I log many kilometres on my vehicle, usually to visit family (which is strung out from Lake Erie to North Bay), friends, or to go fishing in places like Owen Sound.  Ideally, I am able to combine both visiting and fishing.  I also almost always have my little Canon Powershot SX 120 IS camera handy, as well.  All of the photographs that I have posted were taken with this camera.   These locations provide terrific photographic opportunity because of the dramatic landscapes.

However, one of my favourite areas to get outside is only a few minutes by car from where I live in Kitchener.  It is called "rare", {www.raresites.org} and it is one thousand undeveloped acres along and near the Grand River, a Canadian Heritage River.   If I need 'to get away from it all', and clear my head without a crowd around, I drive down to rare, where I have never seen more than half a dozen other hikers on any given outing, except for organized events.  Often, I don't see another soul.  However, I do see deer, racoons, turkey, osprey in the summer, bald eagles in the winter, and, extremely rarely,  owls.

I have often written about rare in this place, and it is time to provide a brief recap of what rare is, and is all about.  It was started ten years ago by a group of concerned citizens, who realized that a large area of land between the Blair Road and the Grand River, opposite the town of Preston in the city of Cambridge, was slated for development.  The Speed River meets the Grand in this area, and many species of birds spend the winter in this area because of the shallow water that remains ice-free in all but the coldest week or three of the winter.  Around the turn of the millinium bald eagles started to spend the winter at this confluence, as well as the usual arctic waterfowl, and this was one of the biggest reasons that rare is around today, instead of bridges, box stores, and unimaginative housing.   

Today rare is home to many species of avian and mammalian and a few amphibious and reptilian species, and many trees, shrubs and wildflowers.  Who knows how many insects and arachnids are present?  27 distinct ecosystems exist on the rare conservancy, and many students pass along the trails, from grade school all the way to graduate students working on various projects.  

A year ago some friends and I went canoe tripping up in Killarney Provincial Park, on the northeast corner of Georgian Bay.  We were looking for the exact site from which the Group of Seven artist AY Jackson sketched one of his paintings, Nellie Lake (Hills of Killarney).  We put the canoes in at the hamlet of Willisville on Charlton Lake, and headed for the remote western interior of the park.  A couple of long and mostly uphill portages later and spectacular scenery found us camped  on the shores of Nellie Lake below a high granite ridge.  In the morning, we scaled the ridge, which involved some scrambling-using both hands and both feet to remain attached to the rock-I would not want to get up there in rainy conditions!  A few minutes later, one of the guys found the site, a little ledge above Notch Creek with a view of the hills above Carmichael Bay and the flat plains beyond Frood Lake towards Georgian Bay.  Very rarely have I ever felt history come so alive!  
            It is a remote site, but we were far from the first people to visit the site.  There is a fascinating website which describes one couple's thirty year voyage to find each location which the Group of Seven and Tom Thomson sketched the bases of their paintings.   Visit www.groupofseven.ca to see a comparison of the actual painting and a recent photograph by that site's owner.  The Willisville website listed above also has some very cool stuff about the history of the Group of Seven in the La Cloche Mountains, as well. 

Earth Day is a big event in Kitchener, where I live.  At the Huron Natural Area on the outskirts of Kitchener there are many events to celebrate Earth Day: birdhouse building workshops, hikes along the pond, a reptile house with a cool four foot long northern watersnake and turtles, and a terrific aerial show featuring the falcons, owls, hawks, vultures and eagles of the Canadian Raptor Conservancy.  When I arrived with a cousin and his children in time for the second of three bird shows, only one of the CRC falconers was present; the other was busy coaxing an adult female great horned owl out of a pine tree.  She was successful.  For me, the highlight of the show were the 2 6 week old grey fuzzball great horned owlets-with fully developed talons!  No, wait, it was the clownish turkey vulture.  Actually, and truly, the most impressive bird was Rocco, the 12lb bald eagle with a ninety inch wingspan.  Someday, perhaps, I will get to see his sibling, a female with an almost 9' wingspan!   
        One of the best websites that I have found is the Bird Studies Canada (www.bsc-eoc.org) website, which includes a nifty online eagle tracker.   

Here are 2 sites about the great Georgian Bay.  One is Georgian Bay Forever, a conservation agency concerned about the decline of the Bay, and the other is massasauga.ca, a very useful site for anyone paddling, hiking, or living  around the Bay because it provides easy identification factors to look for when distinguishing an endangered and misunderstood Massasauga rattlesnake from a fox snake or other snake.  One unique way to tell is this: a rattler has vertical pupils, but most other snakes have circular pupils. Use the zoom on your camera to determine this-stay far away, even if it is not a rattlesnake-this way, everyone remains happy!  Of course, if you hear a rattle, then you know what it is.  Just give the snake a wide berth.

Algonquin Park is a great place.  Many books and even more blogs have been written about the 'Dome of Ontario'-so named because it contains the headwaters of 5 great rivers-the Nipissing, the Petawawa, the Tim, the Madawaska, the Oxtongue, and the South- and over 1500 lakes.  230 of those lakes are home to the char known as the brook trout or the speckled trout, and 150 lakes contain it's close cousin, the lake trout.  2 must-visit websites are www.algonquinadventures.com and
www.algonquinpark.on.ca.

Finally, I am a born-again Christian.  I have been blessed with an ever-growing passion for Creation, and for the proper stewardship of this planet.  I am very concerned about Creation, but I am hopeful-and reassured- that the planet will be redeemed in the future, and that will be a planet beyond anyone's imagination!  There is a Christian environmental group that I have recently become involved with, called Arocha (www.arocha.org), and they are active in 20 nations, participating with such groups as Conservation International.  In Canada, Arocha (www.arocha.ca) is active mainly in British Columbia and Manitoba, with field centres in both provinces.  In Ontario there is a small chapter in the Greater Toronto Area, and a new chapter that is active out of Hamilton and Golden Horseshoe Area.