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?