Munn Road Melody

In these horizon-foreshortened days of both voluntary and mandatory isolation, peregrinations are necessarily more local than they once were. Our trusty Vibe sits idle most days and when we do start it up, it is only to drive a short distance. This being the first week of May, Munn Road beckoned. We drive there to park at a pullout under the hydro line that separates Francis-King and Thetis Lake parks. The powerline and adjacent parkland are an excellent place to see and hear returning migrant songbirds in these early days of a new breeding season. 

Jan and I get going early, arriving at 0517 hours to take in the dawn chorus. The day starts with a bang: distracted by the imminent excitement, I crush my left thumb in the car door, something I'd have preferred not to do. Oh well, even with a battered thumb, I cannot think of anywhere I'd rather be on the fourth of May than in the woods and open places on either side of Munn Road under that powerline. To be there with my better half.

Long ago, in the early-mid 1980s my excellent birding pals, Ron Satterfield and Bruce Whittington, could be persuaded to join me in a birding 'Big Day', an all-out effort to find as many bird species by sight and sound as we could squeeze into a very long day, twenty hours or thereabouts. Even at the time, in my mid-30s I knew what boon companions I had. I cherished them. With the benefit of hindsight my view of them is burnished that much more. I drove my friends hard. If a coterie of birder pals want to see 130 kinds of birds on south Vancouver Island they have to take the enterprise seriously. They did.

I loved Ron Satterfield. I use the past tense because Ron is departed. Gone four years now. Bruce and I were in our mid-30s back then, Ron past 60. Many years after we'd given up the Big Day game, I told my old pal that I felt a little regret about how hard I'd driven him back when. The Great Satterfield asserted that no regret was necessary. He said those times were some of the best of his long, rich life. I knew he meant it.

So yesterday when Jan and I revisited Munn Road for another session of hardcore birding, I was flooded with memories of days gone by, of Ron and Bruce, and all the adventures the powerline delivered when two of the trio were still young and one, not so young, was as intrepid as ever. Two sorts of peregrination unfolded yesterday: the literal kind and the time-travel variety a trip to Munn Road invariably sets in motion.

In a 1980s-era Big Day, after several hours listening for owls in the dark, the trio would typically welcome dawn at Munn Road. There was no time to squander, we would dash into the powerline, keen of eye and ear, and come out an hour or so later fifty species to the good. 

When Jan and go into the powerline now we do not dash. There are no other stops to worry about. The modern version of a May Big Day happens in one place. We take our time. The goal is still 50 species but if it takes the whole morning to reach that target, so be it.

Busted thumb notwithstanding, we have a fine, memorable time. A sapsucker delivers his irregular drumbeat love-song to the woman of his dreams. Jan is widely known by a well-earned nickname: Hawkeye. But her hearing is every bit as sharp as her spotting ability. She has left me behind. I no longer readily hear the kinglets and high-pitched warblers I detected so easily a third of a century ago. She shakes her head at my hearing loss. I wonder how much longer it will be before I get the heave-ho, before she summons the locksmith to re-key the Ontario Street doors.

I do manage to see or hear seven of the eight warbler species we can expect on our route. Especially in the early hours we have the place to ourselves: there are no other people to practice safe-distancing with. A barred owl accommodates our wish for a close look. At the sub-station ponds we find two wood duck families—the adults and their young broods. A pileated woodpecker—the species oldtimers called northern logcock—bangs out his nuptial melody from a distant snag. A medley of songbirds join the morning chorus—purple finches, black-headed grosbeaks, house wrens, common yellowthroats, McGillivray's warblers, goldfinches, a Hutton's vireo—all of them ardent to produce a new generation of their kind. 

It takes the whole morning, all seven hours of it, but we reach our goal: fifty species. The Great Satterfield would be 99 were he still in the land of the living. I miss him, and offer silent thanks for the great, stalwart friend he was.

Doris Irene, 1923-2020

Doris grew up in the multi-ethnic Ontario Street neighbourhood of Montreal, a community that burnished her native kindness, tolerance and acceptance. During the Second World War she worked as a bookkeeper for a large insurance company. Her younger brother, Eddie, a seaman in the Canadian merchant navy, impressed a Cape Breton crewmate, Hugh John MacLeod, who wondered whether Eddie might have a sister. Told he did, HJ demanded to meet the sister the first time their ship landed in Montreal. Doris, 21 at the time, felt that HJ was like Errol Flynn, only better. They married within a year and proceeded to raise a family in Nova Scotia.

It was the best, luckiest decision HJ ever made: during a marriage enduring nearly half a century he was a principal beneficiary of Doris's devotion, dedication and sense of duty.

First came a son, then twin daughters, then a final daughter. In her late forties when her own children were grown, Doris decided to start all over again. She happily took on daycare responsibilities for her first grandchild, then a second, third and fourth.

Doris was first, last and always a mother, a caregiver, a nurturer. But she was much more besides. She paid close attention not just to family and friends but to the world at large. She was a reader, close follower of world affairs, a student of human nature. Possessed of rare empathy and intuition, she was a marvelous listener. She would ask new friends about their lives and families, not merely to be polite but because she was genuinely interested in others. A friend would only have to report family details once: Doris would remember.

She was a role model for growing old: positive, resilient, brave. She understood that abundant good cheer was as beneficial to herself as to those around her.

Left to lament that she is no longer available to share her common sense, wisdom and compassion—and to induce laughter at just the right moment—are son Alan (Janice Brown), daughters Nora (Ron Whynacht), Nancy (Donald Nelson) and Kathleen (Jon Prentiss), six grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

All of whom will have to make do with the world of memories she leaves behind.

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?