October Charms

Cape Breton’s October charms proved lavish. An ordinary October can be expected to deliver frosty nights and a rainy day or three. We ordinarily awake towards the end of our stay to find a skim of ice on the wash basin. No such troubles afflicted us this time. Rain stayed away. Tuques and mittens remained in the drawer. Though I claim it is the best sleeping venue anywhere on the planet, we nonetheless usually abandon the porch once the mercury approaches zero. Not this year. One day the outside thermometer climbed to 24 Celsius. I considered going for a saltwater swim. Briefly.

Ideal conditions presented themselves for rambles with Lynn and Louise—to Mica Hill in CB Highlands National Park and Simon Point near Louisbourg. Diminutive shorebirds—sanderlings and semi-palmated plovers—permitted close approaches and provided generous photo opportunities. Gannets patrolled inshore waters as we gathered wild cranberries from the coastal barren.

October woods are largely silent. With hummingbirds, flycatchers and warblers gone south, we welcomed encounters with chickadees, pine grosbeaks and an occasional sharp-shin hawk. The ears and feet of our resident varying hares began turning white, the better to make them invisible when the land is draped in snow.

Fall colours burgeoned gloriously: scarlet maples and golden birches, the finest display, Jan asserted, of her eighteen seasons at Boularderie. A new friend joined us for the morning constitutional around Dalem Lake: Luna, pal Derek’s four-year-old boxer thinks nothing is better fun than chasing a stick, and the best friends are those who tirelessly throw it.

For the second year in a row good friends Garth and Carole forsook the charms of their own summer palace at Amherst Shore to join us in the musical fun on offer at the Celtic Colours International Festival. We liked all three of the evening concerts we attended—at Membertou, Sydney River and Judique—but gave highest marks to the Monday-to-Friday morning sessions at little Knox church in Baddeck where CBC Radio invites festival performers to make and talk about their music. We arrived early enough to command a front-pew seat, sufficiently close to reach out and pat the performers’ heads if we dared.  

The festival’s last day was Saturday. It was Bigadore’s too: we spent the day shutting down the summer operation and closed the cabin for the winter. It is never the happiest day of a sojourn at the Cape but the weather cooperated and operations proceeded without mishap.  At Sydney we shared a last supper with the twins then applied goodbye hugs. Air Canada had us airborne at 6 on Sunday morning, too early to see what we were waving at as we bade farewell to Cape Breton for another year.

London Daze

. . . What better way to highlight the tranquil quietude of Dorset than to board a train in Axminster and disembark two hours later at London’s enormous Waterloo Station. Waterloo confirms that I am well and truly a country mouse. The aggregations of fellow humans must reach well into the thousands. 

We have arranged a modest B & B at Fulham in one of London’s far reaches for a measly ninety-five pounds a night, no en suite toilet, no shower. The B & B is under one of the aircraft approaches to Heathrow. Every minute a big jet descends toward the vast airport.

We buy three days worth of passes for the London Underground—a Friday, Saturday and Sunday. How benighted of me to imagine that the Tube might be quieter on a weekend day. At one point—how many storeys underground I cannot say—we find ourselves in human gridlock, an Amazon of people jammed in front of us, another immediately behind. I manage to squelch claustrophobic hysteria. Eventually we move.

Our principal Saturday objective is the Imperial War Museum. IWM boasts a newly reorganized Great War exhibit. The museum charges no admission. We arrive at opening time, 10 a.m., to find a long queue of people eager to see the fresh exhibit. We are surprised and pleased to be included among the 10:15 admitted flock. Despite the masses elbowing for space I somehow manage both to keep panic at bay and feel much moved by the fruits of the curators’ labours.

Sunday delivers another museum—the mother of all reliquaries say I—the British Museum. Crowds of people—what else—swarm around us. This amazing museum features free admission too. We escape the masses by paying sixteen pounds each to get into a special exhibit, ‘Ming: 50 Years That Changed China’. Beholding the Ming treasures from the years 1400 to 1450 we are thus able to see, I do not feel robbed.

After several hours at the museum we walk the streets of London: Oxford Street, Regent Street, Piccadilly. On a bright Sunday afternoon the sidewalks are choked with fellow humans, none of whom seem nonplussed by the hordes. 

