Those three great blue herons* are still around.

While eating my lunch I just watched them glide past the kitchen window in tight formation, circle the field to the north, and eventually glide right in to the shelter belt of immature pines at the north of the property. They rode the breeze like vultures, not flapping their wings until within a jump of the ground.

What amazes me about these three is the way they always travel and move together, in formation. Even when walking across the field they are a tight group, as if they think as one. And what are they doing in a field, in November?

NOTE: 11 November, 2009

Queen’s doctoral candidate Martin Mallet just suggested in an email that the trio are most likely sandhill cranes. He saw them in the area last week. The Wilkepedia description of the birds’ behaviour is very much in line with what I have observed.

Pinfeathers!

Saturday for the first time in thirty years I took out my shotgun for the opening day of migratory bird season. Geese had been flying over the house in increasing numbers lately, and I resolved to bring one down for dinner.

Several hundred have been feeding each day in Chant’s large field near Crosby. I watched how the flocks approached their airport, and calculated that if I stood in a clump of nannyberry bushes at the northwestern corner of our property, I’d have a reasonable chance at about ten percent of the birds on their approach.

Steel shot was the variable. I had never used it before, and Louis Burtch last week told me “It’s like throwing a handful of sand at a goose.” Nevertheless I resolved to try, keeping in mind another Louis adage: “Don’t bother shooting if you can’t see their feet.”

I quickly discovered how difficult it is to determine distance with a bird as big as a goose. All my experience wing-shooting has been with ducks, and these things look as big as an airliner by comparison. I let the first few flocks pass because they were far too high, but then I realized that I had seen the odd foot on a couple of lower flocks, so I resolved to pick a single goose and shoot at it.

Then while I was occupied with a handful of nannyberries, a silent group glided in low and my snap-shot was directly at the goose, rather than ahead of it. Strangely, the birds ignored the blast and glided the half-mile to their landing zone, unperturbed. Resolving to lead the target more carefully, I blasted at my next goose, the third from the right in a flock of twelve. It folded and dropped like a stone. O.K. fine.

My trophy didn’t seem all that big compared to other geese I had handled, so I decided to add a couple of more birds to the larder. That’s when I discovered what thirty years of idleness can do to one’s co-ordination as a shooter: I tried for a pair, missed both, but to my surprise I found myself flat on my back after the second shot.

Chastened, I made sure of my footing before the next pass, and managed to rock a large goose, then killed it with a second shot, even keeping my feet during the process.

The biggest mistake of the morning was a case of nerves when a dozen geese lifted off and flew across Chant’s field, right towards my hide. The Remington started too soon.
Canada geese are big, and I’m used to targets flashing by me without much warning. I should have waited for the feet, but instead I blasted three loads of shot up into their path (which they ignored) and stared stupidly as, somewhat later, they flew over my head.

Alerted by this ill-advised fusillade, the big flock took off and headed for Delta. Still, I had two birds. Not a bad morning for an old duffer, and there would be plenty of goose for dinner that evening.

Following the usual photographs, I started to pluck the larger goose. The bird eventually dressed 6 1/4 pounds, but I think a quarter of that must have been pinfeathers. I plucked until my hands cramped. Mom plucked until her hands cramped. The cruel irony of it was that my young friend Sean grabbed the other goose and had it cleaned in just a few minutes. No pinfeathers at all. It was a beautiful bird, dressed at 4 3/8 pounds.

An Internet site suggested holding the older bird over a propane stove and burning off the down and pinfeathers. I should have known better: the page also had a recipe for crow marinated in garlic.
The inferno approach produced a few scars on the bird, short, nubby hair roots on my left hand, and a gawd-awful stench which required a complete change of clothes and shower before I was allowed in the kitchen.

Then it was over to Bet to cook the beast, pinfeathers and all. She warned me, “You’ll just have to skin it while carving the bird, but be sure you cut it up where nobody can see it.” The cooked goose smelled great, but the pinfeathers made it easily the ugliest thing yet to come out of the oven at the farm. What’s more, I discovered I couldn’t even skin it while carving: the skin remained welded to the meat. Strange bird, indeed.

At dinner Roz and I went back for more; Bet and Charlie barely finished theirs. Mom didn’t seem to like it. The bird served five with leftovers.

