Swans a swimming part 2

ILLUSTRATION: BARRY KENT MACKAY

While January 5 marked the end of the twelve days of Christmas, and while I only came up with 19 mourning doves (there were 20 before the red tail hawk charged them) 64 grey squirrels at the bird feeder and an Al Purdy CD that a once-love sent to me, I’m sticking to the idea that Miss Lily’s in Picton makes for a dependable all-weather ‘field research station’ to hold a tête-à-tête with the ‘bird man’, Terry Sprague.

Terry seems sympathetic to my quest to understand this ‘twelve days’ business…you know…two turtledoves, four calling birds and all? “How about the history of the Christmas bird count?” he comes back with a smile. Sold: I’m in. “Prior to 1900 it was the custom to go out on Christmas day and see how many birds they could shoot. The one with the largest pile of feathers was the winner.” I mean happy holiday’s right? I hate to imagine what happened on Boxing Day.

“There was a prominent ornithologist, Frank Chapman, who finally stood up and said: ‘people this is not right; we ought to be counting instead of shooting the creatures’. So on the very first year of promoting a change of custom, they held about 20-25 bird counts in the New Jersey area. Nowadays, from December 14th to January 5th there are about 2,000 bird counts involving about 50,000 people across North and Central America. Each count is centered within a 15-mile diameter which in turn is divided into different sections. This year our group was in North Marysburgh, with a focal point at Waupoos Island. It’s only a sampling, and while missing a lot, when the data is entered with Bird Studies Canada and the National Audubon Society, it serves to tell us about what birds are wintering where, migration trends and wintering populations.”

“Along the Prince Edward Bay shoreline we estimated 2,200 Canada geese. One interesting observation was to watch a peregrine falcon descend after a mallard duck. You don’t often see peregrines in winter. We’re now also seeing wintering great blue herons, which poses some questions: how do they survive; why didn’t they migrate? Also on the list are Iceland and glaucous gulls that turned up this winter in the Brighton area. Tundra (whistling) swans are also staying the winter; perhaps because of less severe temperatures or availability of food. My hunch is that they are feeding on the proliferation of zebra mussels,” Terry conjures.

And feel-good stories? “After the trumpeter disappeared from here a hundred years ago, they were re-introduced in 2006 at Big Island marsh and soon followed by another release of 20-25 swans,” Terry responds. “It was a retired MNR biologist who got the project going. I have never witnessed the swans here in my lifetime and to see these huge birds was something else. The release was done off the causeway, and these swans had lost their migratory instincts, so it was thought that they would stay around. While there are some that return to the Rideau Canal area around Chaffeys locks, they all went their separate ways when a few left for Connecticut,” Terry adds. “Except this particular one: he kept coming back onto the causeway and neighbours would stop their cars to ‘shoo’ it off the road; I would also get out and ‘shshshsh’ him so he would move,” he tells me. “When you are used to working with warblers— ‘dickie birds’ we sometimes call them—and then to have this bird walk beside me with its neck stretched out: it had this hhhhhhhhhh-hiss. It was every bit as tall as I was. Coming eye to eye with this trumpeter, something profound went through my mind; that this magnificent bird that was extirpated from this area— suddenly we’re bringing it back and its working.”

My main one is that not too many years ago the environment was respected. Laws were put in place to protect it,” he answers. “Now it seems that these laws are flouted in favour of development; granting permission to do irreparable damage in one area with the sole penalty being to throw money at a visible environmental cause somewhere else. In one way it can be a noble gesture on the other hand it can steer to abuse,” Terry continues.

“My concern is that we’re losing a lot of wildlife habitat. It’s not like these are cute animals to have around and its ok to rob them of habitat because they’ll go somewhere else. We can’t do without them because it is all a part of biodiversity and our very existence depends on a healthy one. Many people can’t seem to grasp that,” Terry adds.

“Our human population is growing rapidly and living longer, meaning that our impact on the earth is increasing daily. We’ve gone a long way in preserving some of these habitats, but we need to do more.”

“I go for a walk every morning at daybreak and feel that there is so much beauty everywhere, and yet it’s so easy to miss in the daily rush. Just as my early teacher Marie Foster at SS#14 affected my life—I visited her long after she retired— my guided walks have in turn affected others. For example Lynn Loughheed was 13 years old when we first met by Macaulay mountain where he lived years ago. He pursued our walks with us for five years and is now a biologist working in the Galapagos Islands.”

Maybe it’s a search for deeper human understanding I think to myself; maybe a need to enrich or import a greater appreciation for natural harmony that has made birding the second most popular hobby in North America— the first one being gardening. “So-called ‘bird watchers’ no longer have to carry their binoculars in a brown paper bag so as not to be singled out as being an eccentric,” Terry comments. “Birders today will gladly pay thousands of dollars to buy spotting scopes or binoculars,” he adds. “Whereas I started out with a Roger Tory Peterson vinyl—two LP set of 331/3 records where you had to drop the needle at the appropriate spot to listen to select birdsong; now, even field guides are almost passé— moving from CDs as more people use iPods.”

“I’ve seen both advances and decline. For example, barn swallows and tree swallows have lowered dramatically in numbers. And if there is anything out there that will generate debate, that is the topic of cormorants and how they have exploded in population. The first person to discover cormorants in the area is Farley Mowat. He was out at Scotch Bonnet island and spotted the first breeding colony on Lake Ontario—he knows his stuff, his father lived down at Northport.” (Barry Kent Mackay is a birding specialist and renowned bird artist currently illustrating a soon-to-be-released book about the misaligned destruction by way of the annual cull of the cormorant.) “You’ll hear people say that cormorants have completely destroyed this island or that island with nests and droppings,” Terry continues. “I look at it philosophically. Take the human element out of it and these islands have evolved for millennia—islands disappear and islands form. Something new comes in and we’re upset because it happens in our particular lifetime— we’re seeing something we don’t particularly like. But biologically there’s not a thing to worry about,” Terry sums up.

And so, this morning wanting to shake add-on rhymes for the ‘twelve days’ that still roam my imagination, I toss a scoop of black sunflower seeds into the nearby thicket along the banks of Slab Creek; a place where chickadees and finches and blue jays shelter. And oh—about the bird count? I’ll call Terry before spring migration so I get a chance to fire off more questions down at his favourite all-weather ‘field research station’.