Our next pop-up will be at Maidstone Conservation Area. Join us for an afternoon walk through this beautiful oak hickory woodlot to enjoy the fall colours. The Maidstone Conservation Area trail is a 1.5-km loop and includes a section of trail that borders the Puce River.

We will meet at 1 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 16, in the parking lot off of Lakeshore Road 209 south of Essex County Road 46. The entrance to the conservation area is on the west side of Lakeshore Road 209. The parking area and main trail are a mix of gravel, dirt and boardwalk on flat terrain. There are no public washrooms available at this site.

Provincial COVID-19 guidelines will be followed during the outing and a written safety plan is available upon request. It is expected that those in attendance at pop-up outings are fully vaccinated.

Pop-ups are intended to be informal, casual and social, and will take place at various locations around Essex County and Windsor. We will continue to provide an array of days and times to accommodate members with different availabilities. They will usually be announced a week before the date of the pop-up. They will not have an official leader but rather we hope those in attendance will share their own knowledge since there is such a wide range of experiences and interests within the club membership. One or more members of the Membership Committee will be in attendance to meet at the start of the pop-up. We will also spend some time using the iNaturalist app and the ECFNC iNaturalist Project, so if you have a smart device, we encourage you to bring it along to help identify anything interesting we find and contribute to the project.

If there is light rain, we will go ahead with the outing but if it is storming, the outing will be cancelled.