I asked the biologist how she would describe the taste of a large wild goose. Roz thought about it and told us it seemed most like emu of anything she had eaten. The flesh was dark and very firm, though hardly tough, dry, but not parched. With a little applesauce I thought it was a high-quality meat, though the blackened pinfeathers were a bit hard to take.

The next carcass in a similar state will be cut up into mystery meat, and should make an outstanding ingredient in a pasta dish or casserole. Lunch today was goose tortillas, solid Canadian fare.

A trio of herons

These three great blue herons keep turning up in meadows around the area. This afternoon I saw them skulking across our back field. I wonder what they’re hunting? I haven’t seen many frogs. Would they catch mice? If so, they’re welcome.

Zeke, again

Tony and I were standing in the yard today looking down over the field where Bill Barrett was raking hay.  Hovering high above the tractor and poised to strike was a large, brown hawk.  The only bird I know that can hover like that is Zeke, the red-tailed hawk who grew up in the woodlot.  For some reason Zeke’s favourite method of hunting involves following a vehicle moving around a field.

Zeke’s back for his third haying season and he seems less bothered by blackbirds than before.  Today he pretty much ignored the redwing which was swooping around him.  I guess he had mice on his mind.

Later in the day I spoke to Bill’s wife, Lynn, and she mentioned that Bill had reported at lunch that he “had help in the field today”:  Zeke was keeping a close eye on things.

Fight or flight: a note from the old house

Bet stayed in town last night to finish some things up in the other house.  She sent this along this morning:

You may notice a lingering smell of Raid in the house.  I had an altercation with a bat last evening (I won).

I was lying in bed reading about 9:30, when this bat flew into the bedroom.  Despite my extreme panic, I recalled Orm Murphy telling me he always kept a can of Raid and a tennis racket beside his lazy boy.  I ran downstairs, grabbed the Raid (for ants, but it was the first thing I saw), and the adult-size tennis racket hanging at the bottom of the stairs.  Hands shaking, I unzipped the cover only to find a mangled racket inside.  The other racket was a kid-size (intact).

By this time it was circling the living room, so I sprayed and swatted (not easy to do with a short racket, and I can’t hit anything at the best of times) until it finally slowed down and landed on the window casing.  I wacked it until it fell to the floor, gave it a couple of more whumps, ran to get the mangled racket so I could pin it, then turfed it out the door.  No blood was shed, and I didn’t break anything.

Needless to say, I didn’t sleep much.  I left all the lights on and slept bolt upright with a broom handy.  I will sleep at the farm tonight.

More trouble with Daphne

In an email retired MNR guy Brian Anderson suggested I protect my walnut seedlings by putting out a blood-scented bait to scare the deer out of the field.  Opening day of bass season produced a supply of fish carcasses, so I placed them around the field, producing immediate results:  within a couple of hours the fish-heads were widely dispersed as though a litter of coyote puppies had played with them.  From then on I saw no more damage to the seedlings in the back field.

Then came the episode with the spotted fawn E. T.’s  visit to our orchard last Sunday.  Yesterday morning over my pancakes I watched E.T. and Daphne’s Mom grazing in the neighbour’s soybean field, about six hundred yards away.  Fine.  No problem.

This morning after a heavy rain I looked over the walnut fields on the way to the woodlot, then settled into a casual mushroom tour on the Ranger.  I picked three different types of oysters, one in quantity, so now I need to determine if the things are edible.

On the way back to the house I looked down into the new 5 acre patch of seedlings, and there was Daphne, cheerfully munching on one of the priceless blight-resistant plants the butternut people entrusted to my care.  Yelling and waving my Tilley, I gunned the Ranger to the rescue across the 700 feet to the culprit and her victim.

Daphne was not impressed by my wild west routine.  She simply retreated into the tall hay about a hundred feet, turned and stared blankly at me.  I stopped by tree #WP92-23 and shut the machine off.  If you’re interested, #23 is located at

N44.39.720′
W76.13.561
441′

She raised her eyes and ears above the hay, looked at me and my Ranger, and slowly started to walk toward us.  Again, she walked up to about forty feet from me, licked her lips, chewed her cud a bit, and looked quite frustrated that I had put myself between her and her breakfast.  It doesn’t seem to matter to Daphne that the whole world around her is green with potential food for a deer at this time of year.  When she sets her taste buds on one particular tree, that’s the one she intends to eat.

