And No Birds Sang

Years ago my late friend Dave Stirling favoured me with a visit to Big Bras d’Or. Dave was a naturalist extraordinaire, one of three great birder pals who fostered my passion for birds and spent uncounted hours with me along shorelines, in woods and fields, in daylight and at night, all in pursuit of the joys of birding. One day during Dave’s visit here, binoculars in hand, we went for a walkabout on my several acres. It was a good morning, though not an especially extraordinary one: we counted forty bird species during the ramble. Dave was pleased, so was I. At that time, even on a routine day someone paying attention was virtually certain to see at least two dozen kinds of birds, most of them breeding right here at ‘Bigadore’.

Before my emancipation from the working life I tried to spend most of the month of August at Bigadore. In August the mosquitoes have subsided, the water temperature has warmed nicely in the saltwater swimming hole below the cabin, there is still plenty of sunshine to savour. August was good for birding too: the woodland breeding birds were still here, and as the month progressed I could look forward to ‘fallouts’ of early migrants: small gangs of warblers and sparrows of several species gathered in a feeding flock in my birches, pin cherries and mountain-ashes.

The halcyon days are gone. I used to see swallows from the cabin at Big Bras d’Or: barn swallows, tree swallows, perhaps an occasional cliff or bank swallow. The swallows have pretty much passed out of view here at Bigadore. I have been here since the first of June—close to four months—and have not seen a single swallow. Not one.

Nowadays there is no way a keen birder could routinely find two dozen species here, let alone forty. These days I walk my trails and woods and encounter mostly silence. If not for squirrels inclined to object to my passage the woods might be perfectly still. Rather than a couple of dozen species on a morning walk, I might find five, or four, or three.

This past week news headlines informed us of a scientific study cataloguing the precipitous decline in woodland birds. The report was no surprise to me: I have been seeing it with my own eyes for years, but this year in particular has been shocking. I still see waterbirds: gulls, gannets in their season, passing herons at dusk, groups of scoters assembling for autumn on the Great Bras d’Or. But songbirds—warblers, swallows, sparrows—are another matter entirely.

The precipitous decline in songbird numbers is a sad fact that can be laid largely at the feet of humans. We destroy bird habitat. We build skyscrapers, telecommunication towers and wind generators without much concern for the migrating ten or twelve-gram birds that crash into them during their night-time migrations. We allow our beloved cats to go outside where they do what nature designed them to do: hunt and kill. Twice this summer I have been seated on a friend’s veranda when the family cat triumphantly returned home with a bird in its teeth. The experts tell us that millions of birds are slaughtered every year in North America by cats allowed to do as they will in the great outdoors.

It is not just cats. I recall how appalled I was to learn about the toll delivered by a single telecom tower in Pennsylvania some years ago: more than a thousand ovenbirds killed on one night—just one—as a consequence of flying into an unseen tower in the dead of night.

What can be done? I am gratified to hear that initiatives are under way to give birds warning as they approach tall structures. Good. We can help as individuals too. Windows are bird-killers. A big picture window is a joy to the folks indoors enjoying the view outside. It is something else to a bird that crashes into it. People who care can help remedy the problem by placing silhouettes in their window—perhaps of a falcon or hawk—to signal that the window is something a bird should avoid.

For a person who is both a cat-owner and someone who agrees that the world is a better place with wild birds in it, does it not make sense, for the welfare of birds and for its own sake, that Puss enjoys life in the safe and secure comfort of its own home?

Walking in the Dordogne

Chateau des Anglais

It was 100 kilometres in heat as much as 35 deg.  But we were up for it.  Mary met me in Paris and next day we headed down to Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne, the beginning of the route On Foot Holidays had set up for us. On Foot set up our accommodations along the way, gave us instructions on how to get to our next place, and arranged to have our luggage moved to the next stopping place. After a pleasant meeting with Emily, the company’s local contact and designer of the route, we went for a celebratory dip in the river.  Let me just say it was very refreshing and we didn’t stay in long.  The evening was very warm, so naturally we left our windows wide open, never thinking that at 4 am we would be discouraging a bat from thinking our bedroom was a great roosting cave.  An auspicious start to our trip. 

