Everything But A Turkey
A hike out into Crown Land near Georgian Bay.
EPISODE NOTES
TRANSCRIPT
I was recently spending a few days on a small island in Muskoka. I had visions of being able to shoot beautiful footage out the window from the comfort of a cottage. But the lake seemed a bit too overrun with power boats and jet-skis for the wildlife to come out in force.
Don’t get me wrong, the whole weekend was super pleasant. I even got to write this narration while a chipmunk climbed all over me looking for peanuts. But it seemed as though I’d have to go a little further into the wilderness for anything really wild.
That’s what got me in a canoe and paddling to a tract of crown land nearby, where I hiked in without a plan but, thank god, with a GPS signal. No big discoveries, but a couple of beautiful feathers.
Any guesses who this one’s from?
I think this is from a Northern Flicker, a beautiful species of woodpecker I’ve never seen in person. They’re so widespread they’ve accumulated more than a hundred colloquial names, like yellowhammer, clape, gaffer, gawker bird, heigh-ho, wake-up, walk-up, wick-up, and yarrup - really scraping the bottom of the barrel there.
How about a guess for this one:
It’s from a wild turkey! They’re one of those rare re-introduction success stories in Ontario, nearly hunted to extinction, re-introduced, now doing much better. The closest I got to one on this trip was some flapping in the underbrush.
But, as a consolation prize, as I was hiking out through a meadow, a turkey vulture came swooping in from the tree line, made a few circuits and dives and landed on a nearby branch. I didn’t have my telephoto with me so this is the best I could do. There are so many cool things I could tell you about turkey vultures to end this video. Or I could just tell you that they poop on their own feet to cool down. Yeah, let’s go with that.