About Hastings County, ON

Up here in Ontario we are in the perfect season for making maple syrup ... cold nights, sunny days ... beautiful!

And what good country boy wouldn't feel the urge to get out there and continue a tradition that goes all the way back to beyond recorded history when the natives started to gather maple sap in birch bark containers?

http://www.canadianmaplesyrup.com/maplehistory.html

So it' simple enough:

You drill a hole into a sugar maple tree (or 2 or 3 depending on its girth), put a metal tap in place, hang a bucket with a lid to keep rain and bugs out, then settle back to listen to the steady drip, drip, drip, as the sap is collected.

Anyone who knows what they are doing has a sugar shack outside where they heat the boiling pot or pan with wood. It takes a lot of boiling - 40 gallons of sap boil down to just one gallon of syrup.

But, if the person doesn't know what he is doing (like I didn't), that person might be tempted to tell his kids, "We'll just boil it on the stove."

BIG MISTAKE!

We had three taps on a large maple beside our home, and they produced well. The stove was kept going all day long, and it soon became apparent that our house had a humidity problem. Like, drips-coming-down-from-the-wood-ceiling type humidity. So, we end up having to open the windows, get some fans going, and turn the heat way up because we were literally blowing all our warm air outside. This lasted for about 2 weeks until the taps decided to dry up.

Yes, the syrup was excellent, but I have no idea how much is cost us in heating and electric bills. Certainly much more than going to one of our spring MapleFest celebrations and buying a jug.

This year ... I'm resisting the urge.

When I was a youngster growing up in Ontario, Canada, we used to hear Thanksgiving stories (likely from the US), about Thanksgiving being celebrated by eating a turkey. This wasn't the kind of turkey we saw wrapped up in plastic in the grocery store, though, it was a wild turkey - something that none of us had ever seen.

Now when I go for a drive near my home north of Belleville, Ontario, it's common to see flocks with dozen of turkeys. So ... what happened?

In the mid-1980's conservation officers north and south of the Canada-US border were looking at two problems. If you haven't hear it before, your word of the day can be "extirpated". When an animal that used to be common in an area can no longer be found in that area, it's not "extinct", because it still lives somewhere else on the planet, so we say it is "extirpated" from that region.

South of the border, specifically in Michigan`s Upper Peninsula, moose were extirpated. Up here in Ontario, wild turkeys were extirpated. And so, they agreed to swap Moose for wild turkeys. Sorry, no ... I don`t know what the exchange rate was at that time.

So, how did that work out? Pretty well, for both sides.

In Michigan, this site:

http://www.michigandnr.com/publications/pdfs/wildlife/viewingguide/up/17Moose/index.htm

reports,

"In 1985 and 1987, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources captured 59 moose in Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario. All were released in Marquette County just north of Van Riper State Park. This small herd has been growing slowly and has expanded its range in the Upper Peninsula (U.P.)."

You may want to check out the pictures on that site.

Up here in Canada, the turkey have expanded their population to over 100,000! - with mixed reviews from conservationists and farmers.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/ottawa/story/2008/03/11/wild-turkeys.html

My reason for sending this story along is to celebrate the fact that, with all the times human activity affects natural system so badly, it's good to see an instance in which clever people managed to fix some of the problems we created earlier.

Bob Foster

YourHomeinQuinte.com

Well, I think my first draft of this must have gotten lost out there between all the zeroes and ones, so I will try this post again. Please excuse me if it turns out to be a double posting!



Sunrise taken at Moira Lake near Madoc, Ontario, Canada.

The ice is just beginning to melt, so it will take a while until we have this view again. Still, it's something to look forward to.

Feel free to copy the picture if you wish. I only ask that you do not sell it or represent it as your own. Credit is not required.

Ready for some good economic news?

I know I am, so I was delighted to see this article in our local newspaper last week:

http://www.intelligencer.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=1458779

In January and February of 2008 building permits in Belleville, Ontario amounted to $2,428,908.

With timing that is especially fortunate given the current economic crisis, the Canadian Federal Government has started a major renovation project on its property at 11 Station St. in Belleville that will cost $8.5 million. This boosts the overall value of building permits issued in January and February 2009 to $11,288,100, an increase of 365% over the same period last year.

I'm sure that plans for this have been in the works for a long time, but having this project proceed now is a stimulus at just the right time.




City Hall, Belleville, Ontario

I must admit that I have very little experience in re-reading books. Most often when I finish a good book, I like to think about someone who would enjoy it and give it to them. Passing it along means that it can be doubly-enjoyed.

One book I decided not give away, though, is "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time" which was first published in 2003. The author, Mark Haddon, take us to a place we can never visit on our own - inside the mind of a young man with Asperger's Syndrome.

Haddon manages to do this so effectively that reality, as Christopher John Francis Boone understands it, makes sense for us. The behaviour we would have dismissed as being bizarre has meaning within his experience, and his outlook on life challenges us to examine the assumptions on which we have based our own.

After a few years I have picked up this book for a re-read, and I find that it is still just as fresh and compelling as it was when I first received it. If you haven't found the bright red book with an upside down cutout of a dog on the cover yet, you are in for a treat.