Author: marianlthorpe

Not content with two careers as a research scientist and an educator, Marian L Thorpe decided to go back to what she’d always wanted to do and be a writer. Author of the alternative world medieval series Empire’s Legacy, Marian also has published short stories and poetry. Her life-long interest in Roman and post-Roman European history informs her novels, while her avocations of landscape archaeology and birding provide background to her settings. As well as writing and editing professionally, Marian oversees Arboretum Press, a small publishing imprint run as a collective. Marian is currently writing Empire's Heir, the sixth title in the Empire's Legacy series.

November Diary – last day of the month.

December 3, 2023

November 30: University of Guelph Arboretum.

Snow squalls, or, rather, the high winds associated with snow squalls kept me close to home for a few days. But the last day of November dawned still and sunny, with morning temperatures just above freezing.

The Arboretum was quiet, but snow tells tales. Many bootprints, one set of ski tracks, lots of dogs. But there were also canid prints on paths where no human had walked :

Coyote on the left, the prints slightly offset; fox on the right, the prints a straight line. (I think.)

That woodpile I thought would have many creatures using it for shelter?

One set of squirrel tracks.

But the day had other compensations.

December tomorrow, and the beginning of meteorological winter. A month where I need the quiet and space of the Arboretum and other natural areas more than usual, to escape the world, which, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, is definitely ‘too much with us…getting and spending…’ I will, instead, go in search (in Annie Dillard’s words) of the ‘unwrapped gifts and free surprises’ waiting for me in the fields and woods.

November Diary 3

November 26, 2023

November 20: University of Guelph Arboretum

Regardless of the hard frost, a few goldenrod plants are still flowering, bright against the brown leaves. As are the bright red berries of a shrub I can’t identify. The goldenrod is wild, wind or bird seeded; the shrubs are planted. One is likely more appreciated than the others by humans, but I know which the chickadees prefer.

November 22: University of Guelph Arboretum

Neither flowers nor berries were needed to enhance this landscape: the diffuse light, the time of day, the copper and gold of goldenrod and grasses combined were enough. The field glowed.

Further along the path, the white-berried bushes – grey dogwood? – were full of birds. First a flock of starlings, sounding like rusty hinges and oblivious to my presence (or simply not caring); then a dozen robins arrived. Starlings and robins mixed without issue, but in a close bare tree, ten bluebirds (or greybirds, on this cloudy day) waited for the larger birds to leave.

The deciduous trees are bare now, except for the few beeches and oaks still hanging onto their brown leaves. November begins to show us the hidden things, nests in the forks of trees and shrubs, wasps’ nests hanging from branch tips, and high in a maple tree near the old quarry, a porcupine, too far away for my iphone camera to capture anything but a lump.

The last surprise of the day was the fruit of an Osage Orange (Maclura pomifera) at the edge of a hedgerow, their almost lemon-yellow colour standing out against the leaves. Three fruits, scattered across a small area. The closest (and only, I think) Osage Orange tree in the Arboretum is some distance away. I expect these were human-gathered and human-discarded. Will they be there the next time I walk this path?

November 24: University of Guelph Arboretum

First snow, a bare sprinkling arriving mid morning. The air is crisp still at 10 am. I round a curve on one of my favourite paths and freeze. On a waist-high stump not more than 6 or 8 meters from me, a young red-tailed hawk is devouring a squirrel. (The picture below is a terrible record shot, but it’s the best my phone could do.)

I watch the bird through my binoculars for several minutes, its head dipping, the strong yellow beak tearing at flesh, the head rising again, the beak red with blood and meat, the ripple of the throat as it swallows. The hawk is hungry after the cold night, and pays me no attention at all. Even when I move again, it just keeps feeding.

I walk my usual route, looking at the patterns of snowflakes on grass and leaves, hearing juncos and chickadees and crows. When I return to where the hawk was, forty minutes later, there is nothing but a few wisps of fur on the stump.

November 26: University of Guelph Arboretum

Still sluggish after my COVID shot, I walk slowly around my favourite paths. This location intrigues me: the pile of logs, the perennial plants, the white-berried shrubs (gray dogwood again?) behind them makes for excellent habitat. (The shrubs are full of cardinals this morning, feeding.) If there’s snow on the ground before we leave for England in early January, I’ll come back here to look at the tracks leading in and out of the logpile, to see what stories they tell.

When I’m almost back to the car, the many shades of brown of these red oak leaves catches my attention. On a cloudy day, they probably wouldn’t have, but in the morning sunshine they gleam, a patch of subtle beauty easily overlooked.

November Diary 2

November 19, 2023

November 14: Rural Roads

Five sandhill cranes flew low over Glen Morris road, arising from the corn stubble to my left. Not calling their haunting cry, but still a sight that makes me catch my breath, and reminds me, every time, of the beauty there is in the world.

November 16: University of Guelph Arboretum

The small pond is frozen, surprisingly, a thin skim of ice over its surface. Juncos chip from the reeds surrounding it, flying up, white tail feathers flashing, to the cedars at the side of the lane.

Further along the track a larch is brilliantly gold against the sky and the bare trunks of other trees. Goldfinches, drab in comparison in winter olive, flit among branches; chickadees feed low on the galls on goldenrod stems, the plants’ flowers, once as brilliantly yellow as the larch or as summer goldfinches, now turned to fawn fluff. Milkweed pods are stripped bare.

On the path through Wild Goose Woods, a wood frog hops clumsily away at my footfall, landing badly, struggling to right itself. The air temperature is perhaps 7 degrees C; the frog is cold. I don’t expect to see a wood frog in the middle of November. I’m too surprised to get a picture before it disappears into the underbrush.

I’m hoping for brown creeper at the maple swamp, but I neither hear nor see one. But a deep ‘gronk’ breaks the silence, repeated three times, then another triplet call, then a third. I can’t see the raven, but it’s there—and the crows know it too, their mobbing call gathering more of their kind to harass the raven. A single unkindness, and suddenly a murder.

November 18: Guelph Lake Conservation Area

Long shadows, even mid-morning. Thirty-two days to the winter solstice. The woods are quiet, not even a chickadee calling. Leaves crunch underfoot.

Scattered along the old fencelines are apple trees, chance-grown from apple cores tossed by a farm worker or buried by a squirrel. The apples still hanging glow yellow in the bare branches, like Christmas ornaments; more lie beneath the trees. Little seems to have eaten them: no foxes, no coyotes? On the paths where I usually walk, evidence of fruit consumption is clear wherever there is coyote scat (and it’s always in the middle of the trail); not here, further away from the city. Why?

I come out of the wood into old fields. It’s 2 or 3 degrees C, and the breeze strong. A raptor catches my attention, soaring above the fields: a buteo, but not a red-tail. Three or four wingbeats, a short glide. Repeat, and repeat. The tail is barred, I note. The bird turns, and the low sun illuminates the rufous breast: a red-shouldered hawk, hunting voles, perhaps.

The path enters old deciduous forest, bordering an arm of the lake. Still silence here, except for the harsh cry of a red-bellied woodpecker, and another. The trail turns, drops down into cedars, and at a stream crossing there are, finally, chickadees, and the chip of juncos. The slowly-flowing stream is surrounded by green, even on this mid-November day.

There should be a counting rhyme for bluebirds. One on the bluebird box, two in the sky… They are landing and leaving, one by one, from on top of nest box, CW64: the one in which they were raised? Or simply a convenient stop on the way to the trees by the little pond? I count seven there, before they flash away, cerulean and russet, and I lose track of them.

November 19: University of Guelph Arboretum

Cold and bright this morning, and quiet out in the fields and woods. The birches that look so white when viewed without comparison are creamier than the clouds. Birds that echo the birches’ colours — chickadees, juncos — are calling from the shelter of cedars.

Squirrels are everywhere, both the black and gray morphs of the gray squirrel (and almost every combination of gray and black and fawn and white you can think of — there are black squirrels here with white stripes in their tails; squirrels with fawn bellies and almost-red pelages, even one with a tail ringed like a raccoon’s), and the smaller, fiercer red squirrel, mortal enemy of the larger grays. Every bustle in the hedgerow is a squirrel, unless it’s a chipmunk. And every few meters along almost every path are the gnawed-off shells of black walnuts, autumn bounty fattening the squirrels for winter survival.

November Diary 1

November 11, 2023

November 3: Paths beckon in sere November, when the bones of things begin to show and the light slants and shortens.

November 5: Frost overnight, roofs and grass sparkling pink at sunrise: a few hours later, a garter snake on the path through Wild Goose Woods, unexpected.

November 8

A larch glowed in the fleeting November sun. Close to where I stood, eastern bluebirds flitted from tree to tree, their breasts the colour of autumn oak leaves, their backs and heads refracting the sky, as mercurial as the day.

November 10

Wild Goose pond was still, no ripple of beaver or muskrat or mink, no green heron stalking its edges or mallard leisurely gliding. Above me, the cacophony of a flock of starlings, like a hundred keys turning in rusty locks. Quiet water, loud air.

November 11

The dam on the Speed is out. Among the rocks and debris scattered in the mud of the river channel, mallards feed. One, in flight, drops diagonally to the water, its descending quacks mirroring its trajectory. By the footbridge, a blue heron stands on one leg, head tucked, motionless, prehistoric, more like a shaggy, shedding tree than a bird.

On the wooded east bank path, a red squirrel is a quivering embodiment of frustration, frantic, angry. It circles and chatters, whipping up and down a cedar’s trunk, returning to a hole to thrust its head in. My approach scares it off. I stand, watching. An eye appears, dark, ringed with pale fur. A nose. A head emerges: another red squirrel. It slides out, glances around, slips down the trunk and away. What disagreement, what trespass, did I disturb?

High Summer

July 30, 2023

End of July. High summer, but with the first intimations of autumn: grain ready to harvest, returning shorebirds, ripening fruit. In southern Ontario, in this year of wildfires and heat domes, floods and record temperatures, El Ninõ has given us a summer from my youth: warm, occasionally hot; humid, with many afternoons ending with thunderstorms.

The ornamental cherries and crabapples that line the streets of my community and the university grounds are heavy with fruit, branches weighted down. Everywhere vegetation is lush and green, rain-and-sun fed. Rivers are high, ponds are full.

On the nest occupying a light standard at the university playing fields, an osprey is calling. I watched the pair nest-build earlier in the year, one breaking off dead branches from trees in the adjacent maple swamp in mid-flight. Then, inexplicably, they abandoned the nest, only to reappear a few weeks later. Young birds, I assume, this year’s nest a practice one, playing house. I’m curious if they’ll return next year.

Roadsides are in full bloom: Queen Anne’s lace, chicory, birdsfoot trefoil, teasels. Purple and yellow and white, the chicory adding a rare blue. All European introductions, better suited to the artificial prairie of roadsides than the local, native wildflowers of the Great Lakes Forest that once covered this area. What native prairie plants could be here instead? Joe Pye weed? Bluestem grasses? I should know; I would have, once. It annoys me that I no longer remember, knowledge crowded out by other interests and concerns.

The garter snake that slid out from the roadside onto the tarmac of the road, perhaps seeking warmth, doesn’t know those plants aren’t native; they provide a hunting ground for insects and perhaps mice. I managed not to run the snake over with my bike, just. I stopped a few feet ahead to watch it, cognizant that a bus approached. But the bus, unlike my bike, appeared to send enough vibration through the road surface to warn the snake. It slithered back into the vegetation and disappeared.

A monarch butterfly half-flies, half-floats by, perhaps heading for the stand of swamp milkweed that borders the stream I’ve just passed. I’m seeing more this year, consistent with the recent data from Journey North, and hopeful.

Days like this—the weather, the wildflowers, the monarchs—blur time, especially as I ride along the gravel road in the north half of the university’s arboretum. I could (if I forget the creaky knee, and all the tasks waiting at home) be ten again, riding the farm lanes and unpaved roads of my home town, summer-free.

Planted in Pennies

May 17, 2023

Well, this is a first – I published this to the wrong blog!

‘I’ve been thinking about seeing. There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But—and this is the point—who gets excited by a mere penny? If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded by the sight of a muskrat kid paddling from its den, will you count that sight a chip of copper only, and go your rueful way? … if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.’
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I…

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Spring, Week V

April 23, 2023

Rain, this morning, staccato against the skylight. Outside the water puddles in every low spot, overflowing to gurgle into drains. It’s been a week of contrasts and extremes. After the heatwave only a few days earlier, the week began with snow. Daffodils lay flat, and violets were edged with frost like sugar crystals. By Thursday, it was sunny and warm again, the snow long gone.

Over the river, one barn swallow hunted sparse insects alongside the tree swallows. The ospreys are all on their nests, and Canada geese hiss and snap at anyone who comes too close to their brooding partner. Regardless of the vagaries of temperature and precipitation which my aging human sensibilities object to, the imperatives of spring continue. Reproduction is all, if enough food can be found to sustain life. If enough places remain to provide that food and nesting habitat.

I sat at a picnic table on the university campus yesterday in 18C sunshine, listening to a cardinal sing from the Norway spruces. Forty-five years ago, in my first year as an undergraduate at this particular university, I was doing the same. The cardinal I was listening to then was a forefather of this one by at least fifteen generations, given the average length of a wild cardinal’s life. Little has changed in this spot, although slowly across the entire campus open ground—research plots and gardens and greens, old barns with open courtyards, old fields—has gradually been paved over, or built upon: more student housing, more parking lots, more teaching and research facilities, more sports fields. More land leased for private development, offices and retail. Even the Arboretum loses ground (literally) to research buildings and parking and managed plots. I doubt the cardinal notices, nor will the development affect it or its descendants much. Cardinals like gardens and shrubs and feeders.

But a huge swath of land once leased research ground will become housing in the next five years, and the woods and old fields and riverine habitat on either side of it will be under greater pressure, not just from a greater number of people (and dogs, and roaming cats) but from a desire for more sports fields and playgrounds rather than unkempt and wilder land. Already meadowlarks are sparse, and the sparrows and warblers that need scrubby grassland habitat.

My sense already this spring is that the birds are fewer; it’s my sense every spring now, and I think a valid one for most species. I can rejoice in ravens and sandhill cranes and bluebirds, and the ospreys and bald eagles—but the small birds of woodland and hedgerow and understory are largely disappearing. It’s not all recent; it’s not all climate change or pesticide use or avian viruses or fatal building collisions, but all contribute.

I’m noticing a reluctance to go walking some days, to be confronted by the sparsity of birds, and by woods and fields far too quiet—or disrupted by the sound of chainsaws and diggers. But—almost equally—I know I should, for a myriad of reasons that include bearing witness to what is being lost and appreciating what remains. The cardinal still sings.

Spring, Week IV

April 16, 2023

I wish I had the tiniest bit of musical intelligence, but I am as tin-eared as they come. I listen and listen: is that a pine warbler? I’m in the right place, the remnant stand of white pines at the north end of Victoria woods. The bird is high in the tree’s dense foliage, and I can’t find it.

I lower the binoculars to plug my earbuds into my iphone and ears, and compare: pine warbler and chipping sparrow. I play the two buzzy songs over and over, trying to discern the difference. Maybe the pine warbler ‘purrs’ a little more than the chippy. I free the earbuds, turn off the birding app, listen again. I think it’s the warbler.

As I walk around the Arboretum, there are lots of chipping sparrows singing, and I grow more convinced of my warbler identification. I’m not the only one noting the chipping sparrows preparing to mate and lay eggs: high in another tree, brown-headed cowbirds are mating. Brood parasites, they’ll lay eggs in a number of smaller birds’s nests, but here the chipping sparrows are probably their most frequent victim, a self-fulfilling cycle. The female cowbirds not only return to the area they were hatched, but will tend to lay eggs in the nests of the species that raised them.

It’s quiet, this early on a Sunday morning. This week’s unseasonable heatwave is pushing trees and shrubs into leaf quickly; the lattice of branches against the sky shading to gold and red with catkins and maple buds. Snakes are out, rustling the leaf litter as they glide away from the vibrations of my footsteps.

The tree swallows are back, chattering and swooping over the old field where the nestboxes are. They take most of these boxes, with house wrens nesting in a couple on the periphery of the cluster, and a bluebird pair or two mixed in with the swallows. There’s always a frisson of pleasure on seeing the bluebirds, even though they raise broods every year; not just for their inherent beauty, but because they’re a rare success story of a threatened bird brought back to a healthy population by a combination of intelligent human intervention and their own nesting strategy. Birds that cavity-nest will, for the most part, adapt to nest boxes. Grassland ground nesters—meadowlarks and bobolinks, to name just two—cannot, and so continue their steady decline.

The maple swamp is full of phoebes and tree creepers and resounding with the drumming and calls of several species of woodpeckers: downy, red-bellied, pileated. A pair of Canada geese are nesting on a hummock of soil pushed up by a fallen tree. A pair nest here every year; every year, the mink takes the eggs. The wood ducks who nest in hollow trees above the swamp may do better, although I suspect the mink likes ducklings too.

In the drier woods, the bloodroot blossoms are still tightly furled, waiting for the sun to reach the forest floor. Marsh marigold’s round leaves are emerging in the marsh, but no buds yet. The stand of beeches ahead of me hosts a convention of conversational crows. I stop to listen, but it’s just chatter, perhaps about my presence, or the dog walkers out on the wide central path. I can’t distinguish a chipping sparrow from a pine warbler, but I’m pretty good at crow!

