THE WOLF HOWL

Published by The Penokean Hills Field Naturalists - February 2003

 ATTENTION ALL MEMBERS:

The next meeting of the PHFN will start at 7 pm on Tuesday, February 11, 2003, at the Bible Chapel, 283 Mississauga Ave. Visitors and guests are always welcome. Our program this evening will be judging the photo contest so bring your pictures. Please join us for coffee and chat downstairs after the meeting, and don’t forget to “Lug a mug”.

Mission Statement:

The Penokean Hills Field Naturalists exists as an educational and advocacy forum for its members and the community at large to promote interest, knowledge, conservation and preservation of the natural history, habitat and environment of our region.

Penokean Hills Field Naturalists 

P.O. Box 74  

Elliot Lake, Ontario 

P5A 2J6

Web Site Address: http:/www.penokeanhills.ottawaweb.com

IMPORTANT DATES: 2002 - 2003

The PHFN meets on every second Tuesday of the month from September to May.......except in December when we hold our Christmas Potluck.

February 11, 2003        - General Meeting

March 11, 2003            - General Meeting

April 8, 2003                 - General Meeting

May 13, 2003                - Annual Meeting

Newsletters: The club will issue 4 in 2002 - 2003 (September, November, February, and May)

The next General Meeting of 2002-2003 will be held on Tuesday, February 11, 2003. There will be a newsletter issued just prior to this meeting. Deadlines for articles for the May newsletter will be Sunday, April 26, 2003. Email articles to chelshad@onlink.net

President’s Message

Dear Members:

Our current season is two-thirds completed now and although it is into February, there are still some great outings, meeting presentations, and activities to enjoy. The days are getting longer and even though, at present, we don’t have bunches of snow, many of our members are enjoying walks, cross-country and downhill skiing, hiking, and birdwatching.

Coming in May is a special event for our club to host - the Spring conference of the F.O.N. (Federation of Ontario Naturalists). This event is attended by the executive members - generally the Presidents and F.O.N. representatives - of the other naturalists clubs in our region, plus the F.O.N. executive from Toronto. All clubs are brought up to date on things that are currently happening and which may affect us, and also on projects that are being carried on by the other clubs. This will be the second time that Elliot Lake has hosted it and our committee is hard at work making the necessary arrangements.

Also coming in May at our final general meeting for the 2002 - 2003 season, will be an election of members to fill vacancies on our Board of Directors. We suggest to all our members to think about the club and its day to day workings and ask that you think about whether you have some talent, expertise, knowledge, or skill that could be of value to the club. If you have any of these, please contact any member of the current board and let us know.

At this time, I’d like to wish each and every one a very HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY.

See you at our general meeting on Tuesday, February 11, 2003. Come along to help judge the Photo Contest, and be sure to bring along your favourite slides for our Members’ Slide Night.

Happy Birding everyone:

Ev.

YOUR BOARD OF DIRECTORS WOULD APPRECIATE ANY DUES STILL OUTSTANDING TO BE PAID UP IN THE NEAR FUTURE.

The speaker for the March meeting will be Ms Kandyd Szuba of Domtar in Espanola. Her presentation will be “Providing Habitat for Wildlife in Forest Management”.

COTTAGE LOT DEVELOPMENT

A Status Report submitted by Nancy-Jo Wannan

Before the Elliot Lake Residential Development Commission can acquire, develop or sell cottage lots in Elliot Lake, the Official Plan and the Zoning By-law must be amended to allow for this type of land-use. The Office Plan contains the general land-use policies adopted by the Municipality where each statement serves as a guideline for land-use development. The Zoning By-law contains the specific regulations and provisions for developing the land.

It is important to note that, “Nothing in the by-law exempts any person from complying with the requirements of any other by-law in force within the City of Elliot Lake or from obtaining any licence, permission, permit, authority or approval required by this or any other by-law of the City of Elliot Lake. When the regulations or requirements of any department of government impose greater restrictions than the restrictions imposed by the by-law, then the greater restrictions shall apply.” For example, the capacity for each lake was established using the standards and measures of a generally accepted Lakeshore Capacity model under the direction of an Inter-Ministerial Committee including the Ministry of the Environment, the Algoma Health Unit and the Ministry of Natural Resources. Private on-site sewage systems are subject to the regulations of the Ministry of the Environment or its designate. Any alteration of the shoreline such as filling or dredging, shore stabilizations or other alterations including the construction of boat houses, marinas, wharves or docking facilities shall not be permitted without the prior approval of the Ministry of Natural Resources.

The Commission reviewed plans and by-laws related to the development of shoreline and rural estates in the rural zone of Elliot Lake. Members discussed additions and amendments that would either address issues related to current and future development or simplify the process to avoid costly amendments in the future. A final report was submitted to the Mayor and Council in October or 2002 with a recommendation to amend the Official Plan and Zoning By-law 87-40.

An internal review including City staff, legal counsel and Official Plan and Zoning By-law Committee is expected to be completed by the end of January. At that time, the actual amendments and additions will be summarized in a report to Council. Under the Planning Act, Council must formally notify the general public of their intent to amend the Official Plan and Zoning By-law and invite feedback. The Commission has been told that the City plans to host more than on meeting to hear from the public. These hearings are expected to take place sometime in February and will be announced through the local media.

