Dalem Delivers Something Special

The customary start to a day at Bigador is an early morning walk of about seven kilometres from the cabin to and around Dalem Lake. Though Jan has been away these past ten days, burnishing her musical skills at a UVic guitar academy, I am as faithful a Dalem devotee without her as I am when she is part of the alluring Dalem package. I admit to missing my better half but I am not lonesome: the neighbourhood affords abundant company to assure me I am not alone in the world.

It is still breeding season here on Boularderie Island: I know this because the songbirds declare it it daily: they will continue to do so for another fortnight or so then the migrational instructions encoded in their DNA will compel them to think about moving on to parts well south of our degree of latitude. Every day at Dalem I hear warblers: parula, black-throated green, black-and-white; thrushes: hermit, Swainson’s, robin; woodpeckers: hairy, flicker, pileated; nuthatches; chickadees; loons and spotted sandpipers. Wild things are accustomed to H. sapiens being a sometimes dangerous species. They cannot recognize that I am harmless: birds scatter at my approach. So do creatures that cannot fly: hares, garter snakes and frogs, both pickerel and wood, flee before me.

Mostly what I hear and see at Dalem is familiar but this morning I was treated to something completely special. A hollow, ghostly ku-ku-ku, ku-ku-ku, ku-ku-ku stopped me in my tracks. Owl? Dove? Jan claims, fairly, that I have become a lazy birder. Most of the time I bird by ear: I know what I hear, and don’t bother to look. But upon hearing a strange ku-ku-ku I revert to something like the hardcore birder I was four decades ago. I searched the birches along Dalem’s south shore for the source of the ku-ku-ku; I impersonated the call as best I could which had the desired effect: the bird flushed and showed itself – a black-billed cuckoo – a bird strange to see in Cape Breton at any time but especially now in breeding season.

I stayed in the cuckoo neighbourhood for forty minutes, had several more glimpses, even managed a photo or two but nothing worth showing at the county fair. What is a black-billed cuckoo doing at Dalem Lake in late July, singing as if asserting a territorial imperative? The species is not known to breed on Cape Breton Island so I am intrigued. I will revert to what I was long ago: for the next several days I will listen and look for the cuckoo and hope to encounter it again. It didn’t feel like cooperating today but, who knows, perhaps I’ll get lucky tomorrow and get a decent photo. If I do you will hear about it.

There is other news to report. Before departing us a year ago Bob Nagel set aside sufficient shekels to fund an event often affectionately called a pissup in these parts, an array of food and drink sufficient to sustain and inspire the assembly of bereaved adorers who gathered Saturday at his old place on MacKenzie Hill to share memories of their late, lamented friend.  No one regretted that the weatherman turned out to be wrong: instead of the clouds and intermittent showers mooted by Environment Canada conditions were mostly clear and sunny.

A diverse array of friends and cousins gathered in the sunshine to share Bob sagas. The congregation ranged in age from 5 to 85 or thereabouts; it featured an outlaw or two, a smattering of good faithful Presbyterians, and a wide spectrum in between, all united in the view that a Boularderie summer without Robert can never be as raucous as all the blithe seasons that preceded it. In honour of Bob’s musical tastes the boom-box laid out show tunes and arias, my personal favourite being the Jeff Beck rendition of Nessun Dorma that produced in me just the sort of emotional response that Mr. Beck likely intended.

I dare to imagine that Bob would have approved of what unfolded on Saturday. Old friends expressed regret that their friend is gone but they laughed too. Some even danced. Last summer the aged house had a forlorn look about it but on Saturday it came back to life. The view out to the Bird Islands was as splendid as ever; there is another bumper crop of blueberries on the bank below the old house. Perhaps for a moment it even felt as though these were the good old days.