Hello again,
I’m sad to say that the river-watching season is coming to an end. As you can see in the above picture (taken on Tuesday) there was only the odd patch of open water on the Ottawa River, at least as far as I could tell from my vantage point at Maclarens Landing (which is little more than a bend in the road – albeit one with a wonderful view of the Ottawa River and the Gatineau hills beyond). Anyhow, I headed down there again this morning, and can report that it’s all frozen over now.
And no, I didn’t test the thickness of the ice. Snow deadens sound, and of course the river’s constant rumble is sealed in at this point. It is pretty quiet here, almost strangely so — at least until the big Stinson truck cruises by, on its way to deliver heating oil somewhere or another.
On the way down, I noticed a good-sized gang (a dozen, or so) of turkeys hanging out in a nearby cornfield. By the time I was on my way back home, they had moved to a ditch by the road. They seem pretty road-savvy – when a truck approached, the group parted ways, some on either side of the road, so that the truck could make its way through.
Afterwards, however, they all flew off in what appeared to be turkey-panic. I guess the whole ordeal is somewhat exciting to the birds.
But boy, those turkeys can actually fly pretty good once they get going. Speaking of which…
RT
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I suppose that the low island in the upper photo is Mohr Island, to which we’ve been trying to arrange a trip with Andre Martel for the past 3 summers, in the hope that our favourite rare Ottawa River Unionid, Potamlius alatus, would be found in the soft sediments in its lee.
The channel of the river is sand-bottomed through here, with another rare Ottawa River Unionid, Obovaria olivaria (Olive Hickorynut), first found on the shore of Maclarens Landing by Joyce Cook in 1962, but not found there in subsequent searches by Andre:
“Following our initial failure to locate specimens along the shore despite numerous dives, we focused all underwater searches based on key habitat preferences displayed by the Olive Hickorynut mussel in other river systems, including: wide rivers, relatively deep water, mid-river habitats, moderate to good water current and sandy substrates. Using these criteria, we focused on the Mohr Island area, located just off of MacLaren’s Landing… an extensive underwater plateau of pure sand covering many square kilometers of river bottom at a water depth of 1.5 to 5 m, in the middle of the river, where water current is moderate. Specimens of Obovaria olivaria were found during the first and subsequent SCUBA dives conducted within that sandy shoal near Mohr Island…. The community of native freshwater mussels in that area of Lac Deschesnes is diverse and abundant. Single shells of the Olive Hickorynut were found amongst hundreds of other live freshwater mussels belonging to a variety of unionid species, including the Plain Pocketbook (Lampsilis cardium), Eastern Elliptio (Elliptio complanata), Eastern Lampmussel (Lampsilis radiata), Black Sandshell (Ligumia recta), and Triangle Floater (Alasmidonta undulata). Density of all unionoid mussel species combined in the area of Mohr Island is high by comparison with that of other rivers, commonly ranging between 40 and 130+ mussels per square metre. However, the density of the Olive Hickorynut mussel is very low, estimated to range between 0.01 and 0.05 individual per m2 of sandy bottom.” — this is from an early draft of the paper about this species in the Ottawa River, which I’ve put as “my website” for this comment. Don’t try to access it by dialup, as it’s a hefty pdf of the whole number of the “Tentacle.”