A few weeks ago a strange thing happened in our bathroom at home.

I had been doing some chores and, somewhat typically, I had left a pail of soapy water in the bathroom. I have a habit of starting a job and then getting diverted to another task, leaving the first job unfinished. My wife, thinking I had left it there to be thrown away, emptied the pail down the toilet. It gurgled and bubbled its way down the drain, and my wife was shocked to see a large cloth with which I had been working disappear down the drain with the water. “I didn’t pull the plug to flush the toilet” she explained. “The toilet flushed because of the water I threw down and the cloth just disappeared before I could do anything about it. And it never clogged the lavatory.”

Ever since we cam to Elliot Lake just over a year ago I have been impressed by the excellent water pressure, which is something I never encountered down south in Hamilton.

And, because I’m one of those people who question things, I have often wondered what happens to the sewage when we pull the lavatory plug just as I have often pondered about the eventual destiny of our dump - sorry, sanitary landfill site. Eventually the dump will be full, I assume, and will then be given back to nature. Nature doesn’t take long to reclaim land which we have ceased to use. Within a few years, there will be scrub and trees growing there as though we had never interfered and used it as a recipient for our garbage. Will archaeologists of another era start digging down into the dirt to discover what our life was really like?

That’s why I was excited with the announcement of an official Penokean Hills Field Naturalists outing to the Waste Water Treatment Plant on Scott Road on November 13, 2002.

It was a fascinating, if somewhat disconcerting, outing. Our guide was Bart, an operator at the plant who had once been a driller with one of the mining companies in Elliot Lake. When the mines folded, he went back to college and learned a new trade - operating a water treatment plant.

The outing was disconcerting because I learned for the first time that all storm sewers deposit their effluent into the lakes - and that includes the salt and guck off the roads. I know some municipalities extract the salt from the storm sewers and recycle it, but maybe that wouldn’t be practical for Elliot Lake.

It was also disconcerting because I saw a tank of cigarette stubs which had been extracted from the waste water. Their eventual destination - the sanitary landfill site.

Actually, everybody on the tour seemed quite impressed with the Waste Water Treatment Plant. Because it was designed for a population of 40,000, not all the plant is being used, but what is being used fully conforms to guidelines laid down by the Provincial Ministry of the Environment.

Three main sewage pumping stations, on Horne, Angel and Porridge Lakes, in addition to one zone of gravity flow, form the collection areas for the effluent processed by the plant. The sewage from these pumping stations meets in a large gravity trunk sewer, which flows right into the Waste Water Treatment Plant. Here the effluent is screened and degritted (the screening and grit goes to the landfill) and then undergoes a series of processes, including primary clarification, activated sludge aeration, phosphorous removal, secondary clarification, sludge recycle pumping, chlorination, nutrient reduction and anaerobic sludge digestion.

To make a long story short, bacteria work on the sewage, just like they work in your home compost bin, and the three products - sludge which is trucked to an area near the airport for growing tomatoes, methane gas which is used to heat the plant and the relatively clean effluent which is piped into Esten Lake. Just to be on the safe side, the “clean: effluent is deposited in the eastern section of the lake.

A SHORT GUIDE TO LATIN PLANT NAMES

Around about the middle of the 18^th century, one Carolus Linnaeus, a Swedish biologist, realized that a system was needed to unify the names of plants and animals around the world. He came up with a system which classifies them by genus and species and his system is universally used to this day. Latin was the obvious choice for this system as that was the only universal language at that time and was also the language of science but other languages have crept in, namely Greek.

The method basically uses two words.

The first classification is the “genus” or group and defines all similar species with a common name. Most of these are easy to interpret - Pinus is Pine, Juniperus is Juniper, Populus is Poplar and so on. Genus names always start with a capital and are in italics.

The second name is the “species” and this defines an individual plant within a genus, often describing its colour or where the plant was when it was named i.e. rubra for red, virginiana for Virginia. Species names always start with a lower case letter and are also in italics.

That is the basic system but, of course, other wriggles come into it. Related genera (plural of genus) are gathered into families, based on the most typical genus in that family i.e. Red Oak (Quercus borealis) and American Chestnut (Castenea dentata) both belong to the Beech family.

 And then there are add-ons (not in italics) for sub-species (ssp.), the name of the first person to describe the plant (the large toothed Aspen, Populus grandidentata Michx. was first described by Michaux), variety (var.) and so on.

The advantage of all this is that by using the Latin name, people all over the world are talking about the same plant, whereas using the common local name can lead to all sorts of misunderstanding. You may have noticed that I have limited my descriptions to trees and that is so that people will not be surprised when the above classifications are used during the wildly popular Tree Identity Outing scheduled for Monday 3^rd March 2003. During this walk along the Spine / Spruce trail, 20 or so different species in 7 different families can be found. A list of these will be provided and the group will be challenged to find any not on the list.