Jan seeks a visit to a long-established department store, Liberty of London, which offers arrays of house-brand fabric highly regarded by quilters. She finds nothing to her taste, but I do. On the way up a stairwell I spot a memorial tablet to those of the store’s employees who died in the Second World War. Is there an analogous one to those who fell in 1914-18? I ask one employee. Then another, a 20-year veteran. Neither has any idea. I go searching on my own and find the WWI memorial: a beautifully crafted wooden tablet evidently invisible not just to the store’s current-day employees but likely to almost every shopper who hurries past.

We form the impression that all the world comes to London. Multi-ethnicity abounds. Along the sidewalks people conversing in our own language seem outnumbered by those speaking a host of unfamiliar tongues. In restaurants we are served by charming young women who are not English lasses. They tell us they come from Lithuania, Poland or Rumania.

We join the throngs at Whitehall, Westminster and sealed-off Downing Street, then cross the Horse Guards Parade to meld into the madding crowds at St. James Park. Fortuitously, St. James is big: we have room to turn around. We are surprised to find abundant birds at the large St. James lake—ducks and geese, some native to the UK, many not: barnacle goose, bar-headed goose, red-breasted goose; mandarin duck, red-crested pochard, tufted duck. The birds swim freely about, they are not caged. Why do they stay? I deduce they are well and properly fed by the park operators and have come to prefer a deadbeat’s life of to that of a free flier. Why should it be otherwise?

On Monday morning we allow ourselves several hours to get from Fulham to Heathrow, check in for our flight and clear security. Heathrow is enormous; it has five terminals, of which Air Canada’s, Terminal 2, is brand new. Despite its world-class museums and myriad amenities 72 hours in London seems just about enough. I nod goodbye to the great city; seven hours later the uninterrupted forest surrounding Halifax’s Stanfield International Airport looks more beautiful than ever.

Dorset Days

We forsook the abundant charms of Cape Breton in September to cross the Atlantic for a six-day walking trip through Dorset County in the south of England. Dorset was ‘Wessex’ in the 19^th century novels of Thomas Hardy. I hadn’t attended to Hardy’s novels in decades but for a taste of Dorset atmosphere I read Hardy’s last novel, Jude the Obscure. Jude is said to be Hardy’s darkest novel. If ‘darkest’ means inclining the reader to thoughts of suicide, I concur in the adjective. For all the dreadful events Hardy arranges to fall on the head of poor Jude Frawley, the book had me tearing my hair out. Be that as it may, the quality of the writing is up to Hardy’s exalted standard and the novel certainly evokes a sense of place, one that enhanced the walk.

We tramped more than 120 km in our six walking days, one of those days close to 30 km. A year ago we hiked the Garrotxa region of Catalonia in northeastern Spain. Arrangements were made for us by a British company, On Foot, who booked our accommodation, transported our bags from place to place, and most important, availed an off-the-beaten-track route for us and supplied detailed navigational instructions. We were sufficiently pleased with On Foot’s 2013 efforts that we got them to undertake the same role for us this time.

Starting out at Salisbury we admired the city’s magnificent cathedral; its spire dates back to the 1300s and at 404’ is the tallest pre-1400 spire in the whole wide world. If 14^th century attractions seem a little too nouveau there is, not far from Salisbury, a man-made structure that is even older—vastly older. We went to Stonehenge and joined the crowds gawking at the huge human-arranged rocks, the origins and purposes of which have yet to be comprehensively illuminated by experts.

Dorset’s is a lyric rather than epic sort of beauty. The region perhaps doesn’t lend itself to the same sort of superlatives we applied a year ago in Catalonia: ‘pastoral’ and ‘bucolic’ are more suitable modifiers than ‘spectacular’ and ‘glorious’, but we found plenty enough to distract ourselves as we wandered Dorset’s well-tended landscapes. Much of the time On Foot led us across farm fields through ‘kissing gates’ and over stiles; into woods past copses and coppices. There were daily encounters with tranquil sheep and cows, and fortunately none with enraged bulls or rams.

