Insights from St. Vital Park

Insights from St. Vital Park

I visited St. Vital Park between 11:25 am and 12:20 pm on 9^th April 2022. This park is the third largest park of Winnipeg city located in Manitoba, CA. the park was developed in 1929. This park encompasses 46 hectares of land and is located on the banks of the Red River on 49.8285°N and 97.1404°W with 240m of elevation. The weather was a little cool for April, with 3°C and a wind speed of 26 km/h, and even though spring is on its way and the cold doesn’t seem to be going away. The park is mostly flat, but because it is near a river, there are some high and low points.

I walked the park for about 45 minutes observing all the vegetation throughout. I saw few animals like squirrel, sparrow, crows, and Canada geese. There is a designated duck pond which is used for ice skating during winters but right now since everything is melting down with spring incoming, I saw couple of geese enjoying their time in the icy pond. There were a lot of elm trees all around the pond but are still dormant right now, a lot of them had lichens growing on them making symbiotic relationship of commensalism with the plants. The soil was covered with wood chips at a lot of places that is usually filled with people, to retain moisture for the soil, eventually for the trees. I could also see maple leaves that were covered by snow last fall and are now visible. A large portion of the area was still covered in snow, but some areas were showing grass. The trees in the area along the Red River were inundated under water due to melting of snow.

#lichenontrees

As I walked down the fitness trail, I noticed dormant elm trees with lichens growing on them all around, as well as some Black spruce here and there. Here the soil was really soft with some wooden chips, the soil could have been soft because of ice melting in the small areas of trails. Along the trails, there were couple of trees that were dead and had fungi growing on them. Noticed a few squirrels running behind each other with some geese enjoying their walk around. Sparrows and crows were chirping in the trails.

IMG_5580 #sparrowchirping IMG_5594 #squirrelplaying

During this walk, I had the following thoughts:

1. I have keen interest in knowing how do trees change their dormancy with spring’s arrival.?
2. Seeing all the trees under water, I wonder how will the trees survive?
3. Why is there so much lichen growth on dormant trees? Because wherever I looked, all I saw was lichens.

References

St. Vital park—Parks—City of winnipeg. (n.d.). Retrieved April 9, 2022, from https://winnipeg.ca/publicworks/parks/st-vital.stm

St. Vital park. (2021). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=St._Vital_Park&oldid=1028165599