Mud Lake Menagerie
A last-minute outing in Ottawa led to some serendipitous footage.
It was a lovely day and we needed to get out of the house and soak it in. So we picked a nearby, basically urban walking route in Britannia conservation area, looping around the attractively named Mud Lake (which I think is technically a pond, but maybe Mud Pond was just too diminutive).
It’s a 79 hectare patch and 5km of trails through lakeside deciduous swamp forest abutting a water purification plant. Apparently it’s a well-known birding destination for folks in the city. National Capital Commission says that 269 species of birds have been sighted in the area.
It also turned out to be, hilariously, a hub for the wildlife I had been traipsing all over Ottawa for.
Chickadees and turkeys were the main targets for the trip. I’d hunted around Beechwood for the turkeys, driven out as far as Jack Pine trail for the chickadees, and here they all were around one little urban pond.
The chickadees were, if anything, more domesticated than those at Jack Pine. The official signage for Mud Lake and the Britannia Conservation Area is very clear on ‘don’t feed the animals’ but it didn’t seem to be having any effect on people desperate for a photo of a chickadee in their hand. Or on the chickadees themselves, who’d alight on a branch inches away from you and cheep impatiently for the food you were obviously there to provide.
More surprising than the insistent chickadees, we turned a corner to a flock of a dozen turkeys making use of the same path as us. They strutted by just a few feet away, equal parts caution and bravado.
Turkeys are unappreciated for their beauty, I think. Maybe that bulbous red head distracts from the complexity and subtlety in the rest of their plumage. And when you get right up to one - or rather, when one gets right up to you, the copper rainbow of iridescence really shines through and adds a whole other layer to it. Working on this episode about wild turkeys in Ontario has certainly made me appreciate them so much more - aesthetically and just in general.
I didn’t have any of my gear on me so I had to be satisfied with trying to catch a few shots on my phone. At the very least, I’ve recently made the jump from the iOS camera app to BlackMagic’s impressively featured version - long time coming - so I was shooting those turkeys in ProRes and without all of Apple’s automatic ‘enhancements’ on the image.
That’s it for me and Ottawa for a while - I’m heading home loaded with more good material than I could have hoped for. The next month are two look to be a big crunch work-wise, but I’m also at the moment when I can actually start editing this batch of episodes. We’ll see how that balance gets struck in the next few weeks. Fingers crossed.