We paid attention to birds wherever we went: birds we never see in either of the neighbourhoods we seasonally call home on Canada’s east and west coasts. Birds with enticing names: yellowhammer, stonechat, wagtail, wheatear. And of course tits—plenty of tits—willow tits, coal tits, blue tits, long-tailed tits, even great tits.

We came upon evidence that mankind has occupied this part of the world for a very long time—the occasional tumulus or barrow—ancient burial mounds for those not in the know—and, at Hambledon Hill, the site of a neolithic fortress going back forty-eight centuries.

Readers who know us well need not be reminded that neither of us is a religious person—not in the least—but we nonetheless found ourselves paying close attention to churches, some standing since the 13^th century. For us the lure of churches relates not to heaven but to architecture, history and art.  Attractions like the carved ‘kneeling oxen’ at Rampisham that Hardy may have worked on, the remarkable stained glass at Milton Abbey, the 15^th century tempura-on-wood paintings of Christ’s apostles at Hilton.

Serendipitous discoveries are among the best rewards of travel. A year ago I’d never heard of Antoni Gaudi or modernista architecture. It took only minutes in Barcelona for that to change. This time we discovered architect Augustus Pugin (1812-52); in his very short life time amazing Augustus designed some six cathedrals, forty churches and further numbers of convents, seminaries, monasteries and colleges. In his spare time he designed castles and grand houses too, and oh yes, contributed designs to the Palace of Westminster while he was at it. We first encountered Pugin’s multi-faceted genius at Milton Abbey where we admired his monumental stained glass window. We found more of his handiwork in Lyme Regis and finally, by the end of our English fortnight, the fruits of his labours at Westminster.

Loyal readers of Peregrinations will be unsurprised to hear that I kept one eye cocked for shadows of 1914-18. Almost every Dorset village we traversed has a community war memorial. I looked at them all, photographed each, contemplated the infinity of loss and grief reflected in every list of names.  Not just in village squares did we find relics of the Great War. More often than not, if we managed to get inside a church we would see a tablet of bronze or wood listing those among the parish who died at Loos or the Somme or Passchendaele.

Among all the big and important things to see we found small ones too: post boxes in continuous service since the reign of Victoria, weather vanes. Yes, weather vanes. Weather vanes novel, strange and charming. Soon I was photographing every interesting weather vane I spotted. In the fullness of time i will dedicate a Flickr set exclusively to the myriad weather vanes of Dorset.

No walking trip of ours is solely about wearing out boot leather. In the evenings we went out looking for a good repast. An enduring legacy of the long-ago year I lived in India is an abiding love of Indian cuisine. All in, we spent just ten nights but on five of them we managed to find Indian restaurants, every one of them worthy. In villages not blessed with subcontinental dining options we did just fine opting for local fruits de mer—haddock, cod or calamari.

After five days deprived of the scent of salt air we finally arrived at the Dorset coast and began reaching for some of the same superlatives that served so well in Catalonia. From West Bay to Lyme Regis the vistas are truly spectacular; the coastal trail winds up and over high sea cliffs. Those climbing to a height of land are rewarded with magnificent views to east and west. This part of England—the ‘Jurassic Coast’ of Devon and Dorset—is England’s only natural world heritage site. As you might deduce from the name, fossils abound.

Lyme Regis on the coast was the end destination of our walk. After six days of intensive, all-day walking we rewarded ourselves with—what else—a day of walking. We prowled the Lyme shoreline to look for fossils. We found many—ammonites all, some small, some sixteen inches across. The nice lady at the visitor centre mentioned a brochure describing a town walking tour.  We asked for one and went on our way. The rewards include a Pugin church and a wavy-roofed old inn where Beatrix Potter wrote ‘The Tale of Little Pig Robinson’.

Far From the Madding Crowd is the title of one of Hardy’s novel. We felt grateful to Dorset for affording us no madding crowds at all. Then we went to London for three days where the story was altogether different . . .

In Praise of the Lowly Hammock

September unspools idyllic days one after the other. Quiet is pervasive by day and night. In the wee small hours barred owls and coyotes converse from one or another patch of the broad neighbourhood. More than five miles stretch between the cabin and the stretch of blacktop descending from the top of Kelly’s Mountain to the big bend at New Harris—too short a distance to entirely squelch the Jakes brakes of 18 and 22-wheelers. But by 4 a.m. there are interludes happily bereft of any machine-made noise at all.

