cranberry walkabout

On the south side of the island, hoping for cranberries, I picked up the ghostly track of an ATV. Maybe it was our own from this time last year. I doubt if anyone has come there since. I followed it, walking through a low scrum of bayberry and juniper and cotton grass and dried fern, around stands of spruce and up a gentle crest. Surrounded by the forest and the sea and hidden in a low place, the bog becomes visible only when you are upon it. Like so much on the island, if you don't know where to look you will only discover it by accident. And if, having found it, you fail to take sufficient note of where you are, you may not find it again.

Once I was in the bog I tiptoed about in my rubber boots, a curious giantess, and bent down and squatted so I could peer closely at this world. Everywhere I looked I saw the basal leaves of the pitcher plant, plump veined red teacups. Each one now held a thimble-full of some dark shining brew. The pitcher plant seems to have had a very good year in this bog. I might have come upon the last touches for an end-of-season tea-party about to be tossed by the local fairies for a few invited flies. While I admired the cunning place-settings, the guests, abuzz, were at home donning their iridescent wings and polishing their heads.

Even though it is a small enough place -- maybe four or five acres altogether -- and even though you can see all the way across it no matter where you are standing, still, it's easy to lose your way in the bog. Somehow you are never quite where you had thought you were. You look up from peering into its watery pathways and glinty pools and rumpled velvet moss to find yourself somewhere else entirely. How did I get over here when I was just over there, you wonder. I think there may be some shape-shifting that befalls the bog visitor, which can be disconcerting unless you begin to go with it.

It is easy to forget that, like a reasonable person, I have come here for a reason. I remember from last year's search that to see these cranberries I will need to adjust my expectations. I won't be looking for the colour we call cranberry. Instead, I'm after a glimpse of dull purplish bloom only a few shades darker than the pitcher plant's teacups. I remember Peter's rule for seeing whales in the summer. "Go up to the lighthouse four or five times in July," he said, "and look out to sea, and I guarantee you, if you do that four or five times, on one of those trips you'll see a whale."

Peter's rule applies to cranberries too (and maybe to other things as well). I spied one, then another, then another, until I had gathered a handful in my cupped palm. If I bent down to look four or five times, on one of those times I'd begin to find them lying quietly about here and there, attached to a delicate green thread, a dark jewel set on a bracelet of tiny green leaves, bog treasure.

autumn landscape

There were twenty contented sheep in the lower orchard on Monday.The bog, meanwhile, is showing off its prettiest colours.

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.

a narrow escape on mid-summer's day

We celebrated mid-summer's day with a visit to a secret bog we found in the spring. I wanted to see whether orchids grew there, too.They do. We found dragon's mouth aplenty,
and also another one: grass pink. They are small shy orchids and you have to look carefully to find them hidden in boggy shaded places, among the bayberry and holly. Come further in! they whispered shyly to us, and so, spell-bound, we did.
Many enchanting sights appeared as we walked deeper and deeper into the bog. The flower of the northern pitcher plant was just emerging.
Blue iris, winking like jewels.
The magical northern pitcher plant. Here you can see its charmingly sinister basal cups filled with water, where poor unsuspecting creatures are lured in and drowned, while the bog fairies hover nearby and laugh. ( Nobody ever said bog fairies were nice. )
After wandering around the bog and almost getting sucked down into the netherworld, we went a different way out. Then we got so lost. Because ferns had overgrown the trail we found last spring; more trees had fallen; everything had been turned around and rearranged and obscured, the better to lure poor unsuspecting creatures like us. Though, really, we ought to know better by now.
Luckily for us the mosquito repellent Greg had bought at the Dollar Store has an actual compass embedded in its top (also a whistle, though who would have heard us? And it was a very soft whistle. But still: good thought.)
Without the mosquito repellent compass we might still be wandering around in circles in the forest. We saw this osprey nest from several different angles, that's all I'm saying.
Eventually we came to the eastern passage. Really, I can't imagine how we got here.
Then more slogging through deceptively smooth-looking fern covered fields and broken deadfall where I'm sure I heard the sounds of elvish snickering
until at last we crossed the path that leads to the main road, and -- just like that -- we found ourselves transported from the realm of mid-summer magic back to reality.

Almost spring meander

Another calm and sunny day. We wanted to explore an interior bog-like place that shows up on the Google Earth satellite picture of the island. Actually, from looking at that satellite picture you can see that huge swaths of the interior are bogs.

But the interior bogs are secret places, ringed all around by forests so that you can't see them from the road.
We walked along a forest path that was made either by a deer hunter or a surveyor. In either case they went to a lot of trouble.

Or it could have been made by the gnomes, since one of their houses lies along it.

Then we walked into the bog. This particular bog is well along in its transition to a forest. Long, long ago it would have been a glacial depression, then a pond. Now the spruce are moving in. Bayberry is well established, and the ground around those bushes is fairly firm.

