Canada Day

[Frederick W. Schueler]

Everyone,

The internet advises not celebrating this Canada Day, because "there's
nothing worthy of celebration there. Mass graves of children, horrendous
traumas and ongoing harm... All eyes should be on how our government is
continuing to destroy and disturb Indigenous peoples - putting their
lives and families in harms way." Similar calls to lament current
policies deplore record-breaking temperatures and continued support for
fossil fuel use.

One way of looking at this is that these objections would apply to
calling the holiday "Dominion Day," which celebrates the colonialist
infrastructure and the apomorphies of distinction from the States, but
that perhaps the government accidentally shot itself in the foot when
they changed the name to Canada Day, denoting the country, rather than a
structure of human occupancy & self-congratulation (the national
expression is "sorry," after all).

It will be a good sign of solidarity with indigenous people not to
detonate or attend fireworks this Canada Day, and instead, as we're
asked, to put candles out in front of residences in the evening.

During the day we should each go out to some place where we can think
about the history of the chosen site in relation to the fact that People
have lived here ever since deglaciation, with an ecology that has had
human management and direction from the beginning.

We should resolve to respond to the crises of extinction & climate
change by all working together to change our management of Canada to
provide habitat for our biota & to take up carbon in the organics of
agricultural soils, the growth of trees & reduction of lawns in settled
areas, net growth of diverse fire-resistant forests, expanded wet- and
peat-lands, and protections for permafrost, glaciers, & sea ice, while
winding down the combustion of fossil fuels.

So perhaps a proper celebration will be a description or photograph of
each chosen site, with a few sentences about its post-glacial history of
management or abuse, and a vision of how future management might
contribute to making 49.6°C a thing of the past.

fred.
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Frederick W. Schueler & Aleta Karstad
Fragile Inheritance Natural History
Mudpuppy Night in Oxford Mills - https://www.facebook.com/MudpuppyNight/
NatureMatch concentration game - https://naturematch.ca/
'Daily' Paintings - http://karstaddailypaintings.blogspot.com/
6 St-Lawrence Street Bishops Mills, RR#2 Oxford Station, Ontario K0G 1T0
on the Smiths Falls Limestone Plain 44.87156° N 75.70095° W
(613)258-3107 <bckcdb at istar.ca> http://pinicola.ca/
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[rmb...@istar.ca]

I am celebrating Canada Day, not with fireworks (always found these
too loud, too wasteful, too much paper debris, too much frightening of
pets and wildlife), but with sober reflection. I celebrate that we
have a free country in which we can openly discuss our history, we are
not under a regime that wishes to rewrite and dismiss shameful aspects
of our past, but we examine it openly, and have the opportunity to
learn from it. My parents grew up under the Nazi regime, all 4 of my
grandparents were on the Gestapo lists for eventual extermination, one
great aunt was murdered for speaking out, my grandfather had 2 murder
attempts on him for not belonging to the party. My Austrian mother
was arrested at midnight, dragged from her bed and interrogated by the
Gestapo because of a letter that she had written to her mother
commenting on how Grandma was lucky to have grown up in a time when
she could speak freely, the Nazi woman who ran the local post office
opened it and gave it to the Gestapo. They had Mom's i.d. papers and
told her that she had Hungarian and Croatian, that doesn't make for
good Germans. My mother replied "Is that so? Were you able to choose
your parents? Not even Jesus Christ had that privelege." That earned
her a couple punches to the head. It only served to pound into her
the value of racial equality, and she was always outspoken about
injustice along these lines. It would pain her to the point of tears
had she seen what is being revealed today, some native friends she
made in Hamilton had told her some of their experiences, but even they
didn't tell her the worst of it.

Yes, I celebrate that I now live in a peaceful natural setting, my
father had the foresight to buy the property and we have preserved it
as much as we can.

Where do we as Canadians go from here? It is far beyond time that we
demand action on the destructive forces both to the environment and
the social order. A bit of red and white cloth hanging halfway up a
flag pole is just another symbolic gesture, it's time to demand
positive action.

End of rant, climbing off my soapbox. I have daylilies in bloom, birds
singing, greenery all around, when I'm done today's workload I shall
wade in the lake and enjoy it. I'll see if I can grab a couple photos
to share.

Rose-Marie

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[Fenja Brodo]

That was a beautiful letter written by Rose-Marie.
We too feel lucky to be living in Canada.
Fenja

https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/naturelist/20210701134032.14564ugg4acn63gw%40webmail.ca.inter.net.

[Frederick W. Schueler]

On 01-Jul.-21 1:40 p.m., rmb...@istar.ca wrote:

> I have daylilies in bloom

* and for the day we can consider their orange to be a memory of the
residential school victims.

fred (the colour orange certainly has a striking variety of political
burdens to bear)

[I Macaulay]

Yep, everything from Elephant food to Husqvarna.   And my favorite color with Black, Grey or Brown.

However as for using a specific color as a genetic symbol, I have some reservations.

Lets start by hiring some water specialists to get water to these native populations and move on from there.

No more Cash giveaways.   Who will start the collection and begin the process.  

Sarchasm is my Fort eh!  (well at least a brick or two in me Casa)

Ian

Senility has been a smooth transition for me.

