I’ve been doing a lot more bicycling and kayaking of late, since injuries have forced me to lay off running… completely but I hope temporarily.I took both kayak and mountain bike out to Dunstable last weekend for a multisport, wildlife watching afternoon outing.I’m a canoe man from way back, but kayaking is new to me. I like it. The kayak is smaller, and easy to hoist up onto my car. It’s also easy to maneuver over the smaller beaver dams and other such obstacles one encounters in local streams.I explored a tributary of Salmon Brook this time, putting into the water off Main Street, and heading downstream. The beavers have added a new dam on Salmon Brook since I visited last, but it was low and only slows, not stops, the stream. I kept my eyes on the shoreline, to see what I might see. There were many areas, I noticed, where the grasses around the stream bank were flattened, apparently by ducks or other creatures, and still other, larger areas of shallows along the stream, where a few inches of water covered a few feet of thin mud. I spotted an interesting bump in the midst of one such spot, and when I scooted over to investigate, it began to move. It was a turtle, which I later identified from pictures as a common musk turtle (they aren’t all that common, despite the name). Its shell was about four inches long, with a moderately high dome.It withdrew into its shell when I picked it up, but after I rinsed him or her off in the stream it poked its head out and opened its mouth, trying to look fierce. It had a small clam clamped onto on of the claws on its hind leg. I pulled on it gently, but it was stuck pretty fast. Not knowing how the turtle felt about its companion, I decided to leave it alone, and put the turtle back where I’d found it, adding a small dollop of mud on top of the shell for good measure. It had moved on when I passed that way on my return.Continuing downstream, I flushed a heron and then took my first left off Salmon Brook and headed up a smaller stream. It was just wide enough to paddle, and deeper than I expected, but I soon ran into another beaver dam, just high enough that I had to get out to get over. Beyond that point the stream narrowed, with high grass bending over the banks on both sides. I wasn’t paddling so much as pushing off the grass.I am guessing, looking at a map, that I was on Joint Grass Brook. According to an old history of the town, it once powered a saw mill.The brook soon split into two even smaller streams. Neither was large enough for my kayak, but the junction gave me just enough room to turn around, pulling into one and then backing into the other.Back at the car, I swapped kayak for bike, and headed down the road to the Dunstable Rural Land Trust land. I tooled around Gregg Woods a bit, then crossed over to the rail trail and headed south to the second crossing of River Road. There’s a trail there I’d been meaning to check out; when I passed that way last, it ended at a full-flowing stream. This time, the stream was dry, and the track continued. I found trails aplenty out that way, criss-crossing power lines and skirting wetlands. A barred owl crossed my path at one point, and stopped to perch a few trees back from the trail. We made eye contact for a moment before it decided to distance itself further.I followed the main trail at first, saving branches for the way back. Before long, it came out onto a dirt road. Not an old, charming dirt road, but a new one, soon to be paved and lined with the sort of utterly charmless houses people build these days, on lots prepared by bulldozers.

Mountain bike paths all too often end that way, in Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire. I suppose that eventually there will be no open spaces left at all, save for Beaver Brook and various public lands. It would be nice if people could agree to live more compactly, and save more forest for the owls and the turtles and other creatures who live there (not to mention the occasional human visitor). I’m afraid I don’t think that’s likely.