The natural world offers a wealth of knowledge
The new year seems bereft of birds and I miss them. Oh, there are a few black-capped chickadees flitting around the feeders, but the flicker and the downy woodpeckers have hardly been around. There would have been precious little to report to the