With winter taking a while to disappear, there isn't much in the way of colour in parks these days (which is one of the reasons I haven't been actively photographing the trails.)However, I did happen to spot a colourful orange Bobcat off in the distance while walking through the Birkdale Ravine the other day.
Not just any colorful cat either: this one was busy at work cleaning up the damage caused from the recent Ice Storm in December 2013 that affected so many in Toronto over the holidays. A local man walking his pup had mentioned that the damage to the park was catastrophic and sadly most of the larger trees were taken away already.
Birkdale is a 2 km walk which starts north of Lawrence off of Brimley and winds north west towards Ellesmere.
One of the paths of the park is marked by a tall, elegant light standard —
self-sufficient, too, generating its own solar/wind power. Now
that's a great idea. The same man who was taking his pup for a walk
had mentioned that he has been out at 4 am and still saw the lights
generating power. There is plenty of wildlife in and around the creek. This must be why it was chosen as the site of a village inhabited by Iroquoians around 1250 A.D.
Sometime in the early 1950's a group of University of Toronto students had excavated the area to discover varied clay tobacco pipes, tools and sharpened objects. They also found pieces of pottery and long slender poles and bark used to build very large log cabins. It appeared that each cabin had a centre line of fireplaces that were used for both their heating and cooking. They lived off the land by fishing, hunting and growing basic agriculture of squash, pumpkin, corn and beans. Later they found bones of mass graves on a hill side a little north of here called Tabor Hill. (see this blog: Tabor Hill).