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?