Maple Trail

Note:  While walking the trails, pleae take care not to pick the flowers or disturb the wildlife.  "Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints."

The Maple Trail will lead you to an old sugar bush, where you will find the ruins of a sugar shanty. You will also see a variety of trees such as nanny berry, oak, hickory and cherry trees that provide food for songbirds, game birds, small mammals and deer. An off shoot of this trail leads to a covered viewing blind where you can observe migrating ducks, geese and shore birds.

Buckhorn
This shrub can be recognized by its small, dark green, oval-shaped leaves which are deeply veined.  Thorny branch tips replace the terminal buds.  Ingesting the black berries clustered along the twigs will result in severe diarrhea.

Bur Oak
The most wide ranging oak tree. Acorns can be boiled, roasted and eaten as nuts or sweetened and eaten as candy.

Trembling Aspen
The beaver's first choice at the tree buffet! Note the smooth, greenish-grey bark and, on a windy day, the "noisy" leaves.

Sugar Maple
Sugar Maple, a tree of upland habitats, is the principle maple tree tapped to produce maple products. The leaves are usually five-lobed and the leaf margins (edges) lack teeth.

Woodpecker Holes
(Can you spot them?)  The Pileated Woodpecker drills large, rectangular or oval holes and extracts insects with its barbed tongue.  These cavities in turn provide shelter and nesting habitat for other species.

Black Cherry
Note the dark, scaly bark with horizontal dash-like markings (lenticels). The wood is valuable for furniture.

Yellow Birch
The yellowish or bronze bark forms thin papery shreds. A broken twig has a strong wintergreen taste.

Eastern Hemlock
Usually a tree of upland habitats. The flat needles are dark green above, whitish below and have short stems.

Northern Maidenhair
Maidenhair ferns are most adapted to life in dry places. The stalks are black, fine and shiny ---a maiden's hair. Spores develop on the back of the leaflets.

Blue Beech
(Look ahead on the right)  A small tree with very hard wood that settlers would use to make wedges for splitting other logs. The smooth, slate-grey bark resembles tensed muscles.

Christmas Fern
An upland fern with leathery, evergreen fronds. Smaller spore-bearing leaflets are near the tip of the fertile fronds (stalks).

American Beech
Note how the trunk, with its pale grey bark, resembles a cement pole or an elephant's leg! Early settlers often used dried Beech leaves as filling material for mattresses.

Climax Forest
A forest that has reached the final stage of succession. It will no longer undergo natural changes as trees that die will be replaced by others of the same species.

For further information, contact the Upper Canada Migratory Bird Sanctuary at 613-537-2024.