Wayne Buck sent along these pictures of a white-flowered Red Trillium (Trillium erectum) photographed in Schmidt’s Woods behind the Wilmot Recreation Complex near Baden.
The White Trillium (Trillium grandiflorum) can change colour – going pink with age, or else sporting green stripes when attacked by a virus. However this Red Trillium is a true white morph. The one giveaway to its real identity is the dark red ovary at the centre of the flower.
Friday, April 24, 2020 Dale and Nina Ingrey
I know we cannot hold our regular WRN outings during this time, however we can still get out by ourselves to see signs of spring and life returning to the land. Here’s a sampling of spring wildflowers popping up through the leaf litter in the Townline Regional Forest northwest of Waterloo – Spring Beauty, Trout Lily, Bloodroot, Blue Cohosh, Dutchman’s Breeches and the Scarlet Cup Mushroom. Townline, on Cedar Grove Road just west of the Wilmot Line, is a small eight hectare mixed conifer and deciduous forest with a stream bisecting it. There is a narrow, somewhat hilly but easily navigable trail covering a good portion of the property that takes you around the forest and back to Cedar Grove Road. Fortunately, although GRCA properties are closed for now, our regional forests are still open as long as we practise physical distancing.
Part of the definition of a floodplain is that it occasionally gets flooded, although normally that happens in the spring and not in mid-winter. This winter the Nith River covered all of the floodplain at our F.H. Montgomery Wildlife Sanctuary.
Graham Macdonald took these pictures on Wednesday February 21, 2018:
Fraser Gibson took these pictures of the aftermath on Friday March 16, 2018:
WRN members Josh Pickering and David Gascoigne spotted a Prothonotary Warbler on May 4 in a woodlot on the University of Waterloo campus. This discovery is only the second record ever for Waterloo Region, the last being in 1997.
Details in the Waterloo Region Record article Rare warbler spotted in Waterloo.