Chateau de Castelnau 

Over the next six days we walked as much as 22 kilometres in a day, and gained an accumulated amount of altitude of as much as 700 meters.  We saw miles of limestone walls, taking many thousands of person hours to build, many beautiful churches, chateaux and even a few birds. 

Plate Stalegmites

We worked up our appetites, and were wowed by some of the food. I know we will both remember the local specialities of Rocamadour Salad, and chestnut liquor (we had it in a bubbly aperitif and were hooked after that). We stopped along the way to tour the caves in Padriac and LaCave, and were gobsmacked by the beauty. 

Sheep Shadow

I have a picture of my feet at the end of the hike that I won’t show you, but after a couple of days rest they look fine again.  Mary and I retreated to our Paris airport hotel a day early to avoid the fallout of a transportation strike in France and it was a good thing we did, too. We heard reports of 475 kilometres of backed up traffic during the morning rush hour.  Never mind, we are comfortable, and all set up for our return to Canada tomorrow.  

Only 145 KPH

I am invaded by an earworm. A line from Fred Eaglesmith’s song ‘Wilder Than Her’ courses through my cranium: She’s a summer storm; I’m a hurricane. Hurricane Dorian—much diminished from the monster it was for the poor Bahamians a few days earlier—tore through Nova Scotia Saturday and Sunday. The biggest Cape Breton gusts were a mere 145 kilometres per hour, enough to topple trees, knock out power to eighty per cent of households, and keep us awake the whole night. But that is small beer compared to the 300 kph maelstrom that engulfed the Bahamas, leveled entire communities and left a death toll nowhere close to being fully counted all these days later. How do we even imagine three hundred kilometres an hour?

On Saturday Jan and I spent some of the day battening down the hatches—raising shutters, moving indoors everything that might be blown away, filling the woodbox, et al—before hunkering down for the show. The cabin withstood the ensuing winds without trembling. Now 48 years old, the building demonstrated it is sufficiently well made to withstand winds of a hundred kph or so. Not everything on the land proved as resilient. I walked our road the morning after—winds still howling—to find the road strewn with branches and parts of it paved with blown-down apples. Egress was obstructed by a big birch across the road. Later in the day I fired up the Stihl and commenced the task of reducing the tree to firewood.

We count ourselves lucky. We have only a minimal need for electric power and Dorian left our solar panel in place: I rely on it to power the laptop I use to keep Peregrinations readers informed of what we get up to at Big Bras d’Or. Friends and neighbours aren’t so lucky. I am co-owner of a generator I use in summer to run the power tools of my workshop. Pal Stuart Squires has it the rest of the year. Stu came down Sunday afternoon to retrieve the machine he needs to preserve dozens of chickens stored in his freezers.

The simple life we enjoy at the summer dacha reveals its advantages in the wake of a hurricane. Three days after Dorian blew through town a hundred thousand Nova Scotians are still without power. Our three rain barrels are full: we needn’t worry that a powerless pump can no longer supply the water essential to daily routines. We needn’t try to make our way to town in search of fresh fruit and vegetables that may not be available as a result of the storm: we still have a bounty of blueberries, blackberries and chanterelles, the best of all mushrooms.

But what of the luckless Bahamians? The climate scientists tell us that hurricanes as powerful as Dorian—or worse—will become ever more commonplace. Doubtless it is only a matter of time before a future cyclone delivers to Nova Scotians some facsimile of what was visited upon the people of Grand Bahama and Abaco last week. Meanwhile the man Americans elected as their president in 2016 asserts there is no such thing as climate emergency, and the menace chosen by Brazilians to lead their country burns the Amazon, convinced it is more important to produce beef than oxygen.

Catherine McKenna, threatened with physical harm by climate-change deniers, must now be accompanied by a security detail as she discharges her duties as Canada’s environment minister. Young Greta Thunberg is reviled for telling us we must all do our bit to reduce the human-induced threat to the atmosphere.

