The Ravine Birds

The creek in the ravine is really low now. Despite which, that brace of mallards is still hanging around. Why, we cannot imagine. On a clay base, the creek is fairly unproductive. What are those ducks eating, we wonder. It's quite different for the robins, there in great numbers, running alongside the trail as though they're ground creatures and not creatures of the air and the wind.

But nature doesn't appear to pride herself on moderation. She delivers up many beautiful days for our pleasure, equal measures of sun and rain. To offset the disequilibrium of inordinately heated summer days when we wilt with heat and high humidity. Or those times when day after day we are visited by unrelenting downpours, when to look out a window appears as though we're looking into an aquarium.

And that's when the creek in the ravine runs deep with water and detritus, all rushing down to empty into the mighty Ottawa River. When the creatures of the forest seek shelter from the relentless rain, and when we are loath to remove ourselves from the comfort of home to venture out into the ravine.

This day, though, the atmosphere is blessed with moderation. There are goldfinches weaving their way through the branches of trees, and a white-throat lets loose its praise of the day, again and again, joined by a cardinal also pleased with this day's beauty. Cowvetch is now in bloom, sending its slender searching fingers above and around daisies and clover, adding its bright purple to the colour scheme.

Damselflies, their bright iridescent purple bodies glinting in the sun, hover around the banks of the creek, joined by a multitude of dragonflies, lilting here and there, on the lookout for tasty morsels of mosquitoes, those little pests that have already taken their portion from our tender skin.

There is hawkweed in abundance now, single-headed and multi-flowered, among anemones, and fleabane with their perky pink heads. The thimbleberry bushes have begun to flower, their deep pink heads aglow, soon enough to become tasty little red berries eager to be eaten by the casual bypasser.

Button and Riley have sniffed out something that appears to be completely irresistible to them. They park themselves side by side, immobilized by the splendid odour to which we are immune. Partners in a kind of olfactory ecstasy denied us. We can live without it, given how irresistible they find aged scat.