Winter Wandering (and Automatons)
Sunday 16 November
Good morning everyone - it snowed, again and a larger than we would have liked branch broke off the larch tree … but did no damage.
A Happy Place
We are now in the middle of November and finally are able to restart the winter task that we always look forward to. Winters in the Montreal area are deep and crisp and you have to find something to do and to get outside just to keep fit. The problem is that most of the outside activities that the world provides seem to involve doing them alongside far too many other people all skiing, skating and generally being jolly. We are not antisocial, but we are by no means party people. Plus, we watch wildlife whenever we can.
Close by home, there is a long established bird banding station on land owned by McGill University. During spring summer and fall it is occupied with, guess what, bird banding and provides an important educational, and research facility for university academics and students supported by volunteers. During the winter months, not surprisingly, almost all of that stops. Along with another pair of friends, J and I split the duties so that someone goes into the site a couple or more times a week, trudging through the snow, often on-snowshoes, freezing cold all to make sure that the birdfeeders that support the resident population until spring returns are kept full. Once that is done, we walk the trails and keep a count of the winter-resident birds. This work usually runs from about now through to the end of March … so 4 to 5 months each year. It’s wonderful. This is an area of mixed field and woodland with a cattail marsh, a surprisingly varied winter-resident bird population and we have it totally to ourselves. Because it’s a research site it’s fenced off and the public can’t gain access. Perfect. We can leave the town behind to go in there and know that we will not meet anybody. We’ll see the tracks of deer and coyote and foxes. We’ll see birds, we’ll hear birds, we’ll just have a lovely quiet time and I will undoubtedly be writing more about this and our adventures there in the weeks ahead.
To give you a taster. here are a couple of images that I took last Thursday morning. At the beginning of the week we had a surprise dump of heavy, wet snow, the meteorologists said there had not been snow like this here for at least the past 20 years in early November. Since then temperatures have crept a degree or two above the freezing point and precipitation has been mixed snow and rain so the snow is gradually going, though it will come back to stay before too long. We always look forward to our first outing of the winter, but I have to say that Thursday morning mixed rain and snow was not as pleasurable a first outing for the season as we had hoped for. Anyway, a couple of pictures …
Thursday morning we had quite a nice 14 species which is not bad for this time of year. Flights of considerable numbers of Canada Geese overhead, a Cooper’s Hawk, Juncos, three White-throated Sparrows, and a couple of Fox Sparrows (that last species was rather unexpected, and nice to see), Woodpeckers, Nuthatches, House Finches, Cardinals were amongst the species that came out to entertain us.
Here’s one of this winter’s first Thursday birds - a (slightly over-sharpened) White-throated Sparrow
Gull Theft
There was a fascinating interview on CBC’s “As It Happens” program midweek about a group of British scientists who carried out a study about the best way to keep gulls from stealing your food. The effective (and highly innovative) technique proved to be shouting at them 🙃 Who knew? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czjp8kz1x8yo.
(thanks Zofia for drawing this to my attention).
A quotation from a post by one of my favourite nature writers … find it and more in her latest monthly Substack at the link below. Would that more people took notice.
👉🏼 A thing that made me go ‘hmm’: One of the stranger symptoms of our growing disconnection from nature is misplaced reverence. Despite the (rightful) Sycamore Gap outcry not every tree needs to be treated as sacred; in fact, woodland management, including felling, is essential for biodiversity. Similarly, foxes (and other wild creatures) do not need hand-feeding, and with the exception of experienced wildlife rehabilitators, people who try to do this put animals at risk by teaching them to override their very necessary caution. If you want to protect landscapes, trees or wild creatures, joining your local Wildlife Trust or doing some environmental volunteering will better scratch that itch.
A neologism that we probably don’t need …
OK, I am probably being grumpy and pedantic but I really don’t think that native plant gardening - which is important and something that we need more of - needs to have an ugly new word inventing for it … nor will I be calling my native and wildlife garden a “plant space” any time soon. Just saying. (The headline below is from the CBC website)
An old guy making fascinating things …
This is definitely an Offshoot and Byway … I was pointed to this short video about an old chap, only a few years older than me, who makes automatons … in the first few minutes he is just chatting and you can skip that, but at around 4:15 things start getting interesting. Look out for the tiny mouse cranking the handle that makes it all work.
Wonderful prose. I feel like I am there with you walking in the fields and woods. Enjoy. Bev
Love the photos and the links.