Perhaps you can sympathize with this dog, frustrated with winter because it means all the sticks are buried in snow:

He’ll have to wait a little while yet. Although on the retreat, the snow and ice at Britannia Bay still have some fight left in them. They’re currently in that unpredictable state where one footstep might rest on the surface while the next sinks to the knee. This plucky dog who joined me for a while didn’t seem to mind the drifts, or the water in the small creek:

He had no trouble paddling across, but his young master ran afoul of a “sinkhole” deeper than his gumboots were high. This little creek is the same one that provided some interesting ice formations in previous winters, but no such luck this year.

The best sight of the day was likely the Cardinal here (same as above). He She (thanks, f.) made for a cooperative subject, and kindly tolerated my snooping for a few minutes :

Looks like I interrupted at lunchtime, too. The joy of getting close to birds is in the listening — and not necessarily to the song, but to the quieter vocalizations, the scrabbling of feet on bark, and at last the surprisingly heavy thwip-thwip-twhip of the wingbeats at take-off.

…and for my hundredth post on NwP: Last weekend we rounded up F&A and another friend, rented a couple canoes, and headed over to Gatineau Park. After only a few wrong turns en route we ended up at Lac la Peche.

(For the boat geeks out there: that’s a Mistral 17.5. The other one was a Quetico 17). As you might guess from the photo, it wasn’t a bad day for a paddle — despite downright atrocious weather just the day before. Sometimes it pays to trust the weatherman (never hurts though to pack rain gear). There was a chill to the air, sure, but that’s to be expected at this time of year. And I’d say that the fall colours make up for it:

There weren’t many other boaters sharing water that day; one left just as we arrived (this making for a tight squeeze on the narrow “road” in), and one arrived just as we left. You’d think we had it all planned out! But both had fishing tackle on board — I guess the Lac lives up to its name.

We noticed some nice stonework on the promontory where we stopped for lunch (lamb stew, tea from the hobo-rific Kelly Kettle):

Definitely a place to come back to, and one for the repertoire of go-to paddling spots for those occasional days off. Not that there have been ever so many of those lately; this one excursion has proved the season’s first and last for us. But such are the sad casualties of our respective toiling nowadays.

And what else is there to do but enjoy what you can, and look forward to bright days ahead? I guess you can always take certain precautions; note the use of PFD — safety first!

Being Earth Day, it seems like a good idea to pass along this brief video describing Fred & Aleta’s latest adventure in citizen science:

Looks to me like a perfect mix of art and science, and just the sort of thing I’d like to tag along with if my summer wasn’t already spoken for. Anyhow, you can read more about the goals and scope of the expedition here.