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Articles by Tim Tiner
Nature Scrapbook: Black-billed cuckoo
On a still, late summer night, a soft, deep, rapidly repeated “co-co-co-co” sometimes betrays the presence of one of Canada’s most surreptitious birds. By day, the mysterious black-billed cuckoo—about the size of a blue jay, but much sleeker—keeps silently out of sight. When it’s not hunched stalk still, it’s slinking slowly through dense, tangled forest edges and understory, or shrub thickets and thorn trees.
Nature Scrapbook: Spring beauty
Dainty bouquets of spring beauty often constitute the most bounteous blossoms beneath early spring’s still bare-limbed forests, from Newfoundland to northwestern Ontario. Delicate stems thread up through the leaf litter on open patches amid melting blankets of snow. Within a few days, a single or pair of lance-shaped leaves unfold and photosynthesize at turbocharge, even in temperatures just above freezing.
Nature Scrapbook: Field horsetail
Growing up to 30 cm in early spring, field horsetail’s pallid, distinctly jointed, cone-headed stem appears akin to an elongated mushroom. Indeed, it lacks chlorophyll and releases hundreds of thousands of pale, green spores within days of appearing. Yet it is one of the world’s most widespread and adaptable plants, inhabiting low-lying forests, fields, watersides, wetlands, and high arctic tundra across the northern hemisphere.
Nature Scrapbook: Least chipmunk
Though tiny and secretive, the least chipmunk is renowned as a bold campground raider. Inhabiting sunlit open forests and brushy clearings from northwestern Quebec and central Ontario to the Yukon, it’s Canada’s puniest member of the squirrel family. With unique skills, speed, and endurance, this chippy has a paw up on its brawnier kin when amassing its winter larder in the dwindling daylight of autumn.
Here's how autumn's fallen leaves enrich the entire forest
Each autumn’s colourful mantle of newly fallen leaves adds to a mass of organic decay commonly exceeding the bulk of all living things in the forest. Together with fallen deadwood, this immense bed of compost harbours unparalleled biological diversity and nutrient riches for new growth on land and life in water. Can forest bathing help reduce your stress? Rain and moisture, aided by frosts and thaws, leach up to a third of a fallen leaf’s contents within two or three weeks.
Nature Scrapbook: Fireberry hawthorn
Impenetrable forest-edge thickets of dense, gnarly hawthorns are crucial wildlife lifesavers, especially in autumn and winter. Though these shrubs and small trees comprise dozens of species, Canada’s most widespread, reaching from the east coast to the Rockies, is the fireberry hawthorn, typically two to three metres tall. Fireberry hawthorn is heavily armed with sharp thorns up to seven centimetres long.
Nature Scrapbook: Chokecherry
Its ominous name and reputation notwithstanding, chokecherry is top of the menu for wildlife across Canada in late summer. The typically multi-stemmed tall shrub or small tree, averaging two to three metres high, abounds along forest edges, further offering a dense sanctuary for birds and beasts year-round. Fragrant spools of white, late-spring blossoms—attracting hordes of bees, butterflies, beetles, and flies—yield bounties of chokecherries that can turn very dark purple in August and September.
Nature Scrapbook: Hermit thrush
Among the most sublime of forest minstrels, the celebrated hermit thrush pours out exquisite resonating airs that share the harmonics of human musical scales. The spot-breasted bird returns from the southern U.S. to arboreal understories and small clearings across Canada in spring. And while initially, a male sings to stake out breeding territory—up to three weeks ahead of the arrival of potential mates—his early dawn and evening serenades linger well into summer.
Nature Scrapbook: Hoary elfin
The hoary elfin may be one of our littlest butterflies, but it’s also one of the earliest species to emerge as spring weather sets in. After ten or more months enfolded within a brown, peanut-sized chrysalis beneath leaf litter and snow, the diminutive hoary elfin is among the first butterflies to navigate its maiden flight in spring. On sunny days in May, it flies along trails through rocky, evergreen forest clearings and sandy watersides across most of the country.
