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The Macoun Club will be starting up on Saturday morning, September 9th, 2006. The Macoun Field Club is a nature club for youth ages 8 to 18. Sponsored by the Canadian Museum of Nature and the Ottawa Field-Naturalists' Club, our club offers weekend field trips to natural areas around Ottawa, and indoor meetings once a week at the Fletcher Wildlife Garden building during the school year. There are no fees, and you need only come to a meeting to join. We start up on September 9, 2006 but accept new members all year round.
What we did last year:
December 10th: The Thelon Game Sanctuary - "Have you ever been somewhere you couldn't get to by road?" Max Finkelstein asked our group. We thought hard, and couldn't come up with any place farther away than we could walk past a dead-end road. But Max had been in the Thelon Game Sanctuary, 600 miles from the nearest road. If you couldn't travel by float plane, he said, you'd have to paddle. And if you started in the spring from Yellowknife, you might just get there at the start of the next winter. The Thelon is rich in caribou, wolves, and bears, and because it's wide-open tundra, you can see them the same way you can see great herds of wildlife in the Serengeti, in Africa. Max has written books about this and other wilderness places. You can find out more by searching the internet for 'max,' 'thelon,' and 'river.' December 3rd: Tracks and trees -
November 19th: Deer fight! -
November 5th: Lunch by the Indian Creek - Field trip into the Pakenham Hills, an hour's drive west of Ottawa. We spent the first hour exploring an abandoned sandpit, looking for sea shells left over from the Champlain Sea, which washed against the melting continental glacier before draining away 10,000 years ago. A few of these fragile, whitened shells had been washed out of the sand by rain. The species, Macoma balthica, still lives the Arctic. Then it was time to hurry on to a suitable lunch place by Indian Creek. One boy found a crayfish, and it nipped him. Afterward, we had a sketching session, with art paper and pencils, on the slope above a beaver meadow.
October 15th: World of the White-tailed Deer - October 1st: Mushrooms! -
September 17th: Frogs and salamanders -
Juniors (ages 8 to 11) meet for an hour at the Fletcher Wildlife Garden building every second Saturday at 10 a.m., and Intermediates (ages 12 to 13) meet right after them, from 11:15 a.m. until 12:30 p.m. On alternating Saturdays, both groups go on all-day guided hikes. The Seniors (ages 14 to 18) have traditionally met every Friday, 4:30 to 6 p.m., but owing to low numbers, Friday meetings are not currently taking place. Seniors are being invited to attend presentations at the Intermediate meetings on Saturdays. Senior field trips may be on Saturdays, Sundays, and sometimes weeknights depending on when members request them. They are also encouraged to take part in the general field trips that are held every second Saturday.
For more information about the club, contact
Would you like your articles, pictures, or artwork to appear on the Macoun website or newsletter? Email them to mfc-contribute@googlegroups.com! If possible, please save text in Rich Text Format (.rtf), and pictures or artwork in JPEG or GIF formats. You can also give your work directly to one of the leaders at a meeting or field trip. Thanks! Feel free to email me any questions about what to submit or how, or to ask what will be done with your work.
Questions or Comments about the Webpage? This page was last updated on Feb. 11, 2007 © 2007 Macoun Field Club |
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At Macoun
Club 
January 28, 2006: Winter bird identification - After the big migrations,
quite a number of beautifully coloured birds stay behind. Some even chose this
time of year to come to the Ottawa area. Rob Lee and the other leaders showed
members how to use a birding field guide to figure out who's visiting. At
right, a male Purple Finch.
January 14,
2006: Adaptations - What is your favourite animal? How is it adapted to its
environment? Ian MacKay challenged our members to think about things they
already know in new ways. He explored the subject of adaptation with them, in
the context of evolutionary theory and life-history studies. He focused on the
kiwi, which lays a single huge egg, as an example of a biological oddity that
helps us think about what advantages and disadvantages might be inherent in a
particular trait, be it physical or behavioural. (Kiwi photo from "Bone
clones: Osteological Reproductions".)