I share Greta’s aggravation with those who say ‘there is nothing I can do’. Nothing? Beef production is a huge producer of greenhouse gases. Can we not reduce or eliminate our demand for steak and hamburger? Can we not consider ways of clustering chores requiring a trip to town in order to reduce consumption of fossil fuel? Can we not occasionally walk rather than drive to a nearby destination? Or, gasp, go by bicycle?

During our walkabout around Dalem Lake yesterday we crossed paths with a woman recently immigrated to Boularderie Island after 31 years living in the Yukon—long enough for her to be struck by all the significant changes in weather patterns she has seen in that time. What will she have observed after 31 years in Cape Breton?

My dear old Mum, fretful about the world her great-grandchildren will inherit, announces she is grateful to be 95, and won’t have to endure the future herself. I am hard-pressed to debate her.

Eye of the Beholder

Late August delivers no end of subjects guaranteed to get a fellow contemplating the wonders of nature.

We understand that frog populations are declining in North America but you wouldn’t know it from the spectacle on display in recent days at Dalem Lake. Along the grass road bordering the lake we have to step carefully to avoid trampling the dozens of young pickerel frogs making their first explorations of the world at large. At this stage in their life history they are small—not much bigger than my thumbnail from snout to butt—but they make up in quickness what they lack in size. Not one of them is inclined to accommodate somebody looking for close-up photo opportunity. In Canada this frog is a strictly eastern species. They like the habitat opportunities on offer in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and the southern reaches of Quebec and Ontario, but western Canadians are deprived.

They are not the only frog we see on our Dalem excursions. Just as nimble as young pickerels, the wood frog is distinguished by its attractive tan colour and by a feature—a black face mask—that inclines some folks to call it the ‘robber frog’. Both frog species are cosmopolitan diners. The cabin’s copy of Amphibians and Reptiles of Nova Scotia lists 49 lifeforms pickerel frogs find comestible enough to include in their menu, everything from sowbugs, centipedes and spiders to stink bugs, spittlebugs and slugs.

A third kind of amphibian we see in our wanderings, Bufo americanus americanus, the eastern American toad, is not remarkable for its swiftness: closeup portraiture is much easier to accomplish. Some folks consider the toad an icon of ugliness, an opinion I do not share. I count myself lucky each time circumstance affords opportunity for communion with a fellow traveler I invariably find unhurried, congenial, relaxed—all traits it would do me well to emulate.

Ugliness is of course not a fixed notion. While I might be inclined to see Donald Trump as the acme of unattractiveness, others are inclined to see ugliness in bugs or snakes or centipedes.

Take caterpillars for example. Did you know that all caterpillars are the young of butterflies and moths? We don’t have to go all the way to Dalem to see caterpillars en route to becoming red admirals, swallowtails or fritillaries. We can just step out the cabin door and look down to find an array of creatures wearing multi-coloured coats, bedecked with horns, spines and bristles. Studying a caterpillar at close range I can’t help wondering, by what magic is a caterpillar transformed into a butterfly? Why all the spikes and spines? Well, in some cases the adornments are defensive: they are toxic or distasteful to a predator that might otherwise make a meal out of the caterpillar.

Get nose to nose with a katydid and you might be inclined to think its face is as ugly as ugly gets, perhaps as hideous as the out-of-this-world monster in Ridley Scott’s sci-fi epic Alien. For me, a katydid’s face is merely fascinating. What do all those strange-looking bits do? By what means did this become the ideal design for going about the business of being a katydid?

Late August is a fine time of year to appreciate the diversity of spiders nature provides for close inspection. Orb weavers in the genus Araneus are the arachnids of choice just now at Bigadore. Take a close look at the face of one, make believe the creature is as big as a human and, sure, it is easy to imagine oneself being scared spitless. Fortunately, orb weavers are not as big as Mike Tyson in his pugnacious prime: it is safe to take a close look and marvel at another aspect of nature’s complexity.

