Wasps and other insect bites can be serious
Insect and spider bites often cause minor swelling, redness, pain, and itching. These mild reactions are common. They may last from a few hours to a few days. Home treatment is often all that is needed to relieve symptoms of a mild reaction to common stinging or biting spiders and insects, such as fleas, flies, and mosquitoes.
Some people have more severe reactions to bites or stings. Babies and children may be more affected than adults are. Problems that are more serious include a severe allergic reaction, shock that can occur if the circulatory system cannot get enough blood to the vital organs, nausea, diarrhea, and stomach cramps.
Insects most likely to cause allergic or toxic reactions include bees. A bee leaves its stinger behind and dies after stinging. A local reaction includes pain, swelling and redness around the sting but may become as serious as a severe allergic reaction for some people.
Wasps, hornets, and yellow jackets are typically more aggressive than bees and may sting more than once. Most reactions include a bump at the site of the sting. A toxic reaction can occur if a person is stung 10 or more times. Yellow jackets cause the most allergic reactions. More information at https://myhealth.alberta.ca/health/Pages/Conditions.aspx?hwid=insbt
Western Tanager a wasp eater
Seeing a male Western Tanager is like looking at a flame: an orange-red head, brilliant yellow body, and coal-black wings, back and tail. Females and immatures are a dimmer yellow-green and blackish. These birds live in open woods all over the west, particularly among evergreens, where they often stay hidden in the canopy.
While most red birds owe their redness to a variety of plant pigments known as carotenoids, the Western Tanager gets its scarlet head feathers from a rare pigment called rhodoxanthin. Unable to make this substance in their own bodies, they obtain it from insects in their diet.
This bird eats mostly insect, especially wasps, ants, termites, stinkbugs, cicadas, beetles, grasshoppers, crane flies, dragonflies, caterpillars, scale insects, and sawflies. They also eat fruit, especially during fall and winter, when it may dominate the diet
Around the turn of the twentieth century, Western Tanagers were thought to pose a significant threat to commercial fruit crops. Today, it is illegal to shoot native birds and they are safer than they were a century ago. More at https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Western_Tanager/overview
John Walter a prominent figure in early Edmonton
John Walter came to Canada in 1870 to build York boats for the Hudson's Bay Company. At the end of his HBC contract in 1875, he decided to try his hand at making a life outside of the Fort walls. With York boats still in demand, the company offered to pay John in cash for all the boats that he could turn out. Walter’s boat building business had begun.
John settled on the south side of the North Saskatchewan River, directly across from Fort Edmonton on a location near the ford crossing the river for the Calgary-Edmonton trail. Following the 1882 land survey, Walter’s dwelling and cultivated fields became River Lot 9, which granted him 155 acres, with a 2-block frontage on the river and a depth running south to what is now University Avenue.
He developed his property by moving buildings no longer in use at the Fort and refurbishing them. His property was also shaped by his opening a blacksmith and carriage shop in 1886, his continued boat building business, ferry operation, a small coal mine in 1887, and a sawmill in 1893. Although the sawmill became John’s biggest success, he was most recognized for his ferry.
John’s businesses, particularly his lumber mill, began to suffer with the decline of the housing boom in 1912. The 1915 flood caused great damage to his business, washing away lumber stocks and sawmill, and caused great damage to the Walterdale community. To add to the losses, one of John’s trusted employees embezzled a substantial amount of money. John Walter died 5 years later without recovering his losses. Learn more at https://www.edmonton.ca/attractions_events/john_walter_museum/john-walter-bio
Aspen poplar has been used as a painkiller
This tree is essential to the Aspen Parkland, the ecoregion where Edmonton is found. It is also known as the trembling aspen because of its unusual flat petiole, or leaf stems, which cause the leaves to flutter, or quake in the slightest breeze.
Aspen photosynthesizes even with their bark. This means they provide valuable winter food for porcupine, moose, black bear, beaver, ruffed grouse, and rodents, which may eat the bark and leaves of aspen trees.
Some scientists think that an aspen grove connected by a root system may be a single organism. Aspen is known for suckering or producing new trees from their root system if adult trees are damaged. The roots stay connected, and all trees that are connected will grow leaves or lose their leaves all at the same time.
Aspen contains salicylates and has been used as a painkiller. Salicylates are also used to treat acne, warts, dandruff, and ringworm, because the acid form can remove the outer layer of human skin. It can even be used as a food preservative and as an antiseptic. Learn more at https://www.ealt.ca/species-spotlight-list/aspen-poplar
Comment or contribution
Please note that articles may not reflect the position of NSRVCS. River Valley News is meant to be a clearinghouse for the wide variety of opinions and ideas about Edmonton’s River Valley. Email river valley photos, event information, comments, or questions to nsrivervalley@gmail.com
Sincerely yours,
Harvey Voogd
North Saskatchewan River Valley Conservation Society
780.691.1712
