I got out into the park for my first trip of the season: bird monitoring at Margaret Lake and Broken Skull Lake (our two most forested lakes). I am not a bird expert – there are a lot of birds out there, and a lot of them look and sound basically the same. So what we do is we put out audio recorders to take 10 minutes of recordings every half hour. Then we send the tapes off to an actual bird expert to tell us what birds we’ve got.
We also went to scope out some old ruins near the lakes. There are some old wooden platforms near Margaret Lake, probably from some past mineral exploration. Near Broken Skull Lake, there are the remains of an old cabin, built by a guy named Chris Larkin who flew into the lake in 1979, overwintered, and then paddled out down the Broken Skull River the following spring. He wrote a book about it called A Far Cry.
