The welcome warm weather brings visitors out to the park.
We were happy to see this couple visiting our kiosk and perusing the maps we provide.
And soon after we ran into this happy group on an LL Bean outdoor nature walk.
Come on out, the park is going to explode with life over the next month!
We went for a walk in the park to see if we could find scenes of winter. And we wanted to see if we could avoid getting views of the new Northeastern buildings… that have desecrated the park for all future generations.
The creek that drains most of the park, before running under Muller Road, provided visuals and inspiration.
We had one of our most pleasant walks on Groundhog Day. We found 15 of the 16 posts where we plant milkweed seeds and scattered lots more seeds. We also saws lots of rabbit tracks, some lovely songbirds in the trees, and checked out bird houses.
The cold had eased off, and soon as we started walking were were all comfortable and warm.
Nothing like a good, not rushed walk, with nice people in the out of doors.
In the summer of 2018, your Mary Cummings Park webmaster raised a group of Monarch butterflies from eggs and released them at Mary Cummings Park. Here is how that came about:
1. My good friend Andrea asks if I can raise her monarch caterpillars since she is going away for vacation and I say sure.
2. I learn to raise eggs to caterpillars to chrysalis to butterflies and release them at Mary Cummings Park.
3. I mention this to Vance Gilbert, who asks where the butterflies go and I reply that I don’t know because – I don’t speak butterfly.
4. Vance requests a song by that name and I write one. I like the song.
5. I decide to try AirGigs and have someone wonderful sing it and play it on piano.
6. Liel Bar-Z sings it and Diego Zapatera plays it.
7. I create a video to go with the song. Visuals created in Photoshop, animated in Final Cut Pro X.
For more songs by Uncle Jon, visit his website.
Although the group was on the small side (anyone Christmas shopping?) the weather was lovely and the group enjoyed another sparkling Boot Boutwell walk.
Another promising sky with sun and clouds at play turned dark and foreboding, but impressive.
The Trustees have worked with volunteers to replace our heaps of old palettes with a series of lovely new boardwalks.
There is a small wetland between the trail and the water tower that keeps that area wet all winter and into the spring. This most critical boardwalk gets walkers past the long, long puddle that develops just where many people enter the park at the soccer field kiosk. The Trustees’ knowledge of trail work and boardwalks is evident here, along with their ability to muster volunteer efforts.
Below is a gallery showing a range of the many boardwalks and bridges that the trustees installed this fall.
This walk a particularly fine walk with Boot. At the end, the group really didn’t want to leave! People hung around to chat and trade stories about wildflowers and the outdoors. Boot, as always, was outstanding, entertaining, and educational.
The Conservation Commission of Burlington is holding a photo contest for adults and children to find the best images of natural Burlington. Of course, we think that Mary Cummings Park is a great place to start, with forests, meadows, and wetlands full of plant and animal life.
Here is a link the the contest page where you can find out all you need.
Our friend and monarch caterpillar guide, Andrea Golden, was going on vacation and needed some caterpillar sitting. She had a group of monarch eggs and baby caterpillars that she brought in from her yard, and was raising in terrariums.
We offered to become the foster parents and took the group home, with Andrea’s advice in mind and her handwritten instructions in hand.
Andrea tells us that only about 2% of monarch eggs survive in the wild, so hand raising them is helpful to this threatened species.
We brought them home and set up the nursery on the back porch. And also started setting up timelapse sequences to record their progress. After a number of tries we got a video of the birth of a caterpillar.
Since Andrea taught us what the teeny eggs look like, and where to find them, we found some of our own at Mary Cummings Park, and brought them to the nursery to hatch in safety. One suspects that a monarch egg, not yet tainted by the milkweed poison, must be a real tasty find for other insects, birds, and other critters.
Now we are raising another crop of babies from Andrea, along with some we found at the park.
So this year we will have released 8 monarchs back into Mary Cummings Park, a great insecticide-free haven. And along the way we gathered tens of thousands of frames of timelapse video which will soon emerge from their own chrysalis as a complete lifecycle video of the magnificent monarch butterfly.
Stay tuned.
" data-envira-height="300" data-envira-width="225" />