She tried several circles downwind of the Ranger.  My one-sided conversation with her seemed more to intrigue than frighten her.  Growing a bit tired of the standoff, I tried dismounting from the Ranger to give her a scare.  She just did her gallop-into-the-tall-hay bit, then turned around and returned, tail held high, and gleaming in the sunlight from the dew on her flanks.

She’s a beautiful animal, but I couldn’t notice how, while walking in silhouette in the hay, she has moves a lot like a young Michael Jackson in his early dance steps.  That jerky, but fluid step?

So we’ve established that Daphne has a very strong will, fixates on a particular plant that she wants to eat at that time, has some decent dance moves, and that she’s also not very afraid of me.  The fact remains that she’s poised to damage a priceless bit of the Canadian genetic heritage, and the only way I could get her to give up on her breakfast in time for me to return for mine, was by running after her across a five-acre field until she eventually gave up and ducked into the woodlot to await my departure.

I guess the only solution will be to bait the butternut seedlings with fish heads and hope she develops a taste for Glen Baker’s soybeans.  Time to go fishing.  Now that’s a plan.  Thanks, Brian.

UPDATE:  July 11/2009

Another encounter with Daphne went somewhat better for both of us.  When I came upon her she was firmly ensconced in the middle of my neighbour’s wheat field.  She looked up at my approach, froze, and stared me down  until I grew bored and drove away.  Hey, she’s not eating my nut trees, so what’s the harm?  Hope you enjoy the wheat, Daphne.

E.T.

Sunday afternoon Bet called me to the back of the house:  “Something is making a distress call out there!  I don’t know if it is a bird or a cat up a tree, but something is in trouble.  It’s making kind of a bleating noise.”  She wandered down the stairs into the orchard.  “Look!  There it is!” she whispered.  Bet pointed at a two-week old fawn, standing lost and bewildered on the edge of the lawn.  I tried to calm her down and get her to come back into the house before she frightened the thing out of its wits, but she kept babbling away, all the way up the stairs and into the kitchen.

Our son Charlie had heard the commotion and made his own way to the orchard.  He stood there, stock still. Apparently pleased by the company of these strange animals, the fawn began gamboling about the orchard, trying out the unfamiliar, closely-cropped turf.  Suddenly he noticed this tall animal with strange hair, and so he bopped over for a visit.  Then came that great E.T. moment: the fawn, legs braced like a little, spotted saw horse, nose stretching, stretching out to the man’s fingertip.  The merest touch, a flip of the tail and E.T. was gone.  Well, not really; he went for another lap of the orchard, then posed for a photo and gradually faded into the vegetation along a fence row.  At least he was quiet after meeting Charlie.

E.T. seemed in excellent physical condition, so we were pretty sure he wasn’t the fawn orphaned by the accident on Hwy 15 this week which left a doe dead.  I had looked at the carcass, if only to make sure it wasn’t Daphne, the featured character in last week’s column in this space.  This doe was twice the size of the winsome yearling.  In fact, I suspected that the victim might have been Daphne’s mother, but the good condition of this fawn and my increasingly ragged walnut trees suggest that that very large doe is alive and well and living in the shadow of our barn.

Daphne, on the other hand, has given up ownership of the back field.  This might have something to do with the new player, a coyote who has just arrived.  I haven’t met the critter yet, but the signs are all there.  To my great relief, nothing is eating the walnut seedlings in the back field now.

But Daphne’s mom may have moved her fawn into the tall orchard grass just below the house to hide from the new predator.  The trouble with that stuff is that it’s easy to get disoriented in 7’ high growth, and maybe E.T. got away. Or perhaps there’s a second fawn.

The point of telling about all of this confusion Sunday afternoon is to underline a basic principle of environmental management:  in theory, many things sound wonderful which don’t taste so good in practice.  Take, for instance, the idea of coyotes keeping down the deer population to the betterment of the herd and the ecosystem. That sounds really good on paper, and the picture of a coyote eating a couple of dozen mice causes no one alarm.  But the local coyote-popularity poll took some wild swings today while E.T. tore around our orchard looking for a playmate.

Why do the blasted things have to be so cute?  Or why do they have to act so vulnerable and foist their family dramas off on the humans in the neighbourhood?  Deer have a genius for doing that, all the while munching their way through prized shrubs and orchard growth.

Indian Lake Marina owner Wayne Wilson still chuckles about the doe and two fawns who spent opening day of deer season on his back patio one year.  And of course you can’t drive through Chaffey’s Locks without a few eye-to-eye encounters with local whitetails.

