Exploring Lloyd's River
A view of Lloyd’s River from atop the escarpment (photo by NCC)
When I woke up early on the morning of July 8 in my apartment in St. John’s, it was hard to believe that I’d be in the deep woods of Central Newfoundland that night. Weeks of planning and preparation had been leading up to this day,...
Hunting orchids in Minesing wetland
Eastern prairie white-fringed orchid (Photo by NCC)
As an intern with the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC), I often find myself walking a fine line between work and play. Even the toughest days are balanced by the realization that my workplace typically consists of wetlands, grasslands and...
Not wanted on the island: Combatting common reed on Pelee
Invasive non-native phragmites on Pelee Island (Photo by NCC)
No visit to beautiful Pelee Island is complete without a visit to the beach. The Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) has protected more than one kilometre of globally significant shoreline habitat on the island. This habitat supports turtles,...
Nova Scotian adventures
Danielle Horne in the field (Photo by NCC)
Having spent my summers in Cape Breton, I am no stranger to the fickle weather found here in Nova Scotia. So far, we have been lucky to have mostly decent weather for our field work (so far anyway). Whether it is tromping through the bush in...
Dealing with the periwinkle problem
Hand pulling periwinkle (Photo by NCC)
Jill and I did some follow up to some invasive species removal we did last year at Lathrop. Just a few fragments of the very invasive Periwinkle left! We picked them out by hand, leaving the native mayapple, trillium, Jack-in-the-pulpit and...
Take a second look: Look-alikes in nature offer surprises in the field
Red bartisia (Photo by Kristian Peters, Wikimedia Commons)
It was late on a hot August day. I and my field partner were hiking across the tall grass prairie on one of our newly secured properties when we found a withered little reddish-purple plant. At first glance we thought, “Dang, that looks like...
Many hands make light work: National staff lend a hand in restoration work on the Rice Lake Plains
Micheline Beevis, Christine Beevis Trickett and David Beevis, Rice Lake Plains, ON (Photo by NCC)
On a warm autumn day in 1832, Catharine Parr Traill boarded a wagon “comfortably lined with buffalo robes,” and headed from Cobourg, Ontario into the rolling hills of the Rice Lake Plains. “We now ascended the plains — a...
Tales from the pond - Part 2
Kristyn Ferguson, spring monitoring, ON (Photo by NCC)
I waited over two weeks after that fateful visit to the Creemore pond on the first day of April, when what I had falsely hoped would be the first day of spring. I was sure that after I had had the opportunity to frequently don sandals and T-shirts...
Jetbead: A new threat to conservation
Mhairi McFarlane with leucospora (Photo by NCC)
Conservation is full of mysteries. Recently, my colleague Jill Crosthwaithe and I found ourselves having to turn to gardening literature in order to identify the many non-native, ornamental shrubs and other plants that we kept stumbling across in...
Tales from the pond - Part 1
Kristyn Ferguson out for a snowy day of field work (Photo by NCC)
At a property owned by the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) in the Georgian Bay–Huronia sub-region, a beautiful stream courses through a deciduous forest, providing excellent habitat for coldwater fish species including brown trout, and...