Meet the giant water bug
Giant water bugs (also known as toe-biters) can play dead, audibly squeak, and even release a stinky fluid This flat-bodied, bulging-eyed bugs lurk in the weedy shallows of vernal ponds, sluggish backwater streams, still lake margins, and wetlands across Canada. Imperceptibly concealed in mats of submerged plants, the predator siphons air through an abdominal snorkel into an underwater bubble trapped beneath its wings.
Nature Scrapbook: Cardinal flower
The show-stopping cardinal flower counts on a cottage-country bird for pollination after summer sets in. From late July to mid-September, cardinal flowers stand out in deep crimson along the soggy banks of lakes and slow-moving rivers from New Brunswick to Ontario. For anywhere from two to five weeks, up to several dozen individual hermaphroditic flowers bloom, a few at a time, along a single, unbranched, knee-high spire, starting from the bottom.
Nature Scrapbook: The common loon
How well do you know the iconic loon? Our favourite and famous cottage-country icon is anything but common. Loons are incredibly agile underwater, propelled by powerful, widely splayed legs, which are placed far back on their bodies. This makes walking difficult, but enables them to out-swim and catch dozens of perch, minnows, and other small fish a day.
Nature Scrapbook: The northern spring azure butterfly
Flitting, dodging, never seeming to land, northern spring azures are ethereal specks of splendour, appearing miraculously on sunny, warm spring days. The pale blue butterflies herald the unfolding of the season’s ephemeral blossoms—to which they’re intrinsically tied—along forest trails and watersides throughout Canada to the tree line.
Nature scrapbook: Wolves
Feasting on the fruits of the privations of winter, wolves are at their fattest during the leanest time of year. With their prey more vulnerable and frozen rivers and lakes extending their reach, wolf packs prosper and even find time for romance in the sub-zero grip of the season.
ON Nature Magazine Summer 2010
DEPARTMENTS 5 | This Issue HOW MUCH FOR THAT ECOSYSTEM? A cost-benefit analysis of biodiversity. By Caroline Schultz 8 | Earth Watch Ontario Nature’s Biodiversity Watchlist; more reasons to go outside; the vine at ate the South; raising a stink in farm country. 8 | Bird Watch WHIP-POOR-WILL; Researchers are turning to new survey methods to help save a poorly understood species. By Tim Tiner 45 | In House Donor spotlight: Meg Salter and John Grandy make a generous gift to Ontario Nature.
Seasons Winter 1998
DEPARTMENTS 5 |In This Issue The stories stones tell By Victoria Foote 6 | Earthwatch Rouge Valley victory short lived; Lake Erie too clean; lack of legislation leaves species at risk 14 | Letters 17 |This Season Gary and Joanie McGuffin go on the adventure of a lifetime, again and again By Margaret Carney 36 | Insider Behind the scenes at FON 46 | Reflections Spending the winter at the cottage By Paul Rush FEATURES On the cover 20 | Opening the Flood Gates A deluge of problems threatens many...
Seasons Winter 1994
DEPARTMENTS 2 | President’s Page Land trusts taking off in Ontario.
Seasons Spring 2000
DEPARTMENTS 5 | View From Locke House Why I Love Birds. By Nancy Clark 6 | Earth Watch The battle to protect the Oak Ridges Moraine; proposed highway threatens wetlands; remembering a friend of the bluebird; the return of the elk; RCGA drops plans to build in Bronte park; development opposed at Riley Lake; FON registers its first easement. 18 | This Season Bird healing at the Douglas G. Cockburn Raptor Centre.
