very important birds, expertly observed

In yesterday's post I gave you the latest on lichens, from Brad Toms, who is Wildlife Biologist at the Mersey Tobeatic Research Institute. Now here are Brad's bird observations from his visit to McNutt's last week:

There were American Robins out at the lighthouse on the lawn and there were Winter Wrens (4 males) singing, scattered along the length of the road to the lighthouse. You might hear their very beautiful rambling and lengthy song while you are outdoors.

(Brad wrote later that he had sent his observations to Dr. Ian McLaren who was pretty sure that the winter wrens Brad heard were the first arrivals this spring in the province. Go, winter wrens! We've heard them for the last four years, but we had the hardest time identifying them. Greg said they sounded like they were singing Gilbert & Sullivan operettas. Last summer Sue Abbott finally told us what they were. The robins have been here all winter, though I do believe there are more that arrive with spring.)

Brad's observations continue:

Another interesting sighting of the day was 3 male Harlequin Ducks below the lighthouse point at the in the crashing waves.

This was a new location for sighting these birds whose nearest known large concentrations of wintering adults is Port L'Hebert. A few are seen now and again near Baccaro but this is the first time they have been sighted at Cape Roseway to my knowledge. They're hard to see, but very beautiful, birds if you get the chance to see them before they leave for the Arctic in the next few weeks.

I also noticed your owl post on the blog from last fall. It looks like a Short Eared Owl (listed as a Special Concern under the Species at Risk Act) rather than a Barred Owl.

The clear/whitish under wings and the white circle around the face are the give away features. An exciting sighting!

Here's a not-very-good photograph I took of the short-eared owl that I thought was a barred owl. You can go here to see more pictures of its visit to the bog last fall.

Thanks to Brad for his excellent reporting from McNutt's Island! I hope in the future that more naturalists will pay attention to this remarkable and overlooked place.

Images of the winter wren, harlequin duck and short-eared owl are from Robie Tuft's Birds of Nova Scotia, courtesy of the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History.

spring snow

Just beyond the garden fence, raven is out for his morning stroll. A little spring snow deters him not at all.
A junco perches within the safety of the garden.
Snow gilds the queen anne's lace.
A lovely spring garden.
Junco has flown into the oak tree, everyone's favourite place to sit.

spring visiting

Yesterday was such a social day on the island. In the morning Peter and Sherry came over to the island, and came by for a visit. A dark-eyed junco made a flying house call.
Actually, many song sparrows and juncos spent the day settling in after their long trip back to the island. They twittered about unpacking their bags and checking out the menu at local diner (which is the same menu as last year).
The sheep came by to greet the returning birds.
Blake and Ashley came by. They brought lobster from Blake's dad Skipper, and stayed for a visit. Later Skipper himself came by, with mussels and eggs. We really don't need to go to the store.
At the end of the day Greg sat in his favourite place and appreciated the beginning of spring.

early birds, and a fierce March wind

There are two song sparrows getting blown about in the side yard. They arrived the other day, the advance guard. They'll certainly have their pick of the best nesting spots by the time the laggards show up. I bet they're glad they got here first.The wind is fierce today, and cold. Environment Canada is clocking it at 55 km/hr with gusts to 70 km/hr at nearby Baccaro Point. It reminds me of the wild winds that March blew in on, only eighteen days ago.

All in all, an excellent day to stay indoors.

synchronized flight

A flock of bohemian waxwings swooped along the shore the other day, checking out the bayberry situation. These birds actually breed in northwest Canada. But in winter they like to take in the more moderate climes, and usually include Nova Scotia on their circuit. Nova Scotia is their Florida!

It's hard to tell bohemian waxwings from cedar waxwings, except that apparently if I'm seeing waxwings at the end of February I'm seeing bohemians and not cedars.

I barely had a chance to wave hello before they were off and away to visit some other part of Nova Scotia. They swirled from one part of the bayberry bramble to another, up into the swamp maple that's near the shore, and then -- all at once and all together -- came straight up over the bog into the oak tree. When they flew off again (which they did, immediately) they were a breath-taking sight: a hundred tails, a hundred horizontal bands of bright yellow. Then they were gone.