Take the family of three deer which stroll at will around the lawns of Newboro at the moment.  They must have learned urban living from Canada geese.

So the rest of the day was an uproar of worry.  If it wasn’t bad enough for Daphne’s Mom to foist off her half-grown and quarrelsome adolescent on me, now she has to make us kid-sit the little one?

This week I bought my deer license, and hope I win a doe tag in the draw.  I won’t pick on the little ones, but if Daphne’s Mom or her current swain show their ears around here, there’ll be cutlets-a-frying, come November.  That’ll teach her to dump her family problems on the neighbours.

Bambi

Quite a show here this afternoon: Bet heard something making distress calls and wandered down into the orchard to see. Turns out it was a young fawn, lost and lonely, but unhurt. It flounced around for awhile until it spotted Charlie, standing there still. Over to him it gamboled, assumed the E.T. pose, nose to finger tip, then thought better of it and bounded away. I got one picture with a 35 mm on a long lens, then it faded into the greenery to await rescue from Mom, I guess. It’s a lot easier to talk about coyotes controlling the deer population when it’s in the abstract. When Bambi is in the orchard, the votes swing wildly in favour of the deer.

The trouble with Daphne

Daphne came into our lives when she was abandoned the day her mother gave birth to a new fawn behind the barn.  The yearling white-tail was left to wander, and she seems to have fixed upon the walnut field next to the woods as her new home.

This has done no good for the seedlings.  For a hundred-foot radius from Daphne’s bed, the taller seedlings have been trimmed back to the bark and the shorter  walnuts have had their tops nipped off.  For some reason Daphne prefers her meals served in the open, and from knee to shoulder height.  The earlier leaves from a hundred young butternut trees kept her happy until the walnuts came on, but now she won’t be separated from her favourite food for long.

Take this morning, for example.  In a rage yesterday I had chased her clean out of the field.  I drove back this morning to see if this moment of uncharacteristic energy on my part had had any effect.  No.  Daphne greeted me with wide eyes and perked ears, but she didn’t stop munching on a tender walnut seedling until I drove up close to her.  Then she moved away.  I expected her to pick up my scent, flip the tail, snort and run away, hopefully to the other side of someone else’s woods.  But no.  She walked away about a hundred feet, then turned and started to work her way back toward me, bobbing her head from side to side and doing that alert-stupid thing deer are so good at.

O.k.  It’s the running engine.  I turned off the key, fully expecting this to produce panic and flight.   Nope.  On she came.  About forty feet from the Ranger she suddenly took flight – until she thought better of it after a couple of leaps.  Then she threw up her tail and dashed in a semi-circle around me and towards the woods.  But she turned and came back to take up station on the other side of me. Obviously my vehicle and I were occupying the very spot on this earth where she most wanted to be, and would we please leave?

She made a couple of more attempts to crowd me out of her territory, jumping, stamping her feet, and letting out these little snorts before setting off on another hell-for-leather rush to the other side of the Ranger where she started up her inquiring looks again. With seven hundred  walnut trees in this field, why does she particularly want to eat this one?  And it’s almost all gone.

Eventually she gave up her attempt to frighten me off and stepped over the fence and behind a large tree to await my departure.

Daphne’s rapidly growing into a beautiful animal.  Her tail’s still not fully-fluffed, but she’s the lovely tan colour of a fully-grown deer in summer coat now.  We’d actually love to have her around if it weren’t for the way she Hoovers my walnuts.  I have spent three summers planting, mowing, watering and coddling these little trees, and she mows through them at an incredible rate.

Even camping in the field won’t work if she keeps coming back to her spot to put me out.  I remember two summers ago a young coyote had his bed in another field near the woods.  I nearly ran over him with a riding lawn mower one morning while on my way to trim around a line of spruces.  Young fellow was a very sound sleeper.  The coyote pup, as well, deeply resented my intrusion into his territory, and when I later mowed the field, he spent the day circling to try and find a safe way back to his bed, his favourite bones, and a rubber chew toy.

But he was a coyote, and defined by society as a destructive varmint, even though he caught and ate mice everywhere he went and did his best to keep the squirrels and chipmunks honest.  No fate is too terrible for the local coyote.  Poison, traps, grayhounds, even running down with vehicles – all are acceptable.  Daphne, on the other hand, is protected by law as a natural resource, even though she is cutely chewing her way through my livelihood.  Now which one is the varmint?

