Riverdale Stewardship: August 2013

Thursday, August 22, 2013

Drought

The site is very dry this week, we haven't had any rain for more than 2 weeks now. We needed to clear up a lot of dead tree branches at the back of the site and we also did a lot of mulching to try to add moisture to the trees.

No water monitoring here.

The pond is so dry now. I remember the first week of stewardship, there was a duck swimming here.

It's amazing that the aquatic plants hold up even without water.

We identified a new plant I hadn't seen before. It's a smartweed and there is quite a bit of it around the pond.

There is still a lot of stinging nettle. We've had to deal with this a lot this season.

But the golden rod colours start to show, I really love these.

Friday, August 16, 2013

Back to Riverdale Farm

This week, we went back to Riverdale Farm to take care of some more invasives. Stinging nettle is pretty much one of the worst at this site. We also worked on Japanese Knotweed and Burdock.

As usual at this time of the year, the sanctuary pond is pretty murky and full of duckweed.

Some of the other ponds are still quite clear.

The slopes are covered with English Ivy.

Lots of ducks in the ponds.


Black-crowned night heron.

Stone wall that leads to the Monkey House. I'm just back from a trip to England and this wall reminds me of the stone walls and fences of the English countryside.

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Benthic invertebrates

Last Monday, it was time again for the Benthic invertebrates workshop at The Brickworks. It used to take place at Riverdale Farm but the ponds are so murky there, it was always very hard to find any bugs. So, for the second year in a row, the workshop was held at this different location.

I'm posting here some pics of the evening. We found some 10 different species of bugs which means that the results were pretty good.