In Rondeau there's a visitors center just like in most other parks around here. At the visitor center they had set up bird feeders to get birds to come to the people instead of people going to the birds. They had many different bird feeders set up. They had hummingbird feeders, ones full of seed, ones full of nuts and everything in between. The Downy Woodpecker in this photo was on a bird feeder full of nuts of some short. It was an overcast day that is why the background is grey because I used a low aperture at 5'6 to blur it out and a shutter of 500 and ISO at auto.
The Algonquin backcountry is a wilderness treasured by many people, sometimes too many. Your quiet backcountry escape can sometimes feel more like a car camping site than a rough backcountry site. As a result of this, I wanted to know if it was just because I was bad at picking lakes to camp on or if there was something else behind it. To answer this question, I wanted to know which lakes were the busiest and which were the quietest in any given year. I filled a Freedom of Information request with the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks to get the booking data for each “booking zone” for 2024 and 2025. A booking zone is what you see online when you make a reservation. This data provides a lot of information. Easy access lakes are the busiest, while hard to access lakes are often the most quiet ones in the park. The data also shows that lakes such as Burnt Island, which has 43 campsites, are more busy than lakes such as Frank, which only has 1 campsite on it. To try to u...