Crazier Than a Flock of Monarchs

In this post I cover more of my Saturday photo outing downtown, where I got to see a flock of Monarch butterflies feeding on Goldenrod. It was a long day, and I took many photos.

This is a flock of Monarch Butterflies. It will take a couple of days for me to post the photos I took leading up to them, so I thought I'd cut to the chase. The journey is more important, anyway. It's remarkably difficult to get a large number of butterflies to sit together and synchronize their wings. This was the best I could get. There was much pining for a longer lens, as I did not want to disrupt their feeding and couldn't get closer.

I took my camera out of my backpack after walking from Yonge and Bloor to the Distillery district, where I worked a couple of years back. They've tried to spruce it up a bit since I worked there, but their choice of art has ruined it for me. It's still a nice place to visit, but it doesn't feel Dickens-like anymore. The concentration camp scene of the first X-Men movie was filmed in this corridor.

I went inside the building where I used to work and noticed the'd moved more old equipment into the main stairwell. It looks better.

The millstone from one of the factory windmills. This facility was the birthplace of Canada Club rye whiskey.

I left the distillery and took this mugger-friendly bridge under the eastern Union Station tracks. Beside this bridge (and slightly above it) is the Cherry Street station house, now a small administrative office.

The underside of the most decrepit roadway in Toronto, the Gardiner Expressway. Never was there a more wretched hive of scum and villainy etc. etc. etc.

After crossing the southern would-be estuary of the Don River, now a dredged channel, you cross these tracks to enter a fairly clean industrial district. Not really clean - but it could be much worse.

For example, there's lots of goose poop.

A lot of barbed wire, too. Probably to keep photographers out.

Beautification, including the occasional patch of professional landscaping.

Rows of trees line the sidewalk; on the other side of the trees, chain link fence, barbed wire and barren industrial land. Covered in concrete and gravel, of course.

This area is still used as a port of call for Great Lakes shipping vessels.

There are moorings ready and waiting.

Nothing good lay at the end of this journey.

Perfect teeth along the way.

I am not sure if this plant is abandoned or not. My uncertainty stems from a brief encounter with the security guard watching the place. Regardless, it is in a terrible state of disrepair.

Industrial parking lot.

I'd probably look like that too if I lived around here. No telling what's in the water.

It's either in a state of disrepair, or incomplete demolition. I used to ride my bike down here when I was in university, and it pretty much looked the same then.

Birds watching the dragons.

Sleepy dragons at rest. After visiting for a while, I made my way to the entrance of Tommy Thompson park, also known to some as the Leslie spit. I'll save those pics for the next post.

© Jeremy Buehler and Bug Noir (www.bugnoir.com), 2010.