This afternoon, Herb and I visited the marshy pond on the upper end of Glenrosa Road that I call Moose Pond. We keep a trail camera monitoring the southern edge of the pond, an area  frequented by moose. Today when we checked the camera, we were not disappointed. There was just one picture of a hiker and the rest were all of moose.

Most were nighttime white flash pictures of a cow moose with very young twin calves. She was obviously very protective of them. A couple of the other pictures showed a moose that I judged to be subadult, probably the female calf from the pair of twins this cow had last year. Those pictures were not of good quality, however and so were discarded.

Moose calves grow rapidly. There are 18 days between these two picture of moose, and already there seems to be a noticeable increase in a calf's size. Hopefully, we will get more pictures of this little family.

Devils' Club is one of the plants that characterize the wet forest on the north side of the lake. Right now it is showing its pyramidal clusters of shiny red berries. The berries are not edible. The trunk of the plant is covered with sharp spines.

Devil's Club

Clasping Twisted Stalk, another plant in this wet seepage forest, also has red berries. Earlier it had greenish-white bell-shaped flowers. Flowers and berries hang singly from short, slender kinked or twisted stalks, hence the name of the plant.

The slender stemmed bush in the picture to the right has maple leaf-shaped leaves and shiny black berries (mostly hidden by the leaves). It seems to be a currant or gooseberry but I am not confident enough to name it. I should have taken more careful note of its characteristics but I thought that when I got back to my books with the pictures, identification would be easy. Not so!

The large leaves in the picture are of Indian Hellebore. That is a plant that can grow to 2 metres in height, as it did in this area last year. But this seems to be a season that is not as favorable for the plant. We did have frost in the early part of the summer, at least somewhat higher, along Jackpine Road. There the Devils' Club leaves wilted after freezing and they did not recover, so there was no flowering and no fruit from the Devils' Club at that elevation, about 1200 metres. Perhaps the cold spell came at a critical time for the Indian Hellebore also.