right, the glacial till that now has Scotch pines on it.
In the distance, to the northwest, you’d see the ridge of the melting icecap. It would be huge, but not the two kilometres high it once was. And it wouldn’t be white, but a dirty brown colour, like snow with a lot of mud.
To your left, as far as you could see, there would be sand and gravel mounds, with dozens of small rivers. These rivers carry melting water from the glacier, along with a lot of rocks and sand.
Hundreds of years later most of the rivers would have dried up, and the sand and gravel would have been covered with grasses and shrubs. If you were lucky, you might have seen a woolly rhinoceros or a herd of mammoths coming down to drink at the river.
If you’d been here in the first few years of the nineteenth century, the country would have been heavily forested, although not with the scotch pines you see now. Some of the trees were huge by Ontario standards; one, just a couple of kilometers north along the trail measured a metre in diameter and 50 m tall.
The Grand would have been deeper and wider than it is now, and colder. There would be few signs of Aboriginal peoples: southern Ontario was between the Iroquois Five Nations on the south shore of Lake Ontario and the Ojibwa people up north; permanent settlements in this area risked attack by one side or the other. But the river was full of fish, and so camps came and went along the shore.
But you could have seen some of the first Mennonite settlers, with ox carts and Conestoga wagons, moving slowly along the far shore, following the muddy ruts of the trails left by the few who came before them. They were heading for lands they thought they’d bought. (When they got there, it turned out there was still a big mortgage on the land.)
In 1816 those farmers would have been on the flats by the river, cutting river grass for the cattle. 1816 was a “year without a summer” – it snowed even in summer and ponds froze overnight in July and August. This was followed by rains, then, in September, a drought. This cooling was probably due to dust in the air from the eruption of Mount Tambora, in Indonesia, the year before. The cattle weren’t fond of the tough river grass, but there wasn’t much else, and both cattle and humans went hungry a lot that year.
When crops were good, in the years after, the farmers floated barges down the river to Dunnville. The same barges, with cloth, sugar, and other things farmers couldn’t make themselves, were pulled back upstream, with horses or oxen pulling the barges, and people on the barges steering and helping drag the boats over the shallow spots.
Black Willows
Deer
In any soft ground, or in snow, you’ll see deer tracks. There’s a noticeable trail that joins the Scotch pine forest to the hawthorn forest, halfway up the hill from the river.
The only deer around are white-tailed deer. These are pretty animals, but not particularly interesting. This is especially true since your chances of seeing one, even if it’s close, are very small. They sit quietly and blend in. In summer they’re reddish-brown, but in winter they’re grayish-brown.
Deer seldom live longer than eleven years. That picture of Bambi at the end of the movie, standing there with his antlers – just remember that he’s only two years old at that point.
Without predators, a couple of deer will produce 35 offspring in seven years. Fortunately for population control in the city, a deer’s numbers are limited by Plymouth Reliants, Toyota Corollas, and probably the next car I buy, too.
Down near the water at the south end of the trail is a deer rub, where male deer hang around rubbing their antlers.
Here’s a picture of some deer, since, as I said, you probably won’t see any on the trail.
Beaver
Up near the wooden bridge, at the edge of the buckthorn forest, I found a single beaver-cut stump.
Since I saw neither beaver nor beaver lodge, I’ll confine myself to a few interesting notes about beaver.
They like aspen (what we call poplar). But they must age it some: I tasted an aspen branch once and it was really awful.
For centuries people all over the world went after two glands just inside the beaver’s anus. They contain an oil that was thought to be medicinal. Since beaver eat willow, the oil certainly has salicylic acid, the basic ingredient of aspirin.
It was believed that male beavers, when cornered, chewed off their testicles. In actual fact, the beaver keeps his testicles and penis inside his body until needed, an eminently sensible arrangement, especially if he’s going to share a pond with snapping turtles.
Before the ice ages there were beavers over 2 metres long.
Beavers eat their food twice when food is in short supply, as it is in winter. Yes, folks, they defecate, then eat their poop for a second go-round. That ensures they get all the nourishment out of the tree bark. For a beaver, “mangez de la merde” isn’t a Trudeau insult, it’s a way of life.
Beavers have rather small brains for their body size. They make good pets, but will chew the legs off all the furniture.
Rabbits
Rabbits (by which we mean the Eastern Cottontail rabbits) are surprisingly uninteresting animals. They eat and get eaten. If they live long enough (most die before they reach their first birthday, and few live to be three) they reproduce like crazy.
A rabbit has a trail that it follows every day. Usually, the trail goes in a circle, so a rabbit doesn’t get to see much of the world before it dies.
Nonetheless, here are the most interesting things I found out about rabbits, but don’t blame me if they’re not all that exciting.
They’re crepuscular and practice coprophagy. You can impress your friends with the words. The first one means that rabbits move around only at dusk and dawn. The other word means they (like beavers) eat their own feces. When it’s time to defecate, a rabbit inspects each pellet as it emerges, and if there’s still nutrient value in it, the rabbit swallows it again. Ecologically, this is a good thing, but you’d have to be a vegetarian and use a lot of spices if you planned to try it.
If there were no losses, one pair of rabbits could multiply to 350,000 in five years. A female is ready to mate a couple of hours after giving birth. By fall, the babies she had in spring will be grandparents.
They don’t dig holes. They crouch in a slight depression in the ground under a bush. In bad weather, they’ll look for a groundhog hole.
The mother visits her babies only after dark, to feed them.
Male rabbits apparently don’t do anything interesting at all, except leap into the air before mating.
The picture above is pretty awful: it seems to show a killer rabbit.
