For those who don't live here, the City of Ottawa is proceeding with a very controversial project to connect the two isolated segments of Terry Fox Drive in Kanata. The project is controversial because the land between the two segments is important natural habitat for various rare and endangered plant and animal species including the Blanding's Turtle, Golden-winged Warbler, Butternut trees, and American Ginsing. The project is proceeding without proper environmental assessments and public consultations and without approval from the Ministry of Natural Resources. The reason the project is proceeding in this manner is so the city can make the deadline to receive federal stimulus funding.

 

This photo was taken looking east towards the Ottawa River and the existing segment of Terry Fox Drive.

The smells and scenes at this construction site brought back memories of when the 416 was built through the Bruce Pit. I remember the nauseating smells of chewed up vegetation mixed with the smell of oils from the heavy machinery. That is exactly what it smelled like here.

 

Witnessing the construction of the 416, watching the trees get bulldozed and the pond, which back then was more of a lake, filled in to make way for the road, and seeing confused foxes navigating the construction site and then later seeing dead fox after dead fox on the side of the road until all the foxes in the area had been killed by the wheels of progress, and hearing the natural silence replaced by bulldozers and then non-stop traffic, it all occurred when I was impressionably young and it kindled my enviromental conscious. What I saw today at the Terry Fox Drive extension construction site was in some ways worse than what I saw in the early 1990s with the 416. What I saw today may have been the most destructive undertaking by man I have ever observed in person.

Numerous outcrops of shield rock like this are scattered throughout the construction site awaiting their encounter with explosives. It was disturbing to see the vegetation clinging to these last remnants of the original forest floor. The forest floor habitat on these rocky outcrops was still largely intact and the contrast between that and the surrounding destruction was disturbing. Notice the contrast between the gray weathered rock that has endured centuries of exposure and the freshly exposed pink rock.

 

There were numerous singing birds in the woods beyond including Ovenbirds, Rose-breasted Grosbeaks, Black-throated Blue Warbler, Black-throated Green Warbler, and Northern Parula. I also heard a Barred Owl calling. In previous years this was an easy spot to see and hear Wood Thrushes and Scarlet Tanagers.

This Blanding's Turtle was in the woodland pond shown in the previous photo. A construction worker happened to come by just after I took this photo and told me that two Blanding's Turtles are regularly seen in this pond sunning themselves on the logs. This turtle species is endangered but has a good population in this area. The Blanding's Turtle is one of the many reasons why environmentally conscious people want this habitat saved and the project halted. Personally, I think this entire area is far more important from an environmental and ecological point of view than much of the habitat in the greenbelt.

This is what the ground beneath my feet looked like when I took the previous photo. The leaf litter from maple and pine trees that have recently been butchered surrounds a Wild Columbine plant. A small sapling has been chewed up by the machinery used to clear the road corridor.