There is always lots of interesting botany at Rouge Hills:

Species list: northern flicker, eastern phoebe, blue jay, American crow, house wren, gray catbird,  American robin, cedar waxwing, red-eyed vireo, pine warbler, yellow warbler, common yellowthroat, red-winged blackbird, common grackle, brown-headed cowbird, northern cardinal, rose-breasted grosbeak, American goldfinch, field sparrow, indigo bunting, song sparrow.  (21 species)

The only bird that I was able to photograph on this 26 degree day with a mixture of sun and cloud:

This morning’s group:

Park scenes:

NATURE POETRY

Hummingbird

I can imagine, in some otherworld
Primeval-dumb, far back
In that most awful stillness, that gasped and hummed,
Humming-birds raced down the avenues.

Before anything had a soul,
While life was a heave of matter, half inanimate,
This little bit chirped off in brilliance
And went whizzing through the slow, vast, succulent stems.

I believe there were no flowers then,
In the world where humming-birds flashed ahead of creation
I believe he pierced the slow vegetable veins with his long beak.

Probably he was big
As mosses, and little lizards, they say, were once big.
Probably he was a jabbing, terrifying monster.

We look at him through the wrong end of the telescope of time,
Luckily for us. – D H Lawrence

Miles Hearn