Ian Macaulay   Carp, Ontario
Open at 10:AM   Close at 5:00 PM
45.2397 N long: 76.0991 W Elv 137 M UTM
    Don't Forget to Save the Stamps

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[Frederick W. Schueler]

On 01-Jul.-21 8:18 a.m., Frederick W. Schueler wrote:

> During the day we should each go out to some place where we can think about the history of the chosen site in relation to the fact that People have lived here ever since deglaciation, with an ecology that has had human management and direction from the beginning.

* ...so I've gone out to out Nutrient Depletion Glade, which is an
opening in what's grown up into an area of thickets of Thuja
occidentalis Cedars with lanes and openings of bare and mossy areas
between them.

We began to think about the nutrient status of this habitat around 1981
when we buried a road-killed Cat there, and saw a pale green patch of
dense grass (of a species I'm now going to buckle down and identify)
over the burial site. The soil was shallow over limestone bedrock, so it
was easy to visualize hungry livestock having been pastured on sparse
vegetation, and then defecting the residue into barns where it would be
used on gardens near the houses.

We then heard the archetypal eastern Ontario story of Loyalist settlers
burning the trees as they cleared the forest cover, and extracting the
potash to export it as the first crop from their cleared land, thereby
losing the mineral nutrients accumulated by the forest over thousands of
years.

In 1998 we planted some Opuntia fragilis cacti (descended from an
Okanagan pad that attached itself to Aleta in 1989) in the "shallow/bare
soil limestone flats among Thuja clumps" here, and these survived for a
while, but were gone by 2004. Then in 2007 the way other areas of our
land were growing up alerted us to the idea that we could make this
clearing a sort of memorial to the low nutrient status of our land when
we moved here, and we started to call it the Nutrient Depletion Glade,
and to remove nutrients in the form of Cedars cut out of the clumps,
Cedar branchlets swept up under the trees in the fall, and removal of
any Fox or Grouse droppings which happened to be left there.

Aleta has a painting of the south border of the Glade -
https://karstaddailypaintings.blogspot.com/2017/03/spring-snow-among-cedars.html
- and I've taken some photos which I'll post when this is a
doingnaturalhistory post. About 30% of the glade floods in some springs.

Today there was a sparse flowering of the little pale-blue Lobelia
spicata, with the blooms of the few Penstemon digitalis and Balsam
Ragwort from earlier in the spring faded. These three species are more
common here when a damp spring follows a moist summer. Early in the
spring there are a few Taraxacum palustre Dandelions. These herbs, and
some other species are sparse on the ground, with the small dense
patches of Grass, lots of bare soil, areas of flat moss, and patches of
grey lichen.

In some years there's a scattering of shells, and a few adults, of the
introduced Cepaea nemoralis snails in the glade, and we've found a
couple Novisuccinea shells, but when the spring flooding floats the
fallen Cedar branchlets into drift there are never any little snail shells.

One of the features of much of eastern Ontario is the absence of species
which haven't been able to reach habitats created by secondary
succession. I've long nattered about the necessity of introducing forest
floor herbs to plantation and secondary forests, and we're wondering if
we should or could introduce alvar plant or snail species which might be
adapted to the glade.

[Stewart Hamill]

On 7/1/2021 9:57 PM, Frederick W. Schueler wrote:
> our Nutrient Depletion Glade

When I came here to Wolford Centre in 1976 I noticed a tiny field near
the house which had been scraped bare of its topsoil. I surmised that
they had used the soil to cover the recently-installed septic tank and
bed. This field became my compost yard as I attempted to restore its
nutrients and soil cover.

It has a tiny shallow vernal pool which in the early days we used for
rafting and skating with very small children.

Over the years I've dumped in this field:

rotten lumber, waste wood, pruned branches, kitty litter, ashes,
carcasses and body parts from many individuals of a variety of species
of animals (which brings in the Turkey Vultures after our chickens are
processed).

The field has now almost entirely returned to its original cover of
White Cedar, which apparently can grow just about anywhere around here.
I'm a strong believer in letting nature take its course and I avoid
introducing plant species (except for the plantation at the back which
is now a forest) in order to observe and document when the native plants
get back here on their own.

Stew

[Frederick W. Schueler]

* this year our "place where we can think about the history of the

chosen site in relation to the fact that People have lived here ever

since deglaciation" will be the Bishops Mills Cheese Factory, with its
history of explosion & fire -
https://issuu.com/habitfive/docs/bishop_smillsbook2022-10_compressed/s/17124164
- as well as a probable indigenous canoe portage around the shallows of
the creek upstream of the factory. The site is now owned by the
municipality, and we'll be looking towards the future in assessing the
Buckthorn and dying Ashes, cutting back any Japanese Knotweed -
https://ngtimes.ca/worlds-largest-female-invades-the-cheese-factory/ -
reclearing the path Tom Graham & I cut to the canoe launch site,
planting a couple of Swamp White Oak seedlings from Clay Shearer,
mapping out a site for an Amphibian breeding pond, and seeing what can
be done to make it a demonstration area for native biodiversity.

fred.
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Frederick W. Schueler & Aleta Karstad

Fragile Inheritance Natural History - https://fragileinheritance.ca/
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6 St-Lawrence Street Bishops Mills, RR#2 Oxford Station, Ontario K0G 1T0
on the Smiths Falls Limestone Plain 44.87156° N 75.70095° W
(613)258-3107 <bckcdb at istar.ca>

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