September is harvest time. Jan is once again a canner: blueberry jam, green tomato chow, Astrachan-and-mint salad dressing. Fisherman pal Stuart delivers a lode of fresh mackerel. We have a deal: he does the catching and filleting, I do the smoking. We divide the proceeds which I claim do not take a back seat even to the handiwork of wunderkind fish-smoker Willie Krauss.

One of the cabin’s accoutrements is a hammock supplied some years ago by the folks at Lee Valley Tools.  Being more inventive and sensible than old fogeys, children—great-nieces and great nephews—find all manner of ways to delight in it but when the niblings are not here the hammock goes largely ignored, these days drawing little more than early fallen leaves. Yesterday I decided the hammock is a wasted resource. With afgan, pillow, binocular and good book in hand I decided to give it a go. Revelation ensued.

The hammock stretches between two fine specimens in a little stand of birches above the shop; maples and aspens, firs and spruces complement the birches. Give an inattentive fellow an attractive leafy canopy, blue sky, a few scudding clouds and he is thereby easily distracted from reading. Soon the book is abandoned altogether: I suddenly spot one, then a second, then ten songbirds foraging in the canopy. They are mostly silent and would likely have gone undetected had I not been stretched out in a hammock.

Downy woodpecker, chickadees, juncos, nuthatches make themselves known. At the sight of a black-and-white warbler I try a little ‘pishing’—the frivolous, frequently futile noise birders make to draw birds. Most warblers ignore such foolishness but the black-and-white is an exception. Within seconds I am nose-to-beak with a curious female, then a wave of warblers emerges in the canopy—yellow, blackburnian, black-throated green, magnolia, myrtle, more black-and-white. Some folks need a lottery win to truly feel their good fortune. Give me a mixed gang of warblers dropping in on their way to Central America and I am deluded into thinking I’ve struck gold.

Once upon a long-ago time I was a hard-core ‘Big Day’ practitioner: I would spend most of a 24-hour period in May or September rushing about with a couple of similarly demented pals trying to find and identify as many species of birds as we could squeeze into a binocular field. We wouldn’t be satisfied if we didn’t have a hundred species by lunch time. Because the Big Day is labour-intensive, some folks prefer the alternative of the ‘Big Sit’—park a comfortable folding chair in some advantageous location, picnic basket and cooler at one’s side, and count the birds as they fly past.

As I progress ever deeper into the dark forest of senescence I’ve now decided that Big Days and Big Sits are as nothing compared to the joys of the Big Snooze: stretch out in a comfy hammock and see how many birds you can count between naps. You don’t even have to crane your neck.

Ode to an Ovenbird

The autumn bird migration continues apace. Our front porch provides premium seating for watching the flypast of warblers, sparrows and thrushes. They head south, sometimes landing in the mountain-ashes and mountain hollies to feed on berries or bugs. The migration does not stop at night; it proceeds unseen but not unheard. I lie awake eavesdropping on snippets of clipped conversation as birds seek their way by starlight wherever they are intent on going.

I contemplate the perils the birds face. Weighing just a few grams, a warbler must nonetheless be formidably, unfathomably robust. How else do they manage to cross the Gulf of Mexico to reach South America in one piece? Once, twenty miles out at sea en route to Nova Scotia’s Seal Island to—what else?—go birding, I was amazed to see hummingbirds pass the boat, terra firma nowhere in sight.

It isn’t always peaches and cream. Yesterday an ovenbird, doubtless on its way to wintering grounds in Latin America, crashed into the cabin, killing itself right in front of Jan’s startled gaze. An ovenbird is a lovely thing to behold, preferably when alive. It is a warbler that looks like a thrush. It is the bird of summer sometimes called ‘teacherbird’ due to its song: typically rendered by us humans as teacher-teacher-teacher. We hear them every day in June and July and are glad of it.

Ovenbirds are generally olive-brown but boast a handsome dark-bordered orange crown. They use their pale pink legs to walk rather than hop as most passerines do. Why do we call them ovenbirds? Because their nest, unique among Nova Scotia’s woodland nesting birds, has an arched roof suggesting a Dutch oven. All in all the ovenbird is a real charmer: we count ourselves lucky whenever we see one, less so when it is freshly dead.

