urbpan | January Urban Nature Walk at the mouth of the Charles, part one.

Somehow in the midst of all the dog-related chaos, with Alexis out of town, I was able to complete a scheduled Urban Nature Walk! My idea for this year is to start at the mouth of the Charles, then follow it upriver on the North side. It's not much, but it's a theme. Here I am, as the weather app indicates, in the fair city of Cambridge. The mercury hit the Fahrenheit scale at 14, a bit colder than yesterday, but the motivation of an Urban Nature Walk is enough to get me out there to see North Point Park.

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North Point Park is fairly new--I don't believe it existed when I volunteered the Science Museum, which is clearly visible across the water, T-rex and all. The museum sits on a dam that keeps the once tidal Charles flowing in one direction--fresh water from Massachusetts into the salty Harbor, not the other way round.

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The flow keeps much of the frigid water from freezing. I almost immediately encountered this merganser, which I take to be a female common merganser Mergus merganser. She was by herself in this unfrozen patch among the ice. A friend had tried to talk me out of coming to this park, I suspect because she thought there wouldn't be wildlife. So far so good!

Even though this park is young, it's old enough that one of the trees planted in it has died and provided habitat for a polypore mushroom.

The lazy waterways around the sculpted parkland were frozen.

This clump of phragmites seemed so deliberately placed, and yet it is illegal to propagate this invasive species in our commonwealth. Could it have planted itself from seeds that floated down from upriver?

This pair of dishes is a telephone of sorts; a pipe connects them and sound travels below the ground between them.

Here you can see the beginning of the beautiful new footbridge that crosses a span of the Charles out of one park into another.

A ghost bridge locked in ice, and the massive weights of a drawbridge.

Ascending the footbridge as the iconic towers of the Zakim bridge loom over.