The Urban Pantheist

So as I was on my 2 mile walk, I passed this dam on Mother Brook. Mother Brook, as I may have blogged before, was the first man-made canal in New England. It was cut between the Charles and Neponset Rivers, for the purpose of making waterfalls like this one to turn waterwheels.


The wheels and mills are gone, but the dams remain.


The partially ruined beauty of the human hand on the New England landscape.

I caught this guy out of the air. If I wanted to get it identified I'd have posted a pic of its wing so you could see its wing veins. I just wanted you to be impressed that I caught it with my thumb and forefinger.*


We took the boy dogs down to Mother Brook to let Charlie swim and to let Reggie see if swimming was his thing. Reggie doesn't like to get his feet wet.


He does like to chew on a stick, and do anything else that Charlie is doing.


Near where we parked there was this bait station (it's a locked box that has rodenticide bait in it to kill rats). I'm always curious about them (I'm a fun date, let me tell you) so I went over to look at it. This one has an extra difficulty level for the pest control tech that has to service it--can you see what it is?

On Sunday my dad came to visit me and we walked around my neighborhood and ended up at Mother Brook, of all places. This is a condominium park that straddles the brook. Some areas appear to be off-limits while others are public.
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One of the woodsy natural areas in Dedham is actually a man-made feature. Mother Brook was the first canal dug in the United States, allowing commerce to flow from the slow-moving Charles down to the Neponset.
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A few weeks ago hop clover was featured here as 100 species #53. It was secretly a quite tentative identification, but this developing fruit at least eliminates black medic as a competing rule out.


This goose was swimming in Mother Brook with a group of Canada geese, and at least one other similar goose. If you look closely, the shape of the bill is more like that of a graylag goose than of a Canada, and there is a ring of light colored feathers around the bill. Also the color of the feet is rather lighter than those of a typical Canada goose. I suspect that this is a hybrid Branta x Anser, between Canada and domestic geese.


This mushroom popped up in our compost container. It looks like it's in the Coprinus lagopus group.