Submitted by Dave Young

HARD-WORKING MOTHER OF THE YEAR

It's easy to sum up the child-rearing role of a male Ruby-throated Hummingbird: he doesn't play one. The female builds the nest, sits on the eggs alone, and feeds herself and her young. Meanwhile her mate is either trying to court neighbouring females or chasing other hummers away from some prime nectar source.

In many hummingbird species, the female may start incubating a second clutch of eggs while she is still solely responsible for feeding the young from her first brood of the season. In midsummer, while mom cares simultaneously for both eggs and fledgling young, there doesn't seem to be any males around at all. Where are they?

Mexico!!! That's right, as soon as the mating part of the breeding season draws to a close, males begin to move southward, heading to their winter homes in Mexico and Central America where they will stake out the best territories before the exhausted females and young of the year arrive.

Submitted by Dave Young.

SNOW....THE FALLING CRYSTAL

Snow is a commodity we usually remember for either the pleasures it offers or the disruptions it causes. But what is it....really? How does a snowflake begin its life?

''There is no material of engineering significance that displays the bewildering complexities of snow." As I prepared for my PHFN Outing entitled “Snow Blindness (held Feb5/03) , I came across that matter-of-fact statement in the Handbook of Snow, a compendium edited by the Canadian hydrologists D. M. Gray and D. H. Male. The formation of snow begins when water vapor or a supercooled droplet of water forms an ice crystal, almost always hexagonal in shape, around a nucleus consisting of one of the thousands of minute aerosol particles to be found in each cubic centimeter of the lower atmosphere--clay silicate, perhaps, or bits of volcanic ash, or material of extraterrestrial origin. From that moment on, the life of an ice crystal can be played out in various ways. The crystal may fall to the ground in its original form, as it does in the intensely cold regions of the Arctic and Antarctic. Or, more frequently, the ice crystal may grow into a snow crystal, gaining substance by means of sublimation--water vapor turning directly into ice, without passing through a liquid stage. Its shape, or "habit," will be determined mostly by temperature and the amount of water vapor in the air. As snow crystals descend, they may meet up with one another, forming aggregations. We know these as snowflakes. Or a snow crystal may in its descent encounter supercooled water droplets. Riming can then occur, as the droplets freeze immediately upon contact with a solid body. If the riming is substantial, the crystal may become graupel, or snow pellets.

All this activity has a powerful cleansing effect on the atmosphere--"washout" and "snowout," as two of the associated processes are called. A heavy snowstorm gathers particulate matter to itself and drags it to the ground, thereby preserving, until the snow melts, a sample of the atmospheric chemistry prevailing when that particular snowstorm began--a sample that speaks of climatic conditions generally and may speak more specifically of pollution. In the remote interior of Greenland, where the deposits of snowstorms do not disappear, such records go back a long way. A few years ago researchers at the Greenland Icecore Project drilled a hole through the Greenland icecap all the way to bedrock and extracted a core of ice that, if reassembled, would be close to two miles long. The ice at the bottom of the borehole is believed to have been formed from snow that fell some 200,000 years ago.

            The symmetry of ice crystals was commented upon by the Chinese in the second century B.C. Europeans had recorded the same observation at least by the Middle Ages. The intellectual pedigree of snow scholarship in the West is distinguished. The Dominican scholastic Albertus Magnus wrote about snow crystals in the thirteenth century. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the same subject fascinated Johannes Kepler. "There must be some definite cause," he wrote in 1609, shortly after making the discovery that the planets travel not in circles but in ellipses, "why, whenever snow begins to fall, its initial formation invariably displays the shape of a six-cornered starlet. For if it happens by chance, why do they not fall just as well with five corners or with seven?" In his pamphlet Kepler drew parallels with honeycombs and the pattern of seeds inside pomegranates, but was unable to explain the flakes' hexagonal form. Somewhat later Rene Descartes discerned that branches sprout off each side of the stems of hexagonal snowflakes at an angle of 60 degrees, with an angle of 120 degrees thus separating the branches themselves. The process is complex, but the hexagonal shape of snowflakes essentially reflects the underlying atomic structure of water. (1 oxygen + 2 hydrogen atoms)

For all the scientific awareness of the symmetrical character of snow crystals, the ubiquity of their popular image--the one we see in children's paper cutouts and on bags of ice and signs for motels that have air-conditioning--is a relatively recent phenomenon. What snowflakes actually looked like was not widely known until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the book Cloud Crystals, with sketches by "A Lady," was published in the United States. The lady had caught snowflakes on a black surface and then observed them with a magnifying glass. In 1885 Wilson Alwyn ("Snowflake") Bentley, of Jericho, Vermont, began taking photographs of snowflakes through a microscope. Thousands of Bentley's photomicrographs were eventually collected in his book Snow Crystals (1931). The fact that not one of the snowflakes photographed by Bentley was identical to another is probably the basis for the idea that no two snowflakes are ever exactly the same--an idea that is, in fact, unverifiable.

Ref: A Field Guide to the Atmosphere by V. Schaefer and J. Day

Ref: Handbook of Snow by D. M. Gray and D. H. Male

Submitted by Terry Carr

GENERAL MEETING

Sightings Report Tuesday, January 14, 2003

WHV3n3.html February 2003