The Egret Article

By Jennifer Nantais

On May 11, Windsor held its 2^nd annual Windsor Urban Birding Challenge to bring together novice and expert birders to celebrate and document avian diversity in the city.  This event is part of an ongoing commitment to maintain the Bird Friendly City designation awarded by Nature Canada in 2022, and to honour World Migratory Bird Day.

The Bird Friendly City certification recognizes cities that have made substantial efforts to protect bird populations through habitat preservation, community engagement, and sustainable urban planning, and provides a framework for creating safe environments for birds, especially during critical migratory periods.

World Migratory Bird Day, celebrated on the second Saturday in May, aims to raise awareness about the importance of protecting migratory birds and their habitats. The day highlights the challenges birds face, including habitat loss, climate change, and obstacles like buildings, light pollution and stray cats. The Windsor Urban Birding Challenge aligns perfectly with this mission, encouraging awareness and community participation in bird conservation efforts.

This identification challenge was organized by the Pelee Island Bird Observatory, supported by the City of Windsor, and sponsored by Vortex Canada. Participants spread out across Windsor’s parks, waterfronts, urban areas and green spaces armed with binoculars and field guides. They documented various species, contributing valuable data to bird conservation projects. The WUBC is still in its early days, and this year’s participants enjoyed a generous prize package consisting of binoculars and a fun collection of nature-themed items. Laura Foy and Andrew Campbell won the grand prize with a whopping 82 species found within the 24-hr period despite rainy weather conditions.

The Windsor Urban Birding Challenge not only celebrated the city’s Bird Friendly status, but it also highlighted the collective effort needed to protect migratory birds.
Events like this help track populations, demonstrate how urban areas can coexist harmoniously with nature, and share our collective love for birds. As the city looks forward to future challenges, the ongoing commitment to bird conservation promises to keep Windsor a sanctuary for birds and a haven for bird lovers.

By Phil Beaudoin 

Botanical formulations,
from the Prairie’s chemically radiant odes,
Emit sky-high projections,
taller than a word’s monument,
to all Avians known.

Living the dreams of a sub lunar Fire Weed,
ensnared in the pointillist mysticism of a light cascading Willow;
The Prairie’s roving medicinal airs,
dapple a mesmerizing skin, bathing where the shade grows;
Fragmenting one’s terrestrial wears,
as original nature roves;
In a whirling procession,
of religiously glowing Oak clones.

The Prairie rides a dreaming peace,
to sublimate human health;
Along the vortice of reasoning, captured in the ornate venation,
of the human vine’s physiological wealth.

Where the anatomy of true scientific diversity,
walks through the theories, secreted in an alchemical night’s spell;
The emanations of the tall grass hissing,
recite nomenclature which so solemnly quells;
Like an Orbweaver Spider-Saint at noon, recalling the phylogenetic patterns,
of an ecological mind’s self.

The Prairie breaths a resonance of speciating diversity;
kept in time rhyming, with the hallucinations,
of a humanoid evolutionary history.

It hunts with an insectoidial mythology,
that was born about one’s thoughts amidst dividing leaves,
unveiling human souls;
While, the modes about which songbirds reproduce like distributed seed
and unified polymorphic terrains, are divining at the presence of,
orchestrally arranged, migrating nodes.

As a Redwinged Black Bird,
the Prairie defends its nest with wrathful vengeance.
For the mere thought of a human trespassing upon its scientific excellence,
is a gesture of inhumanity,
towards the nesting of an infinite existential resonance.

As a biologist,
the Prairie speaks itself into descriptions of biological relevance,
Identifying each bone, each plume, each cell,
like the emancipated body that is the temple of the naturalist;
The future of Earth’s eloquence,
the academic void, which teleports the modern consciousness;
Where permutes the Lepidopteran symmetries,
about cerebral elegance;
The frontal lobe of vegetation’s animal stem,
voraciously consuming, intellectual eminance.

The Prairie foments storms of human thought,
like Early May’s morphology;
Unveiling green charisma, as our psychological time,
continues to bloom the cerebellum’s studies,
with a memorized seasonal veracity.

Like a Massasaugua Rattlesnake,
who’s spirit once stared into the ambiance of Prairie din,
Each species remembers the light that exists,
when biological diversity breaths the greatest wind;
The most elegant air, and the most camouflaged verse,
to have inhaled the cycles of this terrain;
The most medicinal arosol, the most divine sentience of soil,
to have been emitted, with the cognitive seance,
that protects the visionary waters, of a good Prairie brain.

Yes, the Prairie is alive, hydrologically active,
and atmospherically famous, a true champion of the Earth’s aolian din stare;
This is probably why we writhe in its life and live in its force,
responding to its presence, as waveforms of water,
the echos of air;
The sway of a grassland, around the womb that is mothered,
gestating life’s growing cures,
Out of which, the human being, may always be uttering,
a composition for a Prairie that is fare, not accursed.

By Catherine Hogg and Aileen Petrozzi

April 2023 to April 2024

It was a wonderful time to meet our members. Socializing and talk not only about nature but other topics. Contributing to our list of flowers, birds and trees etc.

Thank you to all our members and friends that joined us. Hope you will join us for another year at Spring Garden monthly walk. Starting June 23^rd at 2pm.  Spring garden walk will be the last Sunday of the month going forward.

There were too many highlights of the year. Here is just three that have interesting facts:

Prickly Ash

A source of medicine for our First Nations. (Tooth Ache Tree) This Shrub is used by the pharma companies today. The shrub can grow into trees and belongs to the Citrus family. It is the host to the Giant Swallowtail (source google)

American Ground Nut

Gathered as a source of Food by our indigenous people who sliced and cooked it like potatoes (source I nature)

Magnificent Sycamore Tree

Flower pollen and seed flowers grow on the same tree. Fruit aggregate persists during winter, wind dispersed and frequently reproduced from stumps. (source Trees Canada, John Farrar)

Hope to see you on our walks!

Catherine Hogg and Aileen Petrozzi