Morien Medley

Off we went with Lynn and Louise for a medley of human and natural history. We saw remnants of the Cape Breton ghost town, Broughton, and the Broughton cemetery, slowly being engulfed by forest. Broughton matters to me particularly because it was the 1916 training ground of the 185^th Battalion, the Cape Breton Highlanders, before they shipped out for the Western Front. One of the Highlanders was my cousin David Livingstone, fated to die in the last month of the Great War.

The twins knew I would want to see one Broughton gravestone in particular, that of the Ferguson brothers, Archie and Frank, both of whom served in a storied Canadian cavalry unit, Lord Strathcona’s Horse, Frank making the ultimate sacrifice, in April 1918.

Plenty of history is displayed in the attractive fishing village of Port Morien, not far from Broughton. In the early 1700s the first coal mine in North America was developed there to feed the blacksmith forges at nearby Louisbourg.  We chanced upon history of more recent vintage by way of a monument and display attesting that the first boy scout troop in North America was established not in New York or Chicago but at little Port Morien.  Who knew? The display features a 1910 photograph of the lads, all of them identified. I noted that some of the names matched those on the nearby village cenotaph. I committed myself to learning which among the 1910 boy scouts ended his days in 1917 on the slopes of Vimy Ridge or in the mud and gore of Passchendaele.

As for the natural history, well, we had plenty to crow about there too. At Broughton a lovely wood frog generously allowed me to get nose-to-nose for a glorious photo op. Nearby, the Port Morien sandbar is one of the premier places in Cape Breton to behold the wonders of the annual late-August shorebird migration. We saw eight kinds – plovers, yellowlegs, diminutive peeps and the lovely and charming sewing-machine-impersonator, short-billed dowitcher – not to mention a relative rarity, Hudsonian godwit, featuring a very long bill, upturned at the tip. Overhead, ring-billed and herring gulls nimbly picked flying insects out of the air as two osprey hovered for fish.

A bit further down the road, at Schooner Pond, we added two more shorebirds to the day list, Wilson’s snipe and whimbrel. The whimbrel reverses the godwit’s pattern: its bill is every bit as long as the godwit but turns down at the tip. Cape Breton is blessed: almost all of the whimbrels that migrate in autumn along the eastern seaboard funnel through the Island.

Circumstance afforded a beware-what-you-see refresher. Looking back from whence we’d come Jan spotted a chunky bird on a wire. I was galvanized. What was it? A night-heron? Strange owl? First-Canada-record common potoo? We retraced our steps far enough to discover that our extraordinary bird lacked feathers, wings and a heartbeat. It was a one-eyed ceramic insulator not in a hurry to fly anywhere. Oh well, of such reverses a birder is made.

Just beyond Schooner Pond Cape Perce provided consolation: good looks at gray seals and northern gannets and a sunset that had us reaching for the cameras and adequate superlatives. The day may have been deprived of a night-heron or potoo but never mind, It was enough to make an old fella grateful he can still get about without cane or supplemental oxygen.