Whilst appreciating the wonders on display just outside the cabin door there other rewards, incontestably attractive ones. The blueberry crop by the spider’s web is at its peak. Pause from spider appreciation to savour the blueberry bounty free for the grabbing. Go up the road a short distance to harvest the chanterelle mushrooms currently crowding one of our trails. Carry on a bit further still and mine the blackberry crop just about to reach its best-before pinnacle.

Spiders, katydids, caterpillars . . . blueberries, blackberries, chanterelles . . . all this and I haven’t even begun to mention birds and the early days of fall migration . . .

Thrills of The Sporting Life

In an era fraught with anxiety about climate disaster, when the White House, No. 10 Downing and other capitals are occupied by ultranationalists and extreme right-wingers, is it any wonder that a fella is sometimes inclined to go in search of the lighthearted and the uplifting?

We traveled to New Brunswick not just to give a talk about hockey-playing soldiers of the Great War, not just to travel to long-gone ghost towns obliterated to make way for CFB Gagetown but also—perhaps primarily—to watch teenagers play basketball.

Good friends Garth and Carole are the proud grandparents of Malcolm, a star player with the New Brunswick team that competed last week in the 17-and-under national championships in Fredericton.

The most exciting sporting events I ever witnessed ‘in the flesh’ were basketball games back in the mid-late 1960s, when I attended Dalhousie University. A loyal Dalhousian, I watched many a game at the old war memorial gym. Much as I hated the Saint Mary’s Huskies and Saint Francis Xavier X-Men, I reserved my greatest detestation for the Acadia Axemen—because they were the most dangerous, most feared of the Tigers' opponents. The action in the old gymnasium was electrifying, unforgettable.

The teenagers gathered in Fredericton to compete in UNB’s fine Currie sports facility revived memories of those long-gone Dalhousie days. A tournament now, aptly, 17 years old, the 17U event had never delivered a medal for New Brunswick. On August 8 NB took on British Columbia on Currie Court 2. A victory would get Malcolm and mates into the medal round, the Final-Four grouping. BC took an early lead, its fans confident that their boys were a lock for a playoff berth. Among those rallying the NB troops was Malcolm’s granddad. During a stoppage in play he was dared to run up and down the sidelines waving a New Brunswick flag. Garth took the dare. Perhaps it made the difference: New Brunswick roared back in the second half and won 67-61. The medal round was theirs.

A night later NB tipped off against Ontario. The Ontario 17-year-olds looked formidable: big, athletic, fast—and almost entirely black. They dominated the NB lads from start to finish, leading by 11 at the half and winning by 18. Watching the Ontarians outleap, outrun, outthink and outscore the NB boys I thought, wow, how can there be such a thing as a white supremacist. NB backers took consolation: there was still a bronze medal game to anticipate.

In that match, Saturday afternoon, New Brunswick, again the underdog, faced Saskatchewan. The start looked a lot like the BC game, only worse. The New Brunswick shooting was cold; by and by the lads were down by 16 points. Sixteen points is a huge deficit to overcome but in the second half the Maritimers did as they had done against BC: they stormed back. Malcolm and mates shot brilliantly defended fiercely and won going away. Bronze medal to NB. Hallelujah!

Quebec defeated Ontario for the gold medal but that didn’t count for much in the NB contingent: nothing could diminish the glow of the New Brunswick bronze. To ice the cake, Malcolm was named to the tournament all-star team.

The basketball tournament is not the only sporting event worthy of mention. Monday night saw the first annual Bigadore Invitational Table Hockey Showdown (BITHS for short). As in the good old days of the NHL this highly anticipated event featured six participants. Loyal readers of Peregrinations will be aware that identical-twin cousins Lynn and Louise are formidable players. Jan’s game has grown by proverbial leaps and bounds. Peter Goodale and Brian Wilson (no, not the Brian Wilson of Beach Boy fame) are long-time friends who spent countless hours playing table hockey way back when. They were dead keen to knock off the rust and show my hundred-pound cousins a thing or two.

In the round-robin part of the Invitational, four players wound up with identical 3-2 records. These four—Louise, Peter, myself, Lynn—would compete for the gold medal. In the result, Lynn imposed her will on Peter to take bronze. The gold medal game—Louise vs. yours-truly—went on and on. And on. Tied 1-1, then 2-2, the game seemed endless. Then Louise netted a shot from the left wing. Game over. Gold medal to Louise. The joy was universal: everyone happy to see Louise win, just as happy to see me lose.