But there are many places where it would be impossible to walk without getting sucked down to the nether world. And we saw lots of northern pitcher plants and sphagnum moss, both bog species.

I felt surprised to find myself standing inside this large open space that can't be seen from the outside. It made me wonder how many more places like this there are on the island. But unless there's some sort of trail or path into them, they really are very hard to reach.

Cranberry foraging

We thought there might be wild cranberries in a bog near the eastern channel. So on Sunday we went foraging.

We were thrilled to realize that they grew on the island. Carla Allen says that there are wild cranberries in bogs all over southwest Nova Scotia, just waiting for people to come and harvest them. So maybe this is an ordinary Sunday afternoon activity around here. But it's a first for us.
The bog is actually trembly in a few places. You can stand on a little mossy hummocky island and wiggle it back and forth -- an odd experience.
The bog was luminous with glistening water and light. Red squirrels chattered in the forest nearby, and waves pounded the rocks of Cape Roseway and the entrance to the eastern channel. Those were the only sounds.
The northern pitcher plant grows abundantly here. Its basal leaves are cranberry red.
Its tall stem and flower have dried.
We found cranberries everywhere, a few at a time. We never really came upon an extensive patch. We had to look closely to find them. They seem more purple than red at first, so they don't stand out.
A northern pitcher plant waiting for a fly. There were little flies in the bog, looking for northern pitcher plants to drown themselves in. I'm sure they got together. There were also small grasshoppers and water spiders.

There's something deeply satisfying about looking for wild food.
In a couple of hours of foraging we collected about three and a half pounds of cranberries.

Northern Pitcher Plant

The northern pitcher plant is common in Nova Scotia, where it makes its home in acidic bogs. We had not seen them here, though, until recently, when we came upon an open acidic bog on the southern end of the island.During the 1940s, when Fort McNutt and its guns were in place, much of this area was deforested. There used to be a pond here, according to those who know. Now it is an open bog -- a place where it really isn't possible to walk because you can't tell whether there is any solid ground below your feet.
The leaves of the pitcher plant are carnivorous. The leaves emit an odor of decay that attracts insects. Then an inner lining of stiff downward-pointing hairs sends the insects sliding into small pools of water that collect in the base of the leaves. There dreadful things happen to them, but quickly, before they know it.
Meanwhile the pitcher plant's flower rises serenely above the carnage.
In an acidic bog there is little nitrogen available for the roots of plants. The decomposed insects become usable nitrogen for this graceful flower.
An open bog is a phase in a process. Eventually the bog will dry out as it fills in with layer upon layer of decomposing mosses and grasses and other plant life. The mosses will become peat, and the spruces that now surround the bog will invade it. It will become a forest again, and the pitcher plant will not grow here any longer.

Raking muck

If you are raking muck then I guess you are a muckraker. So that's what Greg is these days. His original project -- to clear the bog below our house of dead spruce trees and other unappealing stuff -- has morphed into recovering a pond he found hidden down there. This morphing process often happens with Greg's projects.
Greg finds potential where most of us would just see a bog.

To clear the pond he stands in it with his heavy rake and lifts out whatever he finds, which is mostly branches and muck. So far he has not turned up any ancient bog people.

The toads are cheering him on. They sit on the banks and trill and imagine that soon they'll have a watery home worthy of their collective dignity.
While Greg clears the pond, the three rams lounge about in the lower orchard and keep an eye on his progress. They themselves have undertaken no summer projects at all, but they do admire industriousness when they see it.

a wild orchid on midsummer's eve

Today we saw our first Nova Scotia wild orchid, Dragon's Mouth.

We had gone exploring in a place we had never been before. It's a place where nobody goes, except during deer hunting season. Greg noticed a bright colour glimmering well beyond the path.
When we looked more closely this is what we found, in the middle of an open sphagnum bog.
After Dragon's Mouth is finished blooming it will look like nothing but a stalk of slender grass in the bog moss -- something I would never notice. So it was quite magical that we saw it today.

Forest bog

The island's main road begins at the government wharf and ends at the Atlantic. It was first carved out of the forest in the 1780s, when Cape Roseway Lighthouse was built. When Fort McNutt was a defence post during the Second World War, the military engineers rebuilt the road and added drainage pipes.  So as you are walking from the wharf to the lighthouse you can see rust-red streams running from the eastern side beneath the road to the western side, then on down the forested slope toward the shore. 

But really the waters are more like rivulets than streams.  They meander through mosses and boulders and spruces and sometimes eddy into pools, but mostly they just saturate the moss and make a very soft spongy ground. 

Occasionally you can see a glinting through the trees and undergrowth further in, and know that the water coalesces there, where you see it reflecting the sunlight. It's very difficult to walk into the forested bog without getting lost.  But you can stand on the road and peer into it, and imagine yourself walking deeper and deeper into the woods, your boots squishing and sinking in all that soaked moss.