The Great Outdoors - Kawartha Highlands Wildlife

Most of the wildlife that you're going to see at Kawartha Highlands Provincial Park is wildlife that you could see close to home, too. But there's something about being out there in their habitat that just makes you appreciate it so much more. Tim says that he's seen black bears on the shore of Cold Lake. I would have loved that (until we went to bed, that is) but we didn't see any. We did see at least one loon pair on Cold Lake that paddled around our island the entire weekend. There were lots of ducks and lots of rock bass right beside where we pulled up the canoe. Tim found this little guy sunning on a rock right next to where we hung the hammock:

Turtle!

Teeny tiny feet! (As he glares at me.)

He's a Midland Painted Turtle.

We also saw a number of Northern Water Snakes. The biggest one we saw was on the canoe to Cloudy Lake. He was as big around as my wrist and three or four feet long. These snakes aren't dangerous at all - even the ones we came super close to didn't try to bite, just to get away. If you laid your hands on one, though, they'd probably try to bite you. They aren't poisonous.

Tim tried to catch this one, but they're pretty squirmy in the water. 

Besides the loons and the ducks, we heard a few other distinctive birds. Tim is completely in love with the 'Who-cooks-for-you' call of the Barred Owl. We heard it a lot at night. He was significantly less enthused about the loud and repetitive call of the Whippoorwill. It obviously had a nest nearby, because we heard it all night on Saturday. It was particularly funny - Tim was talking about how annoying he finds Whippoorwills when a mid-sized bird flew into the grasses right next to our campfire. He said something along the lines of 'Wouldn't that be funny if that was a Whippoorwill?' It almost immediately called out 'Whip-poor-WILL'. Tim was NOT pleased. There was even discussion of where the nearest projectile was if it came back. It inspired me when we had our campfire singalong on Sunday night, though, as I pulled out an old Randy Travis song:

"My love is deeper than the holler,
Stronger than the river,
Higher than the pine tree growing tall upon the hill.

My love is purer than the snowflake that falls in late December,
Honest as the robin on a springtime windowsill,
And longer than the song of the whippoorwill."

The long song part is VERY accurate.

We saw a really cool bird that neither of us recognized in the marsh on the way to Cloudy Lake. Tim originally thought it was a heron (I thought it was a log). But it had a barred throat and was a weird configuration. Then when we were coming back it started calling. It would swell out it's throat and then make this deep 'oonk-a-chunk' noise. When I mentioned it to Derek at work, he knew instantly that it was an American Bittern.

The 'log' watching us paddle by.

We chased a beaver in the marsh for a while, but the crafty bastard kept going underwater and getting away. I really wanted to hear him do a warning tail slap. 

We saw LOTS of bugs as well. Water bugs, June bugs, dock spiders, black flies, horse flies, dragon flies, mosquitoes, mosquitoes, mosquitoes. I was also pretty enamored of this little guy:

Longhorn beetle