Anne Klaus, keeper of the Fox Den Trail, soliciting help with.....muffins. I'm a sucker for muffins....

It just felt like one of these good days….right from the early hours.

By the time I got to Ruthven (after volleyball practice at the highschool), it was well above 0 – who would have thunk it in the middle, almost, of December!? I was going to help Anne Klaus with the Fox Den Trail but made the mistake of going into the front office where Natalie sort of suggested it would be a really nice thing if I could open the nets because she was expecting, imminently, a busload of grade 3’s. So I opened the feeder nets just before the kids arrived. The birds were very accomodating (they like grade 3’s) and 17 threw themselves into the nets within half an hour (we banded 14 American Goldfinches and retrapped 1 goldfinch and 2 chickadees).

As soon as the kids were done, we closed up the nets and headed out to the trail. Anne is going to put an extension on it that will run the trail, in a loop, up to a lookout that overlooks Slink Island and the River before turning back toward the Mansion along Rick’s Rill (the new name of the creek that runs below nets 10, 2 and 4 before meeting the Grand). We spent a couple of hours clearing the new section and cutting canes out of the old one. This is going to be an excellent trail in the Spring!

Then it was off to volleyball matches in Dunnville – junior and senior – which we won. It doesn’t get much better than that…..

[PS Nancy reported that she banded 10 American Goldfinches yesterday and had a couple of interesting retraps: 2 American Tree Sparrows, both of which were banded last Winter – one in January and the other in March, 2011. They’ve returned ‘home’ for the Winter.]

Rick