By Howard Williams

Over the last 30 years, Dave Kraus has led 25 field trips to Pelee Island for Essex County Nature members.  We spent two days there and were capably bussed around the very bumpy roads by Linda Froese to nine stops and kilometres of slow road traverses, hunting for birds and wildflowers.  For Carole and I, it was our first visit to the island.  We managed to identify over 57 bird species, and over 20 plant species.  Warblers were perhaps the main draw for this trip, but wildflowers on the forest floor at Fish Point was also delight to behold.  The two photos are of White Trillium and Blue Phlox.

Bird species were much harder to photograph because many were hyperactively chasing bugs or were easily scared off by the crowd of 16 people that were anxious to get a good look at or photo of them.  This Brown Creeper was spotted with an afternoon snack in its beak.

On the Saturday evening we gate-crashed a Pelee Buzz group led by John Ambrose who helped with plant identification in the Stone Road Alvar.  Ryan Wolfe showed us the way in which snake habitat is being encouraged and tried to discover snakes for us, but they were hiding.  Ryan therefore delighted the audience by taking a number of captive snakes from cloth bags and let us handle and admire them, see this link to find out more about his graduate work: https://canadiangeographic.ca/articles/racing-for-survival-ontarios-blue-racer/.  The photo is our intrepid leader handling the Blue Racer like a professional snake charmer.  Not impressed by the charmed snake, Tracey Colenutt stared into the distance, wishing we had spent more time examining the relatively uncommon trees that we had just seen in the alvar, including Fragrant Sumac and Prickly Ash.  Tracey was a fine resource when it came to tree identification.

All in all, the trip went without hitch, was full of people asking questions and providing answers when their expertise was needed.  Many thanks to Dave for putting on this trip – unforgettable.