We set out for our usual ravine walk in the forest yesterday, planning to bushwhack our way in and onto the trails since because of emergency work gates have been erected at the entry point, but were seen by someone cutting down trees close to the entrance who warned us off, concerned with safety issues. So we ended up walking down the street, crossing the busy intersection at the foot of the street and accessing another portion of the ravine that we used to frequent several years back when the bridges in the ravine were being replaced and heavy construction equipment was everywhere, widening the trails and making a general mess in there.

Weren't we surprised coming abreast of the creek as we descended toward the forest, to see a school of fair-sized goldfish? Goldfish now much too large to fit into anyone's home aquarium, much less a commercial one. Goldfish that are there because someone had the bright idea of releasing them to the wild, though they're a species whose natural habitat is Asia, not North America. Goldfish, in such numbers that we assume they were released from the stock of some pet shop which had decided for reasons known only to them that they wanted to rid themselves of the tiny beasties.

We'd seen them for the first time when they were tiny, two years ago. Since we haven't been back to that area since, we had no idea that they would have adapted to their new environment, and they certainly appear to have. We always consider the creek, because of the composition of its bottom, to be sterile for fish, and rarely have seen any there; insects like water striders and caddis-fly larvae, we have seen. So it's a fair supposition that whatever zooplankton is there, along with bug larvae, have kept these beautiful orange swimmers alive. Alive and thriving, since they've managed, amazingly, to get through two nastily icy typical Ottawa winters, and they are now many times their original size; in fact, downright large.

We don't prefer that part of the ravine to our own, accessible just up our street, but we're fortunate to have it as an alternative to our more familiar, far more trail-extensive portion of the ravine. We do find the botanical specimens thriving there different than our own; very few trilliums, though lilies-of-the-valley aplenty, and not many other spring flowers. It was pretty muddy underfoot, but would have been far more so, only a day or two previously.

But at least its presence enabled us to get out into the woods for a walk-about; good for our two little dogs and for us as well. It now looks, from what we've been told by a municipal worker, that it's likely the work being undertaken by the construction crew in an effort to remediate the problem with the ravine hillside erosion, will take more than the original month estimated. Not happy news for us.