I couldn't take their picture but I knew somebody who had: Ronnie Dentremont in Pubnico, along the shore not far from here, earlier in the winter. Ronnie kindly gave me permission to use some of his truly amazing pictures. You can see more of his bohemian waxwing photos here and here.

island life continues, and we resume our place within it

We have been home for a week or so. At first it seemed as if we never left, though I'm almost certain we did, a few days before Christmas. Here sits the house, there the stone walls, the apple trees, the stacked wood, all pretty much where we left them.

But there have been changes. The mice came out to play. Three of them were killed in the traps we had cunningly, murderously set along the kitchen baseboards. So, traps sprang shut. On the window sills, flies expired of old age or despair, their tiny legs sticking up in the air. One small shrew fell down the stairs and died on the bottom step. The shrews do that now and then, and always in the same way, dropping from some unknown place and landing on the last stair, a fatal lack of attentiveness or memory that they make over and over, from generation to generation. We came home to this assortment of small corpses, evidence that time had passed.

Each autumn as the weather turns cold again, the deer mice come back into the innards of the house. They arrive through their secret passages, the ones that we will never close up, no matter how alert or ingenious or dedicated we are. And from there, their safe places, at night, while we are asleep upstairs, they enter the kitchen. Where we have set out mouse traps, baited with cheese. They take the bait, or some of them do. And then in the morning we find them dead.

While we were away the house was cold, but still, for the island's most permanent inhabitants, a nice enough place to spend the winter. Now that we have returned, the sad but inevitable dance -- dance of cheese or death --resumes, exactly where it left off.

We do not hate the mice. They are beautiful and charming animals. If only they didn't want to live inside the house, but of course they do want to live here in this warmly crumby place. And there's no co-existing, no compromise that would suit both parties. So, with regret, we kill them off, one by one. And with determination or hopefulness or filial piety, their children and their grandchildren keep coming back to this fabled paradise, the place they hold dear in their collective memory, our kitchen.

It was about this time a couple of years ago, in the dregs of winter, when there's hardly anything left out there to eat, that we began an understanding with the ravens. It was they who thought of it first, swooping closer to the house than we'd ever seen them do before, stalking and preening around in the side yard. Before, they had mostly perched in the spruce trees south of the house, or in the lower orchard apple trees, or flapped in threes and sevens into the dead forest along the shore where the owl lives. They are birds of great size and dignity, and we were surprised to see them coming so close.

On the nights when we ate meat --lamb or venison or mutton, all from the island --we were then in the habit of putting the bones and scraps outside on a bench until the next day, when I would carry them down to the wharf and drop them into the water, for the gulls. One morning Greg saw a raven fly up off the bench. He had torn open the plastic bag and taken the scraps. Then we began to lay the left-overs on the cement platform of the solar tracker: an offering to the ravens. And soon we added the morning's mouse corpse to the collection. The ravens took it all, lifting into flight with their claws firmly holding these gifts.

Now we are home again. Outside, snows have come and gone, fallen and lain and melted. Rain. Ice. Wind. Winter in its relentless power. Of all that I can only guess, like someone with amnesia trying to puzzle this gap back together again in my mind. I get the general picture but I have missed all the detail.

A raven has noticed that we are home, and walks, gravely, like an old man, along the picket fence near the house. It is he who is the keeper of seasons past. He remembers how long ago, before Christmas, we set out meat scraps for him, and the delectable fresh corpses of mice. He hopes to remind us of our old charitable impulses, to reawaken our consciences and stir our memories, to patch December to March, and move on.

chickadee in oak tree

One sunny day last week I watched a dozen little birds -- mostly warblers and chickadees, as far as I could tell -- catapult from the woods near the shore to the bog to the oak tree: boing boing boing like a bunch of ping-pong balls. These birds hardly pause to allow for pictures. They've got another agenda entirely - bugs!So I was glad to catch this chickadee in rapt contemplation.

