Long-time Westport residents remember life before the park

 To Pat Brown, Foley Mountain has always meant freedom.

Born at the base of the famous ridge in Westport, ON, the 85-year-old spent her childhood in the 1940s and 50s roaming the wild lands and open cattle pastures that overlooked Upper Rideau Lake.

Any chance she got, she'd head up the footpath in the morning and return home when the Catholic church bell rang at 6 p.m.

"I could have been anywhere up there," Brown laughed. 

Sometimes she would drag her dolls up the mountain to play house on a carpet of pine needles. Other times she'd dress up and perform elaborate concerts for imaginary audiences.

"I don't know who I expected to come out of the bushes to watch," Brown smiled.

To think Rebecca Whitman once planned to be a doctor.

Today, Foley Mountain's long-time site supervisor can't imagine doing anything but her dream job: living on Westport's beloved wild mountain and delivering outdoor education programs for hundreds of school children, day campers and families each year.

"I look at my life and think it's a dream," said Whitman, who has also been raising her three children on site since she and her husband arrived 16 years ago. "It's just such an ideal scenario for us. It comes with its challenges, but it has so many benefits." 

It was a cold, crisp day in December 2019 when Rosemary (Rose) Fleguel, RVCA's resident butternut expert, pulled up in her truck to meet North Grenville woodlot owner Warren Dool at his 47-acre property. Her mission? To find any and all living and healthy butternut trees - a cause to which she has dedicated the bulk of her long career.  

Living an unexpected life in a public park

Foley Mountain is home to so many creatures: the chipmunks and beavers, the dragonflies and salamanders, the famous grey rat snakes, the red-tailed hawks.

It's home for the Forest School students who, after just a few weeks, feel like part of the ecosystem. It's home for the locals who routinely traverse the same old trails, somehow always finding something new.

But for Peri McQuay, Foley Mountain has been more than a home, more than the place she lived for 30 years, writing and raising her children.

For Peri McQuay, Foley Mountain has been an unexpected and miraculous gift.

Cait and Kyle White may be sheep farmers, but they're taking a lion's approach when it comes to sustainability.

Earlier this year, the owners of Milkhouse Farm & Dairy in Smiths Falls not only kicked off construction on two acres' worth of new wetlands, but also installed new livestock exclusion fencing, completed a Nutrient Management Plan, began work on a manure storage facility, are replacing their aging well and plan to decommission their existing well.

It's not very often a 50-acre swath of provincially-significant wetland becomes available in the City of Ottawa – but when it does, the Rideau Valley Conservation Foundation is keen to protect it. 

The Foundation accepted the substantial section of Manion Corners Wetland this fall from siblings Paul Lackner and Colleen Green, who decided their family's natural property – lovingly referred to as "the farm" – belonged in a land trust for perpetual protection. 

If you spot an alligator lurking near Rideau Ferry beach this summer, don't be alarmed – he isn't here for you.

Unless, of course, you're a Canada Goose.

Our little pond is growing up.

This spring, residents in Old Ottawa South have noticed mysterious logs and root wads rising out of Brewer Pond – something they've never witnessed since the RVCA and its partners restored the pond to a functioning wetland in 2014. 

When photographer Jon Stuart first visited the Stillwater wetland off Moodie Drive in the early days of the pandemic, he could tell something was a little off.

Tree branches stuck out of the water, but there were no trees nearby. In the distanced towered a lone mature elm tree – an unusual wetland resident. 

It's a bright sunny morning on March 22. You've woken up in Eastern Ontario to warming and lengthening days but also to soggy ground, rising creeks and rivers, swollen wetlands, and cold rain in the days before and ahead. 

What does all this water have in common? Groundwater, of course - but you knew that, at least you knew it intuitively in the depths of your watery core. 

When Rose Fleguel first surveyed the Canadian Wildlife Service's butternut population at a federally protected site last year, she was surprised to see so many healthy butternut trees.

As a butternut specialist for more than 16 years, rarely had she seen a population so diverse in age and so many individuals relatively free of the deadly fungal canker disease that has nearly wiped this native nut species off the map. 

Feb. 17, 2022 – You may already know that Baxter Conservation Area's new boardwalk and bridge will offer the gold standard of universal accessibility. But what is this standard exactly, and how was it created?

That's a question for Marnie Peters, renowned accessibility consultant in the Ottawa Valley. 

You've heard it before: to understand a person, you must walk a mile in their shoes.

A local Cub Scouts pack did just that recently when they walked – and rolled – in the shoes of people with disabilities at Baxter Conservation Area south of Manotick. 

If you've ever been to Voyageur Provincial Park near Hawkesbury, you've seen European Water Chestnut in action. The ornamental pond plant likely hopped a fence nearby, establishing itself in dense mats in the Ottawa River and nearby tributaries around the park more than a decade ago.

Robust removal programs are in place, but getting ahead of it is as hard as the thorny seeds it throws into the riverbed to reproduce. 

Award: Coolest history!

 If the land could talk, imagine its stories.

Thankfully, at Motts Mills Conservation Area we can at least tell you about the past 200 years, and how the historic dam has long shaped the Hutton Marsh wetland and the community it serves. 

A 15-acre swath of Hydro Ottawa land will soon be a buzzing metropolis of bees, birds and butterflies as the Rideau Valley Conservation Authority (RVCA) helps plant one of the largest pollinator meadows in Eastern Ontario.

The RVCA's tree planting program has many branches of support, but it's the sturdy trunk of Forests Ontario that holds it all together. 

The provincial not-for-profit manages the 50 Million Tree Program, which provides two-thirds of RVCA's tree planting funding each year to help private landowners undertake largescale afforestation (the creation of new forests) for just pennies per tree.

Compared to the thrum of a thriving summer wetland, winter wetlands may seem as silent as outer space.

But they're not empty, nor are they vacant – life's just a little slower, a little less showy, in an ice-covered marsh or swamp.

A new batch of butternut seedlings have been sent into the world to help pull the endangered tree back from the brink – but this spring's lot may have been the last.

Landowners flocked to the Rideau Valley Conservation Authority's specialized cold storage facility on Dilworth Road this spring to pick up their baby butternut trees, carefully grown at the Ferguson Forestry Centre from resilient seeds harvested across Eastern Ontario.

Butternut trees in Canada and the US have been decimated by the butternut canker, an incurable fungal disease scientists believe originated in Asia. 

There's a misconception out there that your local conservation authority is out to stop all development. But in reality the RVCA approves more than 90% of the applications it receives; our regulations inspectors and planners work with applicants to come up with plans that can suit the property owner, the provincial regulations and the watershed all at once. 

Not convinced? Meet Hal Stimson, long-time inspector with the RVCA: