Random Ramblings

The First Week of Spring

March 26, 2023

Spring may be here, but it’s dancing with us: one of those dances where it’s one step forward and one back. We’ve had days of sun and relative warmth, and days of sleet and snow flurries and a temperature hovering around freezing. Blue skies and grey, and on the ponds the ice melts a little, then freezes again, then melts a little.

A line of crabapples near one of the village ponds has been discovered by the robins. The winter-cured fruit is a deep purple-red, its sugars concentrated in the desiccated flesh. The robins love it. So do the starlings, whose starred plumage of winter is just beginning to show the iridescence of summer. On the nearby feeders, male goldfinches too are moulting, black and yellow replacing dun.

Where the snow has melted back from the field edges killdeer forage; I hear them before seeing them, their high, onomatopoeic call audible even from inside the car. At the confluence of the two rivers that shape my city, a lone male common merganser is grooming itself, twisting and splashing, ignoring the mallards and Canada geese and ring billed gulls surrounding it. Later a single male bufflehead arrows in.

At the Arboretum there are bluebirds, always an early migrant, one song sparrow—and overhead, three tundra swans, brilliantly white against the blue sky. We’re not on their main flyway here, but every year a few come through; tundras, and more and more trumpeters every year, a reintroduction success.

Outside the city, blue piping festoons stands of maple, and even on urban lawns trees have been tapped. The light lengthens, and in xylem and blood and earth, sap and hormones and the green spears of the first bulbs rise.

Equinoctial Thoughts

March 19, 2023

I left spring behind in England, missing the reported return of chiff-chaffs to Norfolk by two days. I’d heard of other migrants arriving—stone curlew to a secret site, for one—at the same time the last of the winter redwings were leaving, heading north. The blackthorn was in full flower, the local woods were full of primroses between the stiff green stalks of bluebells poking through the leaf litter, and the wood pigeons were courting in the garden.

Outside my window there is freshly fallen snow, on top of the several centimeters already on the ground. Tomorrow is the first official day of spring, and the forecast is for warmer weather, but also for more snow, falling in the cold nights.

But I will have a year of two springs. Already the turkey vultures are back, and the hooded mergansers; red-winged blackbirds buzz in the swamps and flocks of tundra swans whiten corn stubble fields a little further south and west. Sap is rising; maple syrup is being made.

Over the nine weeks I was in England I watched the field across the road go from stubble to fresh-ploughed soil, gulls and rooks following the tractor, to the hazy green of an emerging cereal. The belt of trees up on the hill changed colour subtly, the dull grey of winter overlaid with the golds and pinks and greens of swelling buds. The blackbirds and robins began singing earlier every day, and continued later.

It’s harder here in my suburban bungalow to watch the gradual shift into spring than it was in my edge-of-village house in England. But I intend to return to paying attention this year. Almost fifty years ago, the first serious writing I did was a journal of the coming of spring to my southern Ontario home, a project sadly interrupted by mononucleosis and a month of exhaustion. That too was from an edge-of-village, mostly rural setting. But I have easy access to woods and fields, rivers and parkland, and little excuse not to observe and record. A.E. Houseman wrote:

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
A Shropshire Lad

Of my threescore years and ten, sixty-five will not come again. So I shall go look at things in bloom, and listen to birdsong, and watch the gradual transformation of a winter world.

Image by Noma Lotern from Pixabay

Elemental Norfolk

December 30, 2022

I wrote this poem a number of years ago, after we started spending a couple of weeks over the turn of the year in England. It was one of my first published works.

Earth

Lane and common, heath and ploughed ground

Lie frozen underfoot. The lands

Decline to the sea: downland and saltmarsh

Diked and ditched by countless hands

Against the sea and winter floods.

Beyond the marshes, the named sands

Will rise and fall with the tide.

Air

Skiff and windpump, sails of cloth and wood,

Are battened down and still. The gust

Strikes salt and icy; harness and rigging,

Tarred and treated for rot and rust,

Await the end of winter’s gales.

Above the marshes, the wind’s cold blast

Will rise and fall with the sun.

Fire

House and cottage, farm and village row

Sit tightly closed and warm. Fire

Kindles in the hearths; desire and habit

Pruned and piled the garden pyre

Against the night and winter’s end.

Beside the marshes, the year’s bonfire

Will rise and fall with the wind.

Water

Stream and river, pond and open broad,

Wait silently for spring. The snow

Bleaches all colour; hedgerow and reedbed,

Trimmed and tight in winter’s throe,

Withstand the wind and killing frost.

Within the marshes, the water’s flow

Will rise and fall with the moon.

Image: John Crome, Moonlight on the Yare, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Original in the National Gallery, London.

Solstice Sacrifice

December 23, 2022

The woods were quiet, the first full day of winter. The occasional chickadee, mourning doves flying over. A grey day, no sun, and only the red of berries and dogwood stems to alleviate the greys and brown of wood and field.

And then another splash of red: blood, on the snow beside the path. I crouched to look. A squirrel, I think. Blood, and tufts of fur wavering in the light breeze, caught by crystals of ice. And a neat pile of guts. Nothing else. A fresh kill, not more than an hour or two old.

The path was tamped down by many feet, and the softer snow at the wood’s edge pocked with the tracks of dogs. In the grey light there were no shadows to give shape and depth to a set of prints leading away into the trees. No drops of blood or the marks left by dragged prey, either. Nor were there wing marks to suggest an owl or hawk, and the neat evisceration made that unlikely to my mind. There were, simply, not enough clues for my small store of woodcraft. Weasel, mink, fox, coyote—all these were candidates. I took a photo or two, and kept walking.

At home I turned to my computer for research. An hour later, I more-or-less had consensus, from the style of the kill, that the predator was a member of the Mustelidae – a weasel or mink. Both were possible: I’d seen a weasel only days before, and a mink shares the pond in Wild Goose Woods with the resident beaver. A pond that, as a mink moves, was perhaps 600 metres away.

Today the woods and fields are in the grip of a blizzard, and mink and squirrels both are likely denned and quiet, conserving energy, the mink curled in its underground den, the squirrels in hollow trees. Fresh snow has covered the kill site. When I walk there again, after this storm has blown itself out in a day or two, there will be no sign of it.

A predator taking prey is an everyday occurrence, repeated in one form or another multiple times across these 400 acres of semi-wild land where I walk and think and observe. Only the human need for pattern and meaning, for significance, made me see it, on the first day after the longest night, as a solstice sacrifice.

Winter Encounter

December 16, 2022

I woke today with a strong need to be out-of-doors, after yesterday’s freezing rain and snow kept me in. I wanted fields and trees, not concrete and houses. By 8:30 I was at the Arboretum.

The temperature hovered just around freezing: just above, because trees dripped water and the snow was slush in most places. I took the path through Wild Goose Woods, stopping often to listen: silence. Far in the distance crows called, and a V of Canada geese honked their way to feed in stubble fields somewhere to the south, but the woods themselves were quiet. No chickadees or nuthatches, not even a woodpecker.

The path was free of human footprints, but a fox had used it, not too much earlier from the crispness of the prints in the snow. Squirrel tracks crossed it here and there. I took the wide path to the beaver pond. So had the beaver, sometime in the night, from its trail, but there was no sign of it – or the mink that likes this place too– at the pond. I waited for a while, hoping for ripples in the patch of open water, but it stayed smooth. I moved on before my feet grew cold.

Out into the old field, and along the ecotone between woods and field. Still no human footprints, but a coyote – or two – had passed this way: I can’t tell coyote prints from dog, but coyote scat is usually distinctive, and this one had eaten a fair bit of fruit. Chickadees called, fast and urgent, from ahead of me: I wondered if they had found a small owl, but their behaviour didn’t back that up. They weren’t focused on one place, but moving between bushes, feeding, along with a junco and a downy woodpecker.

Far to the east a raven called, the deep gronk unmistakable. I came out through the rhododendron wood onto the wide roads, and people. But not many, and I left them behind as I returned to the paths.

Curving back towards where my car was parked, on a trail through old field and scattered shrubs, I was still birding by ear and looking at tracks in the snow. Because I was looking down, I saw the tiny white head poking out from cover at the edge of the path, the dark eyes in a pointed face, and the quick, fluid turn of the pure white body—and the black tip to its tail. A short-tailed weasel in winter moult.

Kalabaha1969, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

I walked a few steps, crouched down to see its tiny prints in the snow. I’m sure the man who passed me then had no idea what I was smiling about, the gift just given, the grace granted. A moment and a memory.

Writing Beowulf

December 3, 2022

A portion of the Beowulf manuscript. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

“I need a challenge,” I told my husband the other day. I’ve not long finished my newest book, I’m not ready to start the next one, and I was rather at loose ends. Until I remembered a project I’d half-considered earlier: an adaptation of Beowulf.

In Empire’s Heir, my sixth book, the character Sorley hears a tale new to him, and, because he is a bard with all the responsibility that title carries: historian, poet, cultural custodian– he puts the tale into verse and music. The conceit is that the poem he writes is Beowulf – but as no one knows who wrote it, why not Sorley?

Half an hour later, Sorley had finished singing about Hrothgar and heroes and monsters, and I could stand without too much pain.

“That is not a danta* for children,” I commented, as Apulo slipped a fresh tunic over my head.

“Not unless nightmares are called for,” Sorley agreed. “It’s interesting; there are other danta about Hrothgar, and others with dragons, but nothing else I know with these monsters of the deep. I wonder what traditions are behind it?”
Empire’s Heir

In front of me I have three translations of Beowulf: Seamus Heaney’s, JRR Tolkien’s, and John Lesslie Hall’s, from the Gutenberg Project. The goal is to glean meaning from these – my Old English was never great, and is now so rusty I can only pick out a word here and there – and create my own, or rather Sorley’s – version. Not of the whole poem (I don’t think), but an excerpt or two. Unless, of course, the challenge spurs me on!

Helen Stratton, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

*A danta, in my parallel, not-quite-historical, world, is a story-song.

Acrobatic Accipiters

November 26, 2022

Cephas, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Our bird feeders, caged to deter squirrels and greedy grackles, attract mostly finches and chickadees, both nuthatches of northeastern North America, and the occasional downy woodpecker, all small enough to slip between the crossbars of the cage. The eat an expensive diet of hulled sunflower seeds, and so there are frequently no empty perches. The feeders are also on the hunting route of an accipiter. From it size and tail and the flatness of its head, I’d say it’s a Cooper’s Hawk, the medium-sized accipiter of North America.

Accipiters are wily hunters. They learned early in their interaction with settlers and their chickens to use buildings to spring surprise attacks on the free-ranging flocks, whipping around corners to pick off young birds and earning them the sobriquet ‘chicken hawk’. We saw this behaviour at our previous house, where the hawk would use the space between our house and the neighbours as a hidden route to the feeders, taking—at speed—a too-late-startled cardinal off the tray feeder before the bird had a chance to do more than launch itself into the air.

At this house, the first accipiter to find our feeders used a simple but crafty technique: swoop in and scatter the finches. One, panicked, would almost always hit the window or the patio doors. The hawk just picked the stunned bird out of the air as it fell, returning to the nearest tree to pluck it.

I’m not sure how often the hawk hunts at our feeders: I’m not in the living room that often during daylight hours. I wander into the kitchen to make coffee or tea, or empty the dishwasher, little movement breaks from my desk, and I’ll see the hawk once or twice most days. Most of the time it is unsuccessful in its attack, but every so often it takes a finch. I think we’re just one fly-through lane on its daily patrol of the neighbourhood feeders, a place for a quick snack to energize it before it goes after a larger meal of mourning dove somewhere else.

But how it gets that quick snack is something new to me. The caged feeder hangs from a tall pole. The hawk flies in low, turns upside down, and hooks its talons onto the bottom of the cage. Then it reaches in with one foot and pulls a goldfinch off its perch. It reminds me of the hunting technique of the gymnogene, or African harrier-hawk, which pulls nestlings and eggs from cavity nests with its talons. Somehow, this particular southern Ontario Cooper’s Hawk has learned this is a successful technique.

I haven’t read or heard of other accipters doing this, but surely ‘our’ hawk isn’t unique?

A Convergence of Deadlines

November 14, 2022

There’s an old Gordon Lightfoot song that starts with “I’m on my second cup of coffee, and I still can’t face the day…” I know how he felt. Except, perhaps, it’s this week I still can’t face, although I must. Somehow, for all my good planning, a number of deadlines have converged: deadlines for my book, the community newsletter, another newsletter I’m part of, an upcoming promotion, a book review.

I shouldn’t be writing this: it’s procrastination, pure and simple. Or maybe not; maybe it’s a form of planning, of preparation. And a reminder to myself to take the breaks and small pleasures this week, too.

The book review and the promotion can be put off for a few days, but the work on my own book’s production and the two newsletters can’t be. So I will juggle those as best I can today and tomorrow, but I’m also going to go for a walk, and have lunch with writer friends today, even if I make it an hour rather than the usual two. I also need to plan tasks that get me out of my chair every 45 minutes or so. Yesterday, when I worked nearly non-stop from 6 to 6, it was the laundry. And the cat to feed, and breaks for coffee and breakfast and lunch, and muffins to make. Today perhaps I’ll make cookies, and soup, and focaccia – tasks that get me on my feet for fifteen minutes or so. And the dishwasher always seems to need emptying or filling – I call it dishwasher yoga.

In between it’ll be chunks of focused work, door closed, social media blocked, no interruptions. Phone calls go to voice mail, to be dealt with later. Email gets checked and responded to at scheduled times, part of the work day.

And this week will pass, the work will get done, and at the end of it, there’s a bottle of Laphroaig Quarter Cask on the drinks tray that I am very much looking forward to opening. A drop or two of water, a fire, feet up, and the satisfaction of work done. If that’s not an incentive, I don’t know what is.

But first, I need another cup of coffee.

Thirty-five Years Ago

November 12, 2022

The world was shades of copper and bronze, the sand of the desert glowing pink in the dawn light. Wisps of clouds over the mesas reflected the glow of the rising sun. It was already hot, the sky as it lightened a clear blue, the only sounds the rasp of ravens. Overhead, a long V of birds crossed the sky: not geese, long necks, long legs, birds the colour of the desert sands. We stood by our car in the Texas dawn and watched them fly south, heading for the Gulf of Mexico and their wintering grounds. Sandhill cranes, birds we’d never seen before, birds that the great American writer Aldo Leopold predicted would disappear: “the last crane will trumpet his farewell and spiral skyward….” (Marshland Elegy, 1937). In 1987, fifty years later, the populations had just begun to increase. We knew we were watching something special, something that could have been lost to the world forever.

We were there in Texas in November because in ten days, we were both due to be giving graduate student papers at the American Society of Agronomy conference in Atlanta. With our theses supervisors’ blessings, we had taken two weeks holiday prior to the conference, and had driven our Honda Civic, laden with camping gear, south. Two days of steady driving; on the third morning, we left the last green fields behind and drove into the vast deserts of southern Texas, a world completely alien then to us both, and filled with birds we’d never seen.

It seemed that November that we could barely drive a mile without stopping. The fences were full of sparrows; the cactus and sage full of wrens and thrashers. In a little wash along a highway somewhere we stopped to scramble down the side to see what might be found in the green scrub along the side of the tiny creek, and found our first wild turkeys. Bay-winged hawks (Harris’s hawk) or Swainson’s were on every utility pole, it seemed. At dusk of the same day that had started with sandhill cranes in the dawn, we stood at the Rio Grande, where it runs between huge, bare cliffs, and heard for the first time the haunting, sorrowful descent of the canyon wren’s song.

There were so many ‘firsts’. Some stand out without recourse to notes: the Say’s phoebe at the headquarters of Big Bend National Park; the vermilion flycatcher in a stand of cottonwoods in the same park. The “King-Kong-fisher” (the ringed kingfisher) at Bentsen-Rio Grande State Park, and the tiny green kingfisher on a creek at the Santa Margarita Ranch – a Spanish land-grant ranch, held in the same family from the years when Texas was part of Mexico, not the USA; to enter, you drove in, honked the horn, held up your binoculars, and paid the non-English-speaking old woman who came out from the ranch house two dollars. Green jays and plain chachalaca. Crested cara-cara. And from a boat, where as Canadian visitors we were given the best seats, the last flock of migratory whooping cranes in the world, wintering at Aransis.

Seeds were sown that trip; not just the seeds of birding further afield, but those of a love for cranes. From that first V of sandhills in the dawn, and the fragile tenacity of that flock of whooping cranes began my connection to these birds; birds of grassland and wetland, wanderers of the great plains of the world. The ‘Birds of Heaven’* would take me to the Platte River in March and the muskeg of Manitoba in July; to South Africa, to China, to the Norfolk Broads. Ten springs ago, just north of the tiny southern Ontario hamlet we lived in at the time, I stopped the car in wonder and joy: in a field of corn stubble, four sandhill cranes were feeding. I was looking, with tears in my eyes and my hands shaking, at birds not seen in my locale in the best part of a hundred years. Aldo Leopold was wrong, on this. I am thankful beyond words he was, and I believe he would have been, too.

* The Birds of Heaven is the title of Peter Matthiessen’s beautiful book about his travels to see the cranes of the world.

A Long(ish) Walk

November 10, 2022

November 10^th, and the forecast says warm and sunny. It is, I suspect, the last warm day of the year, and I’m not going to waste it. The wind gusts are forecast to be 35 – 40 kph, however, so it’s not a biking day. I decide, on the spur of the moment, to walk to Riverside Park along the river trails.

Brian joins me for the first part of the walk through the Arboretum to the Eramosa River trail. We follow the paths through Wild Goose Woods, then the old gravel pit and on to Victoria Woods. It’s quiet, aside from the drumming of a hairy woodpecker, the occasional chirp of a junco, and the familiar, cheery call of chickadees. We cross College Avenue, walk up the gravel road, and turn off onto the new Arboretum Side Trail that links the Arboretum trails with the river trail. Where it comes out on Victoria Road, just north of the bridge, we part company: Brian to walk the eastern trail section out to Stone Road, I to head west towards the confluence and the Boathouse.

Lots of dog walkers out, as usual, on this part of the trail. But good dogs, ignoring me. At Lyon Park I leave the river, cross York Road, and walk up through the Ward along Ontario Street to downtown. I’m cheating a little, not staying on the river, but it saves me a couple of kilometers—and anyhow, I like the Ward. We used to live here, and its eclectic mix of houses, old stores that are now houses (some with the signs, painted on the brick, still visible), big vegetable gardens, and old factories being converted to apartments still feels a bit like home.

St George’s bells are ringing ten o’clock when I reach downtown. I’ve been walking nearly two hours; it’s time for a coffee break. My favourite café is closed for renovations, so I choose another on the other side of St George’s Square and settle down with a café latte and an almond croissant. Not too long a break, though, or I’ll stiffen up.

So it’s not too long before I’m up and moving again. Down to Goldie’s Mill Park, and now I have a choice. The paved trail that parallels the railroad tracks out to Speedvale, or the Rapids Side Trail, a hiking trail that drops down to the banks of the Speed? It’ll be rougher, and a bit rugged in places…but it’s right at the river. If there are going to be birds anywhere, they’ll be at the river. I turn onto the blue-blazed side trail.

There are juncos and chickadees, and two squabbling downy woodpeckers, and a host of Canada geese and mallards on the river. It’s hard to believe I’m in the middle of Guelph. It’s a lot more interesting than the paved trail it parallels (as much as I like biking that one!) At a marshy area a few hundred meters before Speedvale, the path turns back to meet the paved trail.

I cross Speedvale in a break in the traffic, and now I’m in Riverside Park. Slowly, because my feet hurt by now, I walk along the bank of the river, looking at the gulls and waterfowl. There can be unusual ducks here, but not this year. I make my way up to the footbridge, cross the river, and find a bench to sit on for a while. I’ve walked about 10 km, on a whim.

But I take the bus home!

(P.S. -regardless of what Google Maps shows, it took me a bit over three hours, not including breaks.)

thoughts on life, landscape, history, and whisky