teen age graffiti artists at Cape Roseway

Here are a few of the inscriptions you can find up at Cape Roseway Lighthouse. I've added whatever I was able to find about these names, mostly by going to the Vital Statistics at the NSARM, which is a fabulous resource. I think that most of these particular inscriptions were made by students at Alexander Hood Cocken's school. Cocken, the second lighthouse keeper, retired in 1860. So the graffiti artists would have been hanging out at the rocks during recess, chiselling away, before that. A few of their inscriptions are dated.

J. Locke, 1856. The Locke family was very connected to McNutt's Island. In the early nineteenth century at least two inter-related Locke households were on the island, among its very first settlers, when they brought their children for baptism at the Anglican Church in Shelburne. Mostly the Lockes lived around and in nearby Lockeport and Ragged Islands, with easy access to McNutt's Island by water, just as it is today.
Robert Miller was likely a son of The Rev. George Miller (an important Methodist preacher of the era, mostly connected with the church in Halifax) and Alexander Hood Cocken's sister Frances Cocken Miller. He would have been Alexander Hood Cocken's nephew.

John Alexander Fraser Purney was born about 1845, son of a Shelburne merchant and his wife. He married Angela Muir in 1872 and became a physician in Shelburne.
J.B. Vernon.Vernon is a significant name on McNutt's Island. Captain Nathaniel Vernon of Tarleton's Legion bought the old McNutt property at the northern end of the island, as well as other lots around the island. This may be the son of Nathaniel's son, Augustus Vernon.

I haven't found anything about J.T. Morrow, though he certainly did a nice job with his name.
J.Gibbons, 1856. There is a John Gibbons who was born in Sandy Point and was a schoolteacher, married to an Annie Perry, and living at the village of Roseway, on the western shore of Shelburne Harbour directly across the False Passage from McNutt's, in 1864.

Joseph Homer, a sea captain, was born about 1842, and married in Barrington in 1870. If he was a student at Alexander Hood Cocken's school at the lighthouse, he would have inscribed his name in the late 1850s.Tottie is a well-known name in Shelburne, because of Tottie's Store, which remains on Dock Street.

You can find more graffiti here, here, and here. I have always wanted to make a map of the rocks, showing where all the inscriptions are located. But I have not gotten around to it.

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.

lichen report

There had been rumours swirling around the island about some lichen experts who had visited here a week or so ago to hunt for a rare lichen -- so rare, one person said, that the whole island would be closed down if one was discovered. But nobody knew anything specific. Who were these mysterious lichen hunters? And what had they found? I put it down to one more unsolved McNutt's island mystery.

Then I received an email from Brad Toms, who is a Wildlife Biologist at the Mersey Tobeatic Research Institute. Brad told me I could quote him. So, Dear Reader, you are about to hear the lichen report in its entirety. Nova Scotia Island Journal does not monger in rumours! (Except maybe now and then).

Here is Brad's report, which includes the link to his site:

I just saw your blog when I was searching for something else on the internet about McNutts Island. I work for a research cooperative (www.merseytobeatic.ca) and Skipper brought us onto the island last Wednesday to do a little work. We were doing surveys for rare species of lichens on the property owned by the Federal Government near the lighthouse. One of our principals is to share the results from our research so when I saw your blog I thought 'who better to share it with than the people who live nearly full time on the island!'

We didn't find anything of great interest at Cape Roseway but while walking back to Skipper's wharf we found a few interesting species close to the road in the middle of the island. The ones we found were called Peppered Moon Lichen, Powdered Moon Lichen and Foliose Shingle Lichen. None of these are particularly imperiled in the province but they only occur in specific habitats close to the ocean and are rare enough that we noted them (the powdered moon lichen is the rarest of the three). In the places where we found those (wet maple and fir forests) there was a good diversity of what are called "Cyanolichens" (lichens that have cyanobacteria as the partner with fungi instead of algae).

peppered moon lichen on McNutt's Island (photograph courtesy of Brad Toms)