Reptiles at Risk

The travelling begins again - on to Long Point!

Posted by Jeff Hathaway on July 31, 2009 at 7:09 PM

So in the Frontenac area we had a busy weekend at the Perth Music Festival and the Smith Falls Chocolate and Railway festival, but after that it was great to have Monday as a day off on the road. The rest of the staff at our centre came to Murphy's Point to visit, and we had a fun day in the sun, hiking around the park. We only had two programs the next day, before heading home for a week.

Now we are on our second day in the Long Point area, on the North shores of Lake Erie, after what was a bit of a shaky start. The three of us haven't travelled very much with the van and trailer before, but after a couple of electrical issues when we left home we seem to be getting the hang of things! A big thanks to a gentleman from Brampton who was kind enough to help us out along the way.

This unfortunately meant we had to reschedule our visit to the Bayham Public Library to next Tuesday at 5pm, but we made it fine to our next two programs and were able to stay at Port Burwell Provincial Park for the night. We are now parked at Turkey Point Provincial Park, and will be using that as home base for the next few days.

The interesting thing about the programs now is the number of animals that we are talking about in our programs. Long Point is just such an amazing place to find reptiles that we have to include more species than any other place we have been to so far! With turtles, for example, it is possible to find 7 of Ontario's 8 species of turtle around this area. At our programs we are talking about three main ones, but everyone seems to agree that the Spotted Turtle is one of the cutest animals we travel with. They are one of Ontario's smallest species of turtles (and Eric's favourite, by the way), and have bright yellow or orange spots all over their head and shell. They are not often seen though, because the usually come out earlier in the year, and are very picky about where they live - they like bogs and swamp like areas. There's not many areas like this left though, so it is fantastic that they can still be found around here.

Robin