ON Nature Winter 2008
DEPARTMENTS 5 | This Issue The Decline of Biodiversity: Conservation efforts should be proactive for a change. By Caroline Schultz 8 | Earth Watch Birds versus planes: preventing collisions at Pearson airport; round two: saving Second Marsh … again; trash talk: using the Great Lakes as giant waste bins; poor planning: why dig a dump on top of pristine groundwater? 40 | Bird Watch Canada Warbler: The country’s namesake warbler is one of the nation’s fastest dwindling migratory songbirds.
ON Nature Summer 2007
DEPARTMENTS 5 | This Issue Time to reconsider our baggage. By Victoria Foote 8 | Earth Watch Tiny water flea takes over Muskoka lakes; species-friendly roadwork; logging with a conscience; Oak Ridges Moraine Land Trust added 25 hectares; climate watch. 16 | Profile For three decades, aerial photographer Lou Wise has been snapping his unique photographs of southern Ontario’s waterways. By Allan Britnell 36 | Field Trip Ontario’s turtle crisis.
ON Nature Fall 2008
DEPARTMENTS 5 | This Issue Great Beginnings: Promises of protection for the Boreal. By Caroline Schultz 8 | Earth Watch Talk of the town: pelicans make a surprise appearance; hidden health hazards; a bigger, better Greenbelt; junior scientist: high school kid makes amazing discovery; spirit tree: lumber mill makes for stand-off over eastern white cedar.
This regenerative flowering plant appears after wildfire
Photo by Real Moment/Shutterstock In the wake of notably catastrophic forest fires across Canada in recent years, vast, swaying seas of pink have inundated many areas of blackened earth. Picturesque and possessed of phenomenal regenerative powers, fireweed may sprout within weeks of a burn. Fireweed flourishes a hundred or more vibrant pink flowers along its sturdy stem, up to two metres tall, gradually blooming from the bottom up, through the summer and into September.
This rare enigmatic bird is hard to spot
Rising from deep within the shade of mature broadleaf forests, a burst of rapid-fire birdsong builds to a ringing crescendo: “tea-cher, tea-cher, tea-cher, tea-cher!” The penetrating call is probably the most performed of any warbler song across Canada east of the Rockies. Yet you will rarely see its sparrow-sized author, the enigmatic ovenbird.
Nature Scrapbook: White-tailed deer
Pregnant since November and famished from the privations of winter, white-tailed deer are in sore need of spring’s lush, highly nutritious new shoots of growth. Yet, even the season of plenty is an extremely precarious time, with most fawns being born, across the country, between mid-May and early June. Between a couple of weeks and a few days before giving birth, a doe shoos off her older offspring and retreats to a secluded natal sanctuary, such as a dense thicket.
Nature scrapbook: Groundhogs
Long after the hoopla in early February, true groundhog day usually doesn’t come until well into March in southern Ontario and April farther north. Once they’re up and about, though, the solitary waddling rodents have a busy spring agenda re-establishing turf and pecking order, finding mates, and starting new families. Fat-fuelled wake up To rouse from torpor, groundhogs (a.k.a. woodchucks), like all hibernating mammals, metabolize blood-rich deposits of brown fat, stored between the shoulders.
Do you know about the Red Crossbill?
Photo by Birdiegal/Shutterstock Built to tackle tricky cones, red crossbills are uniquely suited to winter survival. Like colourful ornaments in forests of Christmas trees, red crossbills brighten the winter scenery, sometimes materializing in great numbers where none have been in recent years. They wander widely across the country in nomadic flocks, touching down and often nesting wherever they find bounties of conifer cones, even when the snow lies deep.
This member of the weasel family is reclusive yet fierce
Photo by Frenchwildlifephotograher/Shutterstock Deep in the snowy Western wilderness, the wolverine hankers for its next meal. Bear-like, ferocious, and ever hungry, the reclusive wolverine is a dog-sized member of the weasel family. Fabled for extraordinary strength and stamina, it wanders through the Western boreal forest as far north as the high Arctic tundra, as well as in remote alpine wilderness in British Columbia and Alberta.
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