Granted, the Bigadore table-hockey invitational is not of the same order as the 17U basketball nationals but Peter spoke for all when he observed, in the thick of the action, Nothing else matters. Nothing at all.

Ghosts of New Jerusalem

A guy who is a sucker for ghost towns is especially taken by a community that has entirely disappeared but for the war memorial commemorating those of its sons who went off to do their duty to ‘King and Empire’ in the Great War of 1914-18. Sons who never returned home.  New Jerusalem, New Brunswick, is certifiably a ghost town. Not a single person lives there anymore. Once upon a time New Jerusalem featured two churches, a schoolhouse, community hall and several dozen houses.  They are all gone. All that remains of New Jerusalem are the cemeteries harbouring the remains of those who lived and died there—and the community cenotaph.

One does not get to visit New Jerusalem without some effort. The village is one of sixteen communities scattered on either side of the Sunbury-Queens county line that were expropriated in the early-mid 1950s to establish Canadian Forces Base Gagetown, one of the biggest military bases in the Commonwealth. I contacted the base commander’s office, offered an account of my interest in war memorials and asked whether Gagetown might let me see the ghost town cenotaph. The army said Yes. Yes not only to myself and Jan but to friends Garth and Carole too.

At 0900 hours Wednesday our quartet arrived at Gagetown Building K69, Range Control, signed the necessary waivers and listened carefully to a short briefing on all the items—shells, rockets, ammunition, smoke bombs et al—that we might conceivably come across and must absolutely, positively not touch. None of us needed to be told twice. Despite the nuisance the military people couldn’t have been more accommodating in allowing us to visit New Jerusalem. We were even provided a soldier escort—congenial Warrant Officer Jamie Beaver, a fellow Cape Bretoner—to lead us where we needed to go.

The Gagetown base is huge—roughly 60 km north to south, 40 east to west—and it required a forty-minute drive from Building K69 to reach New Jerusalem. Driving through the rolling landscape toward the old community, roots of the Appalachian Mountains impressively conspicuous on the near horizon, it was easy to imagine that losing their homes and communities would have been very hard on those who loved the place they called home.

The New Jerusalem monument sits on a height of land commanding a long view in every direction. The stone cairn lists the names of seven men—two from the close-by community of Armstrongs Corner, three from Clones, two from Olinville—fated never to return to their Lower Saint John River Valley community when they went off to war in 1915-16.

The Olinville soldiers were brothers: McCutcheons. Charles Ransford McCutcheon was a 27-year-old fireman/mechanic when he enlisted at Calgary in October 1915. His younger brother by four years, Ernest Ludlow McCutcheon, a lumberman, was 23 when he enlisted at Saint John in early January 1916.

The older brother, Charles, was the first to bereave his mother and father back in Olinville, Isabella and William. On the night of June 22, 1916, he was struck by a shrapnel burst from an enemy shell and died in the wee small hours of the following morning. Some 551 Canadians—including Charles McCutcheon of Olinville—are among more than two thousand soldiers who lie for evermore in Railway Dugouts Burial Ground, just two kilometres southeast of Ypres, Belgium.

An authentic war hero, younger brother Ernest fought in most or all the iconic Canadian battle of later 1916 and 1917—Ypres, the Somme, Vimy, Passchendaele—and was awarded a Military Medal for gallantry, an award he did not live long enough to receive. A casualty of enemy poison gas in late May 1918, he was hospitalized in England. Ernest died October 11, 1918, a month before the Armistice. His ‘final resting place’ is a soldier’s grave in Brookwood Military Cemetery, Surrey. Among the more than 5,700 soldiers buried at Brookwood, Charles is one of 2,729 Canadians.

