the Way of the Turtle

Wandering Around the Palmyra-Macedon Aqueduct Park
Sunday, March 23, 2008

Ann and I spent the afternoon at her parents' house, first for Easter dinner and then visiting with her extended family. I took a break for about an hour and sat out back in the sunshine watching the birds in her mother's feeders - it was a gorgeous day as long as I was out of the wind. There were tons of grackles and red-winged blackbirds in the area, moving from tree to tree. I also saw some slate-colored juncos (a common visitor to the feeder at Ann's) and the ever-present chickadees, as well as several mourning doves and not one but two kinds of nuthatches (white-breasted and red-breasted... we've just seen the latter at Ann's.)

It was getting darker and chillier by the time we headed home, but Ann still wanted to get outside for a bit, so we stopped at the Palmyra-Macedon Aqueduct Park, which houses a current lock on the Canal as well as remnants of several of the previous versions. The most obvious is the Aldrich Change Bridge, which is a Whipple bridge originally built in 1858 over the Enlarged Erie Canal. It was restored and placed in its current location in the middle of the park in 2003-04, and is the oldest of two surviving Whipple bridges in New York State (the other is the one at the Vischer Ferry Nature Preserve.) There's more info about the Aldrich bridge here for anyone who's interested. Usually the bridge has grass underneath it, which always looks a little odd to me, but today the area was flooded and the bridge actually looked like it belonged there!

Another indication of the previous allignments of the Canal is the old aqueduct at the west end of the park. The aqueduct originally carried the canal over the waters of Mud Creek. The towpath bridge over the creek has been put into service carrying the Erie Canalway Trail over the creek, while the aqueduct was dismantled and a portion modified as an overflow spillway for the current Canal. The other times we've visited there was typically a nice waterfall flowing over the spillway, but since the Canal is still in its off-season low water phase, we had a nice view of the underlying stone work.

After that we wandered briefly around Lock 29 and then walked to the east end of the park, just to see what was there. I took a look at a water-covered swamp and what I suspect was part of the old canal prism, and we were both surprised to hear a woodpecker hammering away... on a metal light fixture! It was tough to tell, but he might have been a northern flicker... he flew off when we stopped to look at him, and headed off into the woods when I followed him to try and snap a picture.

By then it was getting near dusk and also getting pretty darn cold, so we headed back to the car to finish the rest of the drive home. While it wasn't a trip into the woods, it's still a nice little park and I'm glad we stopped and got to spend a little while outdoors together.

JMH