Over the past twenty years or so, we've seen a succession of surveyors from the Rideau Valley Conservation Authority come along to assess the environmental degradation that takes place in the ravine opposite our street that goes on for miles and miles throughout the community in which we live. The forested urban ravine is a natural outdoor space jewel that a very small percentage of residents appreciate, use and cherish. When, on the rare occasion, we've come across such a crew I've ventured to enquire about changes, because it seemed to us from our experience over the years that erosion has taken a toll.

The surveyors, based on their assessments of previous records, assure us that whatever erosion does take place it is of little significance, about average for such a natural environment, and nothing notable. We've seen micro-bursts of wind, considered to be of relatively mild tornado-like strength roar through the ravine, taking down venerable old pines, and we witnessed and experienced a week of freezing rain during one winter that burdened the ravine forest and shattered a portion of the canopy. Copious rain events, hard winters, and other such natural events have all taken their toll of the ravine.

Of course encroaching urban settlement has played its part, as well. Where many years ago we often saw foxes boldly presenting themselves on the trails and even outside the ravine proper in the urban area; often came across partridges performing a mating dance, and grouse drumming the ground in spring, often seeing families of raccoons up in the trees, we no longer do. People claim more recently to have seen coyotes deep in the recesses of the ravine very early in the morning hours and late at night in the winter months, but we never have.

We have noted, however, how ominously over time the banks of the ravine have slowly caved in, filling the creek itself with clay deposits running in the direction that the creek waters that tend to spread them, widening and shallowing the creek in the process. And threatening to wipe out parts of the trails that wind their way quite close to the bank shoulders overlooking the ravine. Trees topple into the ravine over time in the relentless but, one knows, perfectly natural maturing and degradation of such natural environments.

A few years back, a portion of the creek bank along which the trail made its way fell wholesale into the creek, requiring trail walkers to seek alternate routes until a municipal crew came along with a small set of bulldozers, razing some trees to make way for a new trail section replacing the old, collapsed one. The soil in this urban forest just happens to be comprised of leda clay and sand, a combination that is unstable, and prone to such collapses. The clay itself can become almost liquid in nature when it has been exposed to a super-abundance of rain.

The series of highway-standard bridges that were built to replace earlier ones only six years ago, last summer came to the attention of the municipality as lacking infrastructure stability, resulting from that very clay-sand instability -- inspiring them to put up warning signs alerting the ravine-centric public. In an obvious, but futile move to protect themselves from possible lawsuits should anyone come to harm as a result, municipal parks personnel proceeded to place barricades over each end of each bridge. Which, happily, most people have no difficulty negotiating, while cursing those authorities and wondering what comes next.