The Common Loon

In an English text a few years ago I came across Margaret Laurence’s Loons, which traces the loss of innocence of two Canadian girls. The title draws the reader into the story, but all the loons get to do is sit at the end of a lake and hoot.  Nevertheless, Laurence uses the birds to evoke a vague bond with nature.  Their extinction in the story she uses to show the girls’ loss of innocence and youth.

The author of the text fawns all over these mythical loons.  The spectre of their impending doom works achingly into every note.  From this prompt a student can hardly fail to generate even more fatuous hand‑wringing over the fate of the loon.

Instead of the fine art and variety of Lampman, Johnson, and Mowat, our renewed awareness of nature has left us stuck with the silhouette of a Loon plastered onto a million sweat shirts, coffee mugs and coins. The loon has become the inflatable doll of ecological guilt.

I would suggest that the real loon is a creature quite different from the popular symbol. The real loon doesn’t choke on the acidified air of Algonquin Park.  He thrives on the Rideau Lakes with his brood, and screams the night away to the delighted anguish of caffeine‑soaked cottagers.

The real loon is no ecological wimp doomed to extinction from boat wakes.  Newboro Lake loons bob merrily among the tidal waves thrown up by passing Sea Rays, Bayliners, and Dorals as the annual spawning run of Quebec boaters arrives.  Biologists quake in horror, but the loon families calmly nest on sides of islands away from raucous boat traffic. Loons didn’t get this far without the ability to adapt.

Real loons can be a bit of a nuisance.  What fisherman can tend his line when a dozen or so loons are conducting a Sunday morning church service, swimming in a large circle in that eerie dipping ritual?

I’m not so sure about their mythical fish‑finding abilities either, because if the boats out trolling start to cluster in one location, the loons are soon on the scene.  I’m waiting for one to ask to use my depth sounder.

On the water they are good company, if they’d only stay there.  You’d think that with all that water, and fish everywhere, loons would be content to stay wherever they happened to be.  But no: about quitting time they start yakking back and forth to each other, sometimes from a mile or more away.  Try talking to anyone while this is going on.  Worse, they decide to switch lakes, or get together for a drink.  This involves several minutes of confusion for everyone, as they taxi, take off, yell at each other, land again, and finally depart.  They’re a little awkward when entering and leaving the water, and they tend to distract boaters from more appropriate activities such as crunching ice cubes and polishing Tupperware.

Then comes morning.  Loons love to sneak up on anchored yachts.  I think they like the smell of coffee and bacon.  (No morning skinny dips allowed in Loon Country.)  Anxious dogs must be rowed ashore, or else lost to a morning of loon‑tag.

Honest.  Loons try their best to separate dogs from their boats.  I have photos of three of them trying to entice my spaniel off our swim platform. Once Patch joined them in the water, they’d see how far from the boat they could get him to swim.  They’d take turns.  They’d let him get dangerously close, only to speed up, just out of reach.  If I’d call him back, they’d come too.

Loon mug in hand, the reader will insist that loons are only protecting their nests when they do this.  Since when do loons nest a half‑mile from shore?  I think they came to our anchorage because they’re bored.

The only good thing which I can say about loons is that they don’t beg handouts.  Unlike the mallards and sea gulls of the area, the loons ask nothing but an occasional bushel of splake or bass fingerlings from the Ministry of the Environment stocking program.  Apart from that they are sufficient unto themselves.

Perhaps loons are good symbols for the writer.  They do have an other‑worldly aura.  They don’t bunch up and litter docks and beaches the way Canada geese do in cities.  Loons stay wild without the help of birdshot.

Perhaps loonies are useful coins.  Northern Reflections shirts and Algonquin Park promotional materials could contain less pleasing logos.

Perhaps I should join the trend, rather than laugh at it.  For Christmas gifts, what would be better than loon slippers? Just think.  You wake up at night.  You want to raid the fridge, but must not click that light switch and wake the family.  You shuffle into your new loon slippers and begin the trek to the kitchen.  You get there without mishap, because last night the sleeping spaniel found himself on the receiving end of a loon slipper, and he’ll never lie at the top of the stairs again.  He now sleeps on his back, snoring in disgust, between the magazine rack and the fireplace. No more loon slippers for him.