I recently worked in Manotick, so I decided to visit Watson’s Mill, which is a working grist (ground grain) mill along the Rideau Canal. On Thursday morning, April 24 I walked over to the mill:

View of the other side of the mill, taken after walking half-way across the dam, which you can see on the right of the above photo:

Long timber square cut beams are used to control the water flow in the dam. These are raised and lowered by a dolly with two hand operated winches on either end that is rolled along a track, as you can see below. There are three old beams laying on the right of the dolly:

Close-up of the chains on the winch:

I then walked across the dam, and that is where I saw these mallards:

The first day I was there, I had no food with me, so I just tossed in some small pebbles to get them to come close to the shore so that I could take some good close-up photos. I felt guilty about doing that, because they would sometimes even dive down to retrieve the pebbles from the riverbed, thinking that it was food. The next day, I came back with some whole wheat pita bread, and they liked that a lot more than pebbles.

On the left of the main entrance to the mill. as seen in the first photo, there is a garden along the sidewalk, and I discovered what I thought was the remains of a mangled bird… but upon closer inspection I saw it was a nesting female mallard:

It remained perfectly still the whole time. It would only blink it’s eyelids every once in a while. I was tempted to bend down and remove that obstructing leaf sticking up in front of the bird, but decided against it. I didn’t want to be attacked by an enraged female mallard.

I returned to the mill again around 8:30 AM on Saturday morning, and noticed a blue heron upstream about 100 yards from the dam. So I took a photo while standing on the dam:

I tried to get closer to this heron, but as I was walking down to the shore I disturbed a mallard that was nearby, and that also caused the blue heron to take off.

So I decided to just concentrate on things that would stay in one place, such as this tulip bud in front of the mill:

Well that’s just about it for now.

Tom Robertson
Photographer
tomspider@yahoo.com