December 17th, 2005: Snowshoeing at Rob's - Everyone came out to Rob's house
in Lanark County, but never set foot in it. We all strapped on snowshoes and
struck out into the woods across the road. There had been more than a foot of
snow just the day before, so we needed them. There were hardly any of the
animal tracks that Rob had been seeing before the big snow -- no shrews or
squirrels, fisher, fox or grouse. Even the deer had retreated to the more
coniferous forest farther away. We had a good lunch fire and roasted pieces of
deer meat (provided by a neighbourhood hunter). Beyond the woods we came to
White Lake. There was slush hidden under the snow, right on top of the ice, and
it made the cold snow freeze to our snowshoes.
A little fresh snow again at the
Study Area, which showed us the tracks of White-tailed Deer, Fisher, and Red
Squirrel. We fed chickadees and nuthatches sunflower seeds, and watched a Hairy
Woodpecker dig its own natural food (a grub) out of an Ironwood sapling (we're
getting ready to examine the holes at right). Our special project of the day
was to find 
November
26th, 2005: Nature in winter - Steve Wendt, of the Canadian Wildlife Service,
engaged the Junior members in thinking about how the natural world survives
winter. He encouraged us to think about the specific challenges that winter
brings: freezing of water, low temperatures, snow as a covering over food and
shelter. And about how plants and animals have adapted so well that, in some
cases, these problems can become essential to survival.
Field trip to the Study Area, crossing from the
Sarsaparilla Trail in the east to the Study-tree Woods in the west. We have
never had so many Chickadees coming for sunflower seeds all at once -- two and
three to a hand, sometimes! Away from them, we discovered a "witness"
(a Porcupine high up in a tall pine) to a "crime scene", where two
White Tailed Deer had scuffled back and forth, leaving blood spatters on the
snow. Not 50 feet farther, a beautiful Fisher came bounding by us. And that was
just the beginning of the day.
November 12th: Fish in an urban river - Former member Nic
Lapointe (early 90s) came back to tell us how his longtime interest in fish has led him into summer work outdoors. For two years he's been searching for endangered and threatened fish species in the Detroit River, which carries Lake Huron waters into Lake Erie. With a true Macouner's breadth of interests, he began by telling us about the wildlife along the river's edge first -- the birds, baby rabbits, and turtles. He used historical maps to show how almost all the floodplain wetlands have been developed, either for agriculture or urban-industrial uses. The river water is so murky (from wind-blown dust off adjacent farmland) that he couldn't just look for fish, but had to catch them with nets and minnow traps. His project's goal was to identify habitats that were important to fish.
October 22nd: First frost - Field trip to Pakenham. We were
hardly away from the cars when we noticed strange "tracks" in the
fine, silty mud of a puddle almost dried up. They looked like the impressions
of pine needles, which have been falling at this time of year. But the
"tracks" were mysteriously empty. The answer was discovered in a
shady place, where the rising sun had not yet melted the last remaining ice
needles. We had just had the second hard frost of the season. We walked a long
way into the forest, and made three lunch fires on the rocky shore of a
beaverpond. Afterward we explored some broken-down old log barns, in little
fields hidden deep in the forest.
Former Macouner and current leader, Jon Hickman, entertained us with an
imaginative "hands-on" demonstration of how the White-tailed Deer
senses its world, and derives nourishment from plant material we couldn't begin
to live on. Here a young deer focuses its eyes, ears, and nose on something
near the photographer.
Field trip to the Study Area's south
end. Guest leader Otto Loesel, of the Ottawa Field-Naturalists' Club, led a
mushroom identification foray until nearly lunchtime. He showed us lots of
bracket fungi, such as the Red-belted Polypore shown here, and crust fungi,
too. After lunch, we followed a series of previously recorded compass
directions into the big cedar swamp, which took us to the whitened skeleton of
a deer that we had found last winter, freshly killed. We also visited our Study
Trees.
September 24th: Seeds under the
hand lens - Botany Workshop with Martha Camfield, who taught everyone how to
use a hand lens successfully. She had us dissecting maple keys to see the
curled up plant embryo inside, and let us look at the many features of seeds
that make them so interesting. 
Need to
know how to get to the Fletcher Wildlife Garden?