MOUNTAIN LIFE - Blue Mountains | Spring 2019

SPRING 2019 ML BLUE 67 words :: Leslie Anthony The late March woods in Haliburton, Ontario, are quiet and sullen. Morning’s blue sky has succumbed to obdurate grey, drawn like a shade from one horizon to the other, painting leafless hardwoods and crusty snow in black- and-white monotones. The thick ice crowning a large beaver pond is barely free of the shore, but water glistens darkly in the few places it has pulled back. Scents of pine and cedar tumble through the air, but the trees themselves look frozen in time. The afternoon pall is an allusion to life- fled-the-land, but a warm south wind smells of rain and I’m pretty sure that later, all hell will break loose. That night in town, people crowd into McKeck’s to watch NHL Stanley Cup playoffs on the big screen. As in most of Canada, springtime here means hockey, maple syrup, and a long- awaited respite from the cold. But while we humans measure spring’s air of renewal in cultural terms, some animals are tied to a more stringent metric: it’s the only time of year an individual might see another of its kind. Naturally, such encounters engender a certain kind of urgency—one that can also get biologists excited. Maybe too excited: while Don Cherry analyzes another punch-up on Hockey Night in Canada , I’m supervising an orgy near Lake Kashagawigamog. Swept on strong gusts, the predicted rain sifts through the forest, coalescing as large drops that tumble from naked branches. Muffled noise in the leaf litter melds with the rain and a growing cacophony from the pond; in the dark, they’re the kind of sounds that make your skin crawl. The night is alive and the ground around me moves. No Hollywood special-effects tech could marshal what I track in my headlamp. THE KINGDOM OF SPRING BIO PHILIAC Amphibians at play, uncensored and uninhibited A yellow-spotted salamander crosses a patch of snow en route to its ancestral breeding pond. PATRICK MOLDOWAN