owl, cruising and perusing

It's a soggy but sunny afternoon. We can hear the hollow sound of waves crashing along the island's southern shore, the storm's aftermath. We've been seeing an owl lately, out in broad daylight, cruising the bog -- a barred owl, I think.
It comes up close to the house, closer than you might expect it to.
It spent the afternoon swooping back and forth.
Then it rested and gazed all about with its owlish eyes. Lyndon thinks it's scoping out the hens.

visit from a northern harrier

A group of students and teachers from the Learning Centre in nearby Barrington Passage came on the island today. As we were all outside making apple cider, we spied an amazing hawk. Well, she would have been hard to ignore. She swooped and soared among the bayberry and dived down into the bog and generally put on a riveting demonstration of hunting skills. (Though as far as we could see no animals were harmed in this show.)Then she posed for a while on an old overturned tree trunk. Though this picture is distant, you can see her owl-like face, I hope.
I'm pretty sure this is a female northern harrier. The hens were clucking and pecking in the front yard, not far away, oblivious as usual. But our visitor seemed to have other fish to fry.
She flew off, and over the lower orchard,
and then along the shore into the skeleton forest.
In England the northern harrier is called a hen hawk. I'm glad the chickens didn't know that.

remembering a hummingbird

This place where we live is a small patch that for a couple of centuries now people have been making into their own. Its house, stone walls, crumbled cellars, apple trees, wells and old fields are evidence of the long-ago work of domesticating a bit of acreage on an island filled with bogs and rocks and forest and surrounded by the sea. It's a project we embrace, most days.

But around and beneath and above and even within this place lies another, vaster place, which is wildness. The two places live side by side and intermingled. Sometimes that other country, that wild place, is distant and impossible to discover, and sometimes it is very near. Sometimes it encroaches. Sometimes it brushes by, lighter than a feather.

This summer we hung up a hummingbird feeder for the first time. We delighted all summer in watching the frequent visits of two female hummingbirds to the feeder -- so frequent that, if you just stood for a few minutes at the front door, you would see them there, all day, every day, without fail. Because they became so familiar I thought I was getting to know them pretty well.

But then, as summer was coming to an end, I met that young hummingbird up in the vegetable garden. At first, when I saw him sitting so still for several minutes at a time, I didn't have enough to go on. It didn't fit with what I had seen near the feeder. So I thought he might be sick or dying. Why was he allowing me to get so close? I began to spin a sort of hummingbird tragedy in my mind: the little bird, somehow left behind or blown off course as his relatives all flew away across the Gulf of Maine, now lonely and afraid and stranded in the vegetable garden. It's a pretty good story, and it could be true.

Or not. It could be that he was merely on his way, alone or more or less along with others, and had stopped to rest for a few hours before moving on. The day I saw him was both sunny and windy, not a good day for flying east against a strong westerly wind, but not a bad day for being close to the ground in a relatively protected sunny garden. It's possible that he was feeling perfectly confident and able to take care of himself, within the limits of being a very small bird with a great distance yet to travel. I did not need to invent pathos where none was required, there being a big enough supply of tragedy in the world already.

Until my tutorial in the vegetable garden, I had not known that hummingbirds sit for long periods of time, stalk their prey, blink, swallow, and unroll their amazing tongues, a skill I associated only with frogs and snakes. He was, though young, an excellent teacher.

But I still don't understand what I saw that day: where he came from and where he was going and why he had come to the garden. I expect there are interpretations that I even don't know enough to consider. I only know that for an hour he became a small portal into the vast wildness that surrounds us.

a young hummingbird in the vegetable garden

This bird has been around in the garden, and for some reason today my presence had very little effect on him. After I watched him for a while and saw how still he was being, I ootched closer and closer.
Every once in a while he would take off to do his hummingbird thing.
Like tiny angel wings. If you accept that these are fiercely aggressive tiny angels.
He was pretty much sticking to the nasturtiums, which I'm glad I have kept picking so there are still fresh blooms.
You can tell when he's planning a move because his feathers ruffle. I was close enough to watch his eye-lids blinking and his throat swallowing.
By the time I got these pictures I was lying on my stomach in the garden path. It was very comfortable. I watched him for nearly an hour and was forced to rearrange the rest of the day's schedule because of it. I may never catch up.
I was close enough to watch his long tongue flick out to capture insects. But I never caught it on the camera.
Got this, though. He's after that bee. Would he really want a bee?
Samurai hummingbird.
Yes, he really wants that bee. Down his throat. Well, maybe once.

