Meanwhile, Nick Doe has published his own Trail Map of the 707 Community Park (.pdf) It is far more fun and interesting than any official thing will ever be. Go take a look!

You might remember that I found a poinsettia plant in the Gabriola forest last year, but it was dead when I came across it.

I’ve had a feeling that another poinsettia would turn up, and the leaf in the stream was fresh. Further along the trail, another pink leaf lay under some salal. And a bit further still, here’s what we saw:

It’s just by the cedar tree with the antlers.

I’m guessing that I just missed the Placer of Poinsettias, because these plants wilt pretty quickly in the cold.

But what do you know? Somebody has fished out that tire, and used is as a trailmarker here.

There are several deer skulls in use as trailmarkers on Gabriola. (These ones, those ones, and some others, too.) What’s odd about this deer skull is that the antlers have been sawn off. Why would anybody do that?

It’s not far from the forest vase.

I think it was February when I first spotted this plant – leaves wilted, flowers no longer red. I’m guessing somebody left it in the forest at Christmas-time, but who? And why?

You know what I missed at Christmas and what else I missed at Christmas in the Elder Cedar Nature Reserve. Now I can add the poinsettia to the list of things I found too late. THIS December I’ll be much more observant, hoping to notice Christmas ornaments in the Gabriola woods – and any poinsettias – while they’re in season.

It’s a handy thing to know if you’re trying to follow mostly-overgrown trails.

Well. Now I’ve found the next tree in the series, I guess – tree number three. It’s 420 metres from the tree number two, and not on a trail… unless you count an old logging road that is overgrown enough to be nearly obliterated.

Are there more? Where’s tree number one? Who marked these trees — and when and why?

In case you haven’t guessed, he’s a ceramic frog. The Elder Cedar seems to sprout things like this from time to time. We’ve seen gnomes, Christmas ornaments, and bells. What next?

I’ve become quite fond of these birdhouses, and hope a few more will appear this winter.

Dear birdhouse builder, whoever you are: don’t you think there should be a birdhouse north of the clothes dryer, just where the path is so deeply rutted?

(Update: there are more birdhouses, but I haven’t blogged about them. Let’s just say there are rather a few birdhouses in the forest these days!)

This is the latest one. It lacks a roof, and the usual fir-cone decorations; perhaps the birdhouse-builder will return to this birdhouse and spruce it up a bit.

Now I’d like to talk to talk to the people who made these blazes. Are they still alive, and still on Gabriola? Gabriolore, do you know? Or how about you, Nick Doe? Anybody else?

At first I thought it was the world’s biggest beer bottle, but no. It’s made of plastic, and the letters on the plastic say PERFEX. Is this another leftover from somebody’s forest grow-op?

Some bright spark decided to scratch a large and ugly arrow into an otherwise attractive boulder. It points down a perfectly obvious road, so I don’t see how it serves any purpose.

There are so many ways to create unobtrusive trailmarkers. And then there’s this. Sigh.

Well, here’s the latest.

One day in the woods I met the guy who’s been hanging these plastic things in the cedar tree. Wasn’t that an interesting conversation! He doesn’t take those things into the woods; he finds them in the woods and hangs them up. Why are there so many plastic bottles? Most of them held garden fertilizer, he told me. Somebody must have been growing something in the woods over there. Oh, that something – right!

Well, that makes sense. Why else would anybody carry fertilizer bottles into the forest, empty them, and then leave the bottles lying around? I went back to the cedar tree to get a better look at those containers. Yup: fertilizer bottles.

I can only hope that the people responsible for last summer’s Gabriola hidden garden aren’t leaving litter about the place.

Related post: mystery in a puddle.

The orange flagging tape is there because that’s what somebody has used to mark a few other places along this route.

I’ve already shown you the first, second, and third birdhouses. Then there were no new discoveries for a while, so I thought that was the end of this particular series. But no! Just recently the house shown here has appeared. These birdhouses are all placed on extremely obscure trails, so it’s a puzzling thing indeed.

The person responsible for these birdhouses takes care to decorate them with moss and fir-cones, and is handy with a glue-gun. He or she also manages to get things mounted onto trees at a respectable height.

Most impressive. But, birdhouse-builder, who are you?

It’s the glass trailmarkers I worry about. Is this one a fire hazard, do you think? Or do I just worry too much?

Update: I’ve just figured out that the skull is an empty Crystal Head Vodka bottle. That explains the bar code on the bottom.

Splendid antlers, no? I hope they last a long time, as I’m inordinately fond of this pair.

Remember a while back I showed you the machete in the Gabriola woods? Well, these clippers and this saw have recently appeared just next to the machete. Go figure.

(Thanks to my ever-observant hiking friend for telling me about this newest addition to the collection of weird stuff in the Gabriola woods.)

I don’t know many knitters, and don’t knit myself. But a friend who does knit came for dinner tonight. She says what we have here is a case of guerrilla knitting.

So there you go, Gabriola: there’s a guerrilla knitter in our midst.

I have done nothing about this, other than wish, and sometimes grumble to myself as I’ve stumbled about in tall salal.

But now? A trail has appeared. Right there. Like magic! It goes exactly where I’d wished for it to go. Is perfect trail. And somebody’s left these deer-bones (and some others) to show the way.

Confusing. Wonderful. Who did it?

Of course, these days there’s a very clear path as well, but I expect that the arrows came first.