White Oak Trees
White oaks can live up to 800 years, and make wonderful (and very large) shade trees, if you’re willing to wait. Most people aren’t, so they grow red oaks instead.
There’s a book I read, called Oak, which presented a pretty plausible case for early humanity developing civilization among the oak forests in the hills between what are now Iran and Iraq. Acorns, boiled to make them less bitter, are a great source of protein.
Only when the population got too large were people forced to go down to the flood plains and raise grains with the other losers.
The book claimed that, until civilization got underway, the only straight lines that people had ever seen were the ocean horizon and oak planks.
It sounded reasonable to me, but, after seeing that TV show, I also believe that Elvis is alive and hiding in Moosonee.
Oaks are easier to identify in winter than most trees, because they tend to hang onto their leaves till spring.
[[woak2.jpg]]
Crows and Downy Woodpeckers
If you hear a woodpecker in a tree, it’s probably a downy woodpecker, the smallest and most common woodpecker.
I didn’t have a picture of a downy woodpecker, so it was a choice of putting in a picture of a penguin or keeping this short.
If a woodpecker didn’t close its eyes when its beak hit a tree, its eyeballs would pop out of its head.
Crows are thought to be quite smart. However, scientists work only with the ones stupid enough to get caught in traps, so it’s hard to be sure.
Without a DNA test, only a crow knows if another crow is male or female.
A crow’s biggest enemy is an owl, which gets it when the crow is asleep.
Other Miscellaneous Birds
Sorry, but I’m not much of a birdwatcher. James Audubon, who wrote and illustrated all those famous bird books had a simple solution: shoot the birds, lay them on a table, and draw them at your leisure. Some people I know won’t let me do the same, so I have more trouble identifying birds.
I did notice a red-tailed hawk circling the rolling fields, and saw and heard a downy woodpecker hammering at a tree.
There were also several unidentified birds flitting among the trees. If someone’s with me, I make up identifications for them just after the bird flits out of sight. “Did you see that? A variegated finch, female, less than a year old. Oh, shucks, it’s gone now….”
The technique is much the same as providing an age for lichens.
Alternately, most birds can be classified as BTSOM (pronounced “btsom”) birds. BTSOM stands for “beats the sheets outa me!”
You’ll also discover a whole world of BTSOMberry shrubs, BTSOM trees and BTSOMrock.
Queen Anne’s Lace
Queen Anne’s Lace is a pretty tough plant. It’ll grow almost anywhere there are warm summers, a few months of sunlight and enough rain. Given that, it’ll grow in a crack in concrete, so it’s not surprising to see this plant in sunny spots all along the trail.
In winter, all that’s left are the dried seed heads, looking like tiny bird’s nests.
The seeds have been used for centuries as contraceptives and “morning after” medicines. The biggest problem with using Queen Anne’s Lace for anything is that it looks a lot like its cousin, poison hemlock.
It looks a lot like carrot plants, too, especially in the first year (it’s a two-year plant), and that’s no coincidence: it’s generally believed that carrots were bred from Queen Anne’s Lace a couple of thousand years ago out Afghanistan way. Queen Anne’s Lace roots are supposed to look like carrots, but they’re small and tough.
Carrots, by the way, used to be purple or white – anything but orange – until someone bred an orange variety for political reasons a couple of centuries ago.
Chickadee
The first time I walked the full length of the trail section, we stopped in the farm lane and my friend Al held out a hand with some black sunflower seeds.
There were a bunch of black-capped chickadees in the hawthorn nearby, but not one actually came over and took a seed. He’s a tough man, and took the rejection well, although he muttered something about climbing into the tree and grabbing the ungrateful little *&^%&*s.
The “chick-a-dee-dee-dee” song is the bird’s most common one, but chickadees have a whole bunch of other songs, apparently, including one that sounds a bit like “cheeeeese bur-gers.”
In the winter, chickadees flock around in groups of 20 or so, looking for seeds and bugs. Chickadees eat bugs when they can get them, seeds when they can’t. They like spider eggs. And spiders.
To make their nests, chickadees make holes in trees; in winter, when storms come, they’ll find the nests to hide in.
All fall, a chickadee hides food in various places, one item at each place. The part of its brain devoted to remembering where it put things is unusually large. That memory’s good for a month at most. After that, the chickadee has to find enough food to keep warm.
A lot of chickadees die in late winter, when food supplies get low. Native Americans called February the “hunger moon” for good reason. Perhaps had Al returned then, he might have found some chickadees willing to take seeds from his hand.
The chickadee belongs to a group of birds called “titmice” (the word comes from the middle ages and simply means “small birds”).
Al finds a stile he likes better than chickadees
Lichens
Lichens grow on rocks. You can confidently point at one and tell your kids or friends that it’s over a hundred years old. I say “confidently,” because who’s going to look it up?
In actual fact, you can make up any age you want: in poor conditions, lichens can be thousands of years old, but along the trail, with a good growing environment, they can grow up to a centimetre a year.
Lichens are made up of a fungus living happily with some tiny plant that can do photosynthesis, in a symbiotic relationship.
What they talk about, I don’t know. Maybe they lie to each other about how old the passing humans are.
Tracks
The only wild tracks that I find easy to identify are deer tracks, unless you have a good book and a really clear set of prints.
Rabbits and squirrels run by putting their hind feet in front of their forefeet. But the tracks of a gray squirrel look a lot like those of a rabbit. If the set of tracks runs from tree to tree, it’s a squirrel: if not, it’s a rabbit.
If the track is clear enough to show fingers and claws, then it’s probably a raccoon, skunk, opossum, or groundhog.
lennypoet@hotmail.ca
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