In the course of the summer's mussel survey contract for Department of Fisheries & Oceans, we visited Lac Georges, a narrow 2.4 km lake just south of the Ottawa River east of Treadwell. We haven’t been able to find if its origin has been studied, but it’s obviously a relic of some aspect of one of the channels of the greater flow in the Ottawa River when it drained the upper Great Lakes.

On 12 October 1995, Fred visited the Lac Georges outlet at the bridge. (45.61049° N 74.97942° W), and his datasheet describes it:

“a steep steam-mouth valley in clay plain. Upland substrate was clay. The terrestrial vegetation was forest coniferous/deciduous oldgrowth & 2^nd growth: Sugar Maple, Red Oak, White Pine on the oldgrowth (W) side of the stream, Big-Tooth Aspen, Oaks, Aspen, on the second growth side. Human impact on the site included scattered residences. Water at the site was permanent natural slow creek mouth at impounded fleuve. The bottom was clay. Water quality was muddy. Water movement was slow.”

Unionids found at this visit were 8 Elliptio complanata (CMNML 095245), with thick shells, 1 Leptodea fragilis (CMNML 095244), an old broken Lampsilis valve, and a broken alate greenish Pyganodon (CMNML 095246), with nubbly beak sculpture.

The unusual Pyganodon especially has triggered a desire in Fred to work out the Unionid fauna of this unique lake. The unusual Pyganodon (Floater) especially has triggered a desire in Fred to work out the Unionid fauna of this unique lake.

Our 12 October 2020 visit to the boat launch ramp at the other end of the lake, 7.7 km NNE Plantagenet (45.60116° N 74.96078° W) found “the water too high and the banks too vertical to do anything on foot, and too windy and late in the day to launch our kayaks.

The steep clay shores have Soft Maple root overhangs which would be good places to look for Muskrat shell piles, but "NO:Unionidae" were seen. The people we talked to who live next door said they never saw any shells on the shore. These results are similar to those on 29 April 1997 – “The actual creek mouth, Ruisseau-du-Lac-Georges, is trampled by mud-pouters, and flooded to Ottawa River levels with coffee & milk coloured water.”

This distinctive waterbody needs to be surveyed by canoe or kayak all along its shores and the outlet channel at a time of low water levels when the water might be clear, to see what, if any, Unionid mussels can be found.

Naomi Langlois-Anderson (South Nation Conservation) says of fish in her e-mail of 18 June 2020: “We've tried to net it in the past without much luck. But Martin Leduc from Plantagenet told me that Muskellunge move in there in the spring. He told me he's caught some big ones in there. It has a small opening into the Ottawa River and I expect that a lot of fish move in and out of Lac Georges as it suits them. Rose-Marie Chretiens has kayaked there before and according to her it's very nice.”

If you have access to, or knowledge about Lac Georges, please get in touch with us.

One-metre Sylviculture

In the forty-three years we’ve been here, the stands of Cedars ( Thuja occidentalis) have made about forty years of growth, what with some years of drought or of infestation with Argyresthia thuiella, the Thuja Leaf-miner Moths.

This winter Fred formalized a thinning project in one of the stands (44.87064°N 75.70083°W) which had been a thicket back in the day, on the principle of taking out trunks to get the spacing between the remaining trunks to 1 metre (operationally this has been closer to 70 cm).

At first he’d exhaust himself by cutting the 7-15 cm trunks with his brush axe, but he gradually figured out it was easier to use a pruning saw. With the stems this close together none of the cut stems fell, and pulling the entangled branches of a “felled” stem out of the canopy was often more difficult than the cutting had been.

He’d then drag the trimmed log home across the snow. The day after the Scales Nature Park interns had revelled in Mudpuppy Night, they came around and did a lot of dragging-home of Cedar trunks.

With the stems growing this close together, no gaps had been left in the canopy. With this situation relieved, we now hope for a moist spring with few leaf-miners, so the remaining trees can fill in the canopy with new foliage.

The trimmed branches piled up without attracting any Snowshoe Hares until the second of March, no Deer yarded on our land this winter, and evidence was seen of Red Squirrels shredding Apples they’d stored on the branches of trees.

Cottontailery

Last year we had a Cottontail ( Sylvilagus floridanus) or two around (probably a byproduct of not having a Dog, even though there is a big burly feral tom barn Cat), and on 28 May 2020 we briefly saw a small Cottontail between the houses, but in the early winter of 2020 we didn’t see any tracks around the houses. This, combined with not seeing any Snowshoe Hare tracks in our nearer Cedar bush, had led us to wonder "where have all the rabbits gone?"

But on 25 January Fred was coming back to the house from doing some sylviculture in the Cedar bush, and saw a Rabbit pellet near some Squash we've put out beside some Deer remains (to see if the Crows that have been processing the Deer offal would also peck at the Squash), and then as he came in towards the houses, there were pellets and Cottontail tracks and their orange-brown pee spots all around the backyard Apple tree.

A little branch that had broken off the Apple tree was gone, the shoots from the rootstock were nibbled, and it looked like the rabbits had been processing Cedar branchlets that were scattered over the backyard as a byproduct of the sylviculture.

Through February there were Cottontail tracks around the back yard, and a path going under a low-branched Spruce tree to a shed behind the neighbours, suggesting this was where the bunnie was spending the nights. With more snow in March we saw a couple of instances when the nibbler had stood up on the deeper snow to trim off the lowest twigs of a couple of Apple trees.

Then on 24 March, with the snow gone, Fred went into his Xanthoxylum americanum (Prickly-Ash) thicket[1] which is growing up around failing Apple & Manitoba Maple trees, and found the numerous sprouts browsed down at about 50 cm height all through the grove, and one pile of Rabbit scat, as if the Cottontail was mostly hanging around here, and browsing the shoots at or a bit above the level of the snowpack. The also-abundant Rhamnus cathartica (Common Buckthorn) shoots were noticed to be browsed only at one point.

We’ve seen Rabbit browsing on Prickly-Ash several times before, and it’s easy to imagine that while the thorns may deter Deer, that Rabbits can nibble around them. Thinking of how the fruits can give a sharp hot flavour to food, we've chewed a bit of the bark and found that it numbs the tip of the tongue with a prickly sensation the same as the fruits, with a sort of "green" taste.

Have others observed Rabbits or other species browsing on Prickly-Ash?

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[1] This is a stand where he’s testing his hypothesis that “real foresters” should be able to grow Prickly-Ash or Pagoda Dogwood (Cornus alternifolia) up to sawlog size.