Years ago I remember being appalled by a piece in Birding magazine reporting the toll exacted by a single tall telecommunications tower somewhere in Pennsylvania. During one fall migration the author occupied himself each morning in tallying the feathered dead at the foot of the tower—a great variety of migrant songbirds. What I particularly recall is one morning’s count of dead ovenbirds: more than eleven hundred.

There can be no doubt that autumn migration was always perilous for birds, even before the world needed cellphone towers , wind generators, high-tension powerlines and 80-storey glass-and-steel highrises. Not to mention millions of beloved domestic cats going about their outdoor entertainment. Scientists report continuing year-after-year declines in populations of neotropical passerine birds. Small wonder.

Of Gannets, Grouse and Goshawks

Hannah, 11, and Sara, about to be 9, favoured us with a visit to the cabin with their Mum, lovely-and-charming Naomi. The girls afforded me the opportunity, for the second time this summer, of introducing youngsters to the multi-faceted fun of the card game Hearts. Snakes and Ladders, Crazy Eights and Uno quickly took a back seat to the new diversion. Hannah in particular proved herself a quick study: she ‘shot the moon’ in her first game and finished a strong second. I have little doubt that a year from now she will wipe the floor with me.

Unfettered enthusiasm is one of the benefits young people bring when they come for a stay at the Big Bras d’Or cabin. Simple pleasures—walks to Dalem Lake, bonfires, marshmallow roasts, salamander searches—are enhanced and intensified when shared with the young. I like the natural world at any time but interactions with wild things—nose-to-nose encounters with deer mouse, garter snake or leopard frog —are somehow all the more compelling with a keen 9-year-old at my elbow.

Perched as it is on a high bluff at the shore of the Great Bras d’Or, the cabin provides plenty to see from our front-row seats on the porch: gannets crashing headlong into Loch Bras d’Or, bald eagles and osprey hurling invective at one another as they compete for the saltwater seafood on offer. Other birds add their two cents in the community conversation: kingfishers and flickers, ravens and crows, herons and shorebirds. Adult ruby-throats left town a week or two ago but a small number of young hummingbirds still entertain us at the feeder.

Now that August is gone the woods are bereft of birdsong but fall migration is in full flood: small parades of migrant warblers alight in the mountain-ashes, maples and birches below the cabin, affording us a chance to sort out confusing birds of autumn. Assorted sparrows, headed south, skulk about the bushes up at site of the old barn. A merlin flashes by on its way who-knows-where.

Other events are perhaps more dramatic: a few days ago the evening quiet was broken by a loud bang at one of the windows in the sun room. We all gathered at the end of the porch to see what the commotion might be about. What we saw was a ruffed grouse struggling in the clutches of an immature goshawk. It only took a little while for the hawk to end its quarry’s torment and commence to feast. The girls might easily have been upset at this vignette of wild kingdom violence but, no, they were not, After all, goshawks have to eat too, and as I recall from long-ago personal experience, tender young ruffed grouse makes a tasty dish indeed.

What we’ve learned from this event is that a well-nourished grouse will sustain a goshawk—the biggest of the Accipiter family of hawks—for several days. The hawk returned the next day and three more days after that to feast on its kill. Now all that remains are bones and feathers, and the goshawk will now likely move on to another dining establishment.

In calendar terms summer has another three weeks to run but abundant signs point to a different truth. At night the thermometer tumbles below ten degrees. Up on MacKenzie Hill the summer folk are headed back—or already gone—to their winter base camps in Massachusetts, Maine and Alberta. Instead of speedboats and sea-dos, the Bras d’Or features small rafts of scoters arriving from their northern breeding grounds. In the late-night sky Orion, absent in summer, re-emerges in all its autumn glory.

In a couple of weeks we two summer stragglers depart for a while too, on a walkabout in ‘Thomas Hardy country’, Dorset, in England. We look forward to that adventure but also to returning here in time for fall colours, both the autumn-leaves variety and the other sort—the annual ‘Celtic Colours’ music festival. Doesn’t that sound almost as much fun as a week at the Las Vegas casinos?