Maple Trail

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.

Staghorn Sumac
The ripe fruit is a cluster of small berries covered with acidic red hairs. Fruit clusters make a drink similar to pink lemonade.

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.

Porcupine Den
If it happens to be home, don't worry ---the porcupine does not shoot any of its approximately 30,000 quills.

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
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.

This information piece is funded by the Canada Trust Friends of the Environment Foundation and its customers. To find out how you can participate, visit your local Canada Trust branch.