Spring, Week III

April 9, 2023

Winter birds are still here; spring ones are arriving. Somewhere between thirty and a hundred Bohemian waxwings can be found on the university campus most days, along the laneways between the research glasshouses and the cattle barn and stables, gorging themselves on winter-sweet crab apples. There are cedar waxwings mixed in, and always a few starlings and robins taking advantage of the bounty too. Disturbed, they fly up into the line of Norway spruce that wind-shelter the glasshouses, looking, in their dun and rufous and yellow shades, like a memory of autumn in bird form, but the fruit is too tempting: they’re back down in a minute.

On the ponds east and west of the city, at the old provincial jail and redhead and goldeneye, bufflehead, ring-necked duck and hooded merganser are resting and feeding, and if you’re there early enough in the morning, there’s usually a loon that came in for the night. Here it’s all about contrast, at least in the males: dark shades of green and blue-purple and auburn against white, sharp and bright. See how strong I am, and what good genes I have, is the message: beauty to human eyes is a coincidence. But beauty there is.

Victoria Woods this week is still all duns and greys: tree trunks and dark water, winter-bleached leaf litter and rock. Only the bright green of moss patches brightens the forest floor. But at the pond, I flushed two pairs of wood ducks, a glimpse of colour. They’ll stay, nesting in hollows in the trees that overhang the water. At the edge of the wood, phoebes are calling, always the first of the flycatchers to return. Their high fee-beee, fee-beee is a sharp, welcome sound in the cold air.

Image by Oberholster Venita from Pixabay

Snowmelt and rain mean the rivers are high and the ground is saturated, ephemeral ponds covering paths. There are few ducks at the river confluence: why use energy fighting the currents when there are plenty of still ponds to be found? The water bubbles and splashes over the rocks and weirs by the mill ruins: a good dipper stream, my mind says, even though I’m on the wrong side of the Atlantic. A flash of blue streaks across the stream: a kingfisher.

There’s still frost in the mornings: -5C today at 7 am. But there is real warmth in the sun now, and so the ice melts quickly. The first of the species iris is in flower in the front garden, narrow deep purple petals with yellow at the heart. We’re promised temperatures in the high double-digits next week, and if so, spring will pop. Buds will swell, coltsfoot will bloom, and more birds will move north. But cold, fast moving water also means blackfly, the bane of my springs. Perhaps I’ll have a few more days without them.

Spring, Week II

April 2, 2023

The world this morning was freshly washed, yesterday’s rain blown away by strong winds, leaving a brilliantly blue sky and air with the clarity of the oceanside. Where yesterday was freezing rain followed by dismal drizzle, temperatures hovering near freezing, everything the grey of concrete, today was birdsong and 8C, and by the time I’d walked the 4 km downtown I was too hot.

The rivers are high and fast, higher than I’ve seen them for some years, and other than Canada geese and mallards there were no birds at the confluence. I grew tired waiting for spring this week: growing up as far south as you can get in Canada, my internal seasonal clock still expects it to be well on its way by the end of March. This year, too, returning from England mid-March, having already experienced the first flush of spring, I was doubly confused. So I cheated, and drove the two-and-a-bit hours down to Long Point, on Lake Erie, with two goals in mind: sandhill cranes, and tundra swans. Anything else would be a bonus.

Cranes, as I’ve written before, are birds that always make me stop in wonder, from the first I saw in a Texas dawn, to the uncountable thousands on the Platte in March; the multiple, magnificent species on the Yangtze in winter, the birds coming in at dusk to an Australian pond, or the breeding pairs foraging in the English fens. Sandhills, so long gone from southern Ontario and now returning in greater numbers every year, are one of the (sadly) few success stories of conservation. They give me hope.

I found the sandhills by sound: the field they’d been in last year wasn’t corn stubble this year. But I pulled over, turned off the car, and opened the windows. The haunting, warbling calls came from a bit further west. It only took a few minutes to find them.

I sat and watched and listened for about half an hour, watching the cranes feeding in small groups, almost always three close together—parents and last year’s chick. Every so often one would raise its red-capped head and bugle, and then another, the sound uncanny in the light fog hanging over the fields.

A single pair of tundra swans flew low over the fields, just at the limit of my vision in the fog. Time to see if there were more. I drove down the Long Point causeway; the fog thickened as I got further out on the sandspit with open water on one side and marsh on the other. No swans that I could see, but I couldn’t see, except a few meters out into the bay. I’d have to go inland.

I was a couple of weeks late for the huge flocks, but I found enough to make me happy, to reset my internal clock to say, yes, it’s late March, yes, it’s spring. I know what to expect now; my brain is firmly back in Ontario.

And now it’s April, and the sun is shining and the first of my daffodils in the front garden is budding.

Random Ramblings

thoughts on life, landscape, history, and whisky