New Jerusalem is redolent of ghosts: the ghosts of those who lie in the cemetery just a stone’s throw from the cenotaph, those whose hearts must have been broken to lose their beloved communities in the 1950s, and those like the McCutcheon brothers who lie under a battlefield stone marker an ocean away from Olinville, Armstrongs  Corner and New Jerusalem.

Echoes of Culloden

Another back road supplied another opportunity for reflecting on the past. Forsaking the Trans-Canada at Sutherlands River, we took NS 245 to the ‘Highland Heart’ of Nova Scotia. Just across the border between Pictou and Antigonish counties we came to Knoydart and spotted an imposing gate and interpretive panel drawing attention to a monument in honour of three men—a MacPherson and two MacDonalds—who fought on the losing side in the Battle of Culloden, April 16, 1746.

The battle transpired 273 years ago on a faraway Scottish moor and produced a disastrous result for Scots Highlanders, but Culloden retains great resonance—even reverence—for people of Highland heritage who care about their history. There is a place called Culloden in Ontario, another in Prince Edward Island. In Nova Scotia’s Digby County the village of Culloden is situated on the margin of Culloden Cove.

The Knoydart monument, a stone column about ten feet high commands a fine view from Knoydart Point over Northumberland Strait, the low profile of Prince Edward Island visible on the far horizon. The 1746 battle was the culmination of an intensive effort by supporters of Charles Stuart—“Bonnie Prince Charlie”—to restore the Stuarts as kings of Scotland.

The monument, built by Ronald St. John MacDonald, a great-great-grandson of one of the men it honours and one-time dean of the Dalhousie University law school, contains rocks taken from the Culloden battlefield. The battle veterans are buried nearby in unmarked graves.

On the east face of the Knoydart monument—aimed more or less in the direction of the mythic Scottish moor—Dean MacDonald installed a tablet honouring his ancestor and the other men of Culloden. It ends with lines that make up in fervour what they may lack in subtlety.

Let them tear our bleeding bosoms

Let them drain our dearest veins

In our hearts is Charlie, Charlie

While a drop of blood remains

Culloden was a catastrophe for the Highlanders. The English victors were ungenerous in victory, clan customs, language and dress widely suppressed. Combined with the infamous clearances in which Scottish lairds evicted their poor crofters in favour of sheep, the suppression led to the great emigration of the later 1700s and early 1800s.

I have something in common with the Dalhousie dean: I too have relatives who fought on the losing side at Culloden, men in my 5Xgreat-grandfather’s generation, all of them Livingstones—men affiliated with the Argyll Stewarts of Appin. Jan and I have visited Culloden, seen the spot where the ancestors fought and died, studied the list of kinsmen who perished. One of my long-ago uncles was the last in a string of men who carried and protected the Stewart battle banner. One by one the flag-bearers fell until, the battle ended, the Livingstone took the banner out of harm’s way. You can see it today in the national museum in Edinburgh, ancient blood stains and all.

The significance of Culloden was impressed upon me by my great-uncle, Harrison Livingstone, who cared quite a bit about family history. My first book, Remembered in Bronze and Stone, is dedicated in his memory. When that book was published I made it clear to my publisher that I wished to be identified as author by my full name, Alan Livingstone MacLeod. Google “Alan MacLeod” and you will see any number of people by that name, but try the full name and you will find only one.

Along Highways 245 and 337 in Pictou and Antigonish counties there are communities named for the places in Scotland the Scots pioneers departed in order to make a life in New Scotland: Lismore, Knoydart, Moydart, Morar.

A few miles down the road from Knoydart the traveler finds Livingstone Cove. It is there about the turn of the nineteenth century that my Livingstone ancestors landed in the new world. A commemorative tablet advises the visitor that Malcolm Livingstone and sons made a living from farming, fishing and lobstering.

I took a photo of Livingstone Cove from the side of the road leading down to the community wharf where the small fleet of Cape Island lobster boats is moored. In the foreground of the picture is a group of red flowers. The English forces at Culloden were led by an English prince, William of Cumberland. English gardeners are fond of another red flower they call Sweet William in his honour. In parts of Highland Scotland and in other places where Highland Scots settled after the famous battle the same flower is less reverently known as Stinking Billy.