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.