Hi, and welcome to my nature blog.


I'm going to be posting observations, annecdotes and information about plants and animals I encounter in the Ottawa Valley. At some point, I'll throw up some pictures as well. Enjoy.



First story:

A couple of weeks ago, I was moving some firewood for my grandmother. She's getting a gas fireplace installed, so she's sent all her firewood up to my mother's cottage. She had, for some reason or other, a great deal of the stuff, and so it was piled some five or six logs deep. What should I find, four levels in, but a little nest of some kind of cloth, and enough birdseed to fill the feeder. The nest looked to be old, and my grandmother assures me that she hasn't bought that specific type of seed in some years, so I was able to remove it without too much guilt. But what, I asked myself, had decided to make a home in the woodpile? A mouse, I assumed, but mice aren't one species, they're actually a pretty diverse group thereof. Of course, I didn't have the mouse itself handy. Now, my copy of The Mammals of the Eastern United States, is rather old, and probably outdated in terms of range maps, but it DOES go into exhaustive detail. From what I can determine, the most likely candidate is probably a white footed deermouse. It appears, however, to have gone on it's merry way, which is, I suppose, just as well.