the bog beyond the yard

We have a front yard, which probably should not be called anything so grand as a lawn. It is randomly studded with huge half-submerged boulders and equally randomly cropped by the sheep. When, for reasons known only to them, the flock's visits become increasingly random, as they did this summer -- in fact downright unreliable, though who are we to complain -- then the yard is mowed by Greg, with his push gas-powered mower, which is not designed for boulders and magically appearing stumps.

Just beyond the yard the ground dips into a low swath of bog, before it rises again at the lower orchard. Where the yard ends wildness begins. Like all the island's bogs, it is filled with soft mossy places, little streams and pools where you least expect them, deadfall lying in wait to trip you up, ferns, and grasses. It is criss-crossed with narrow deer paths. The bog is a good hiding place for the deer, easy for them to travel through without being noticed.
There are several varieties of berry-producing bushes in the bog.

Here is some sort of holly -- I think winterberry (Ilex verticillata) but I'm not sure.

And I think this sort is different from the first two. I think it is Indian Pear, which is also called shadbush or eastern serviceberry (Amelanchier canadensis).

Its berries change colour from creamy white to pink to deep cranberry to dark inky purple. I don't know whether it is edible for the likes of us.

Here is bayberry, beloved by the warblers. Well, I expect the birds love all these berries.

And here are wild rose hips, just beginning to turn from orange toward dark crimson. In a few weeks the bog will be an Impressionist landscape of bronze and copper and red and mossy green and grey, with occasional dabs of goldenrod and blue aster.

evening, high tide

At the end of the day the great blue heron is fishing at the head of the cove.He sits unmoving on a rock in the middle of the water.
The island is peaceful after the strong winds of the past few days.
The sheep pen is quiet this evening, too. It's almost always serene like this, except for a few days every year when it is a place of intense activity.

how the music changes

The birds have been slipping away for some time now. I last saw the hummingbirds in the evening on the 31st so I guess they left that night, or early the next morning. They didn't say good-bye, even after we had such a good time together. The juncos and sparrows and mourning doves have left too, along with their babies. The warblers no longer flit among the bayberry down in the bog. The woods where the kinglets dwell is silent. And I haven't seen the robins for a while, though some of them winter over here, so maybe they are only taking a short vacation.

Yesterday I heard a white-throated sparrow's half-hearted song, and there's still one small sparrow of some sort who believes the vegetable garden is her personal kingdom. Other than those laggards, most of the beautiful singers -- the ones that make you stop whatever you're doing and listen -- have gone away and they didn't say where.

As sometimes happens, when the lead singers go off in search of greater glory or at least someplace warmer, you are not exactly bereft after all. It turns out that there were other musicians here all along, practicing quietly to themselves and waiting for their moment. Now their moment has come and they are ready. Bees and grasshoppers and dragonflies saw away on their tiny fiddles. Red squirrels add percussive texture. Lamb and ewe duets offer heart-felt recitative. The seal chorus really only knows its one song, but they love it dearly and never get tired of singing it over and over, their end-of-summer lament.

And there's the single loon who lives year-round in the cove. She's an aged alto, once famous but now retired to this obscure spot. She's still got her voice, and when she sings the island's enthusiastic amateurs fall silent, as anybody would in the presence of greatness.

a visit to the ledges

You can see the rock ledges in the western channel when the tide is low. The rest of the time they are submerged, and no buoys mark their presence. These ledges, and the overall shallowness of the western channel, are the reasons it's named False Passage on the nautical charts. There is one particular ledge where the seals gather for choir practice, which they feel especially inspired to do on foggy days. The ledges belong to the shag and the terns, too. Terns are more camera-shy than shag, though.
The shag's other name is cormorant. In south shore Nova Scotia they are shag.
When the Atlantic is rough it sends strong waves into the channel. Then the waves crash over the ledges even when they are submerged, sending plumes of white spray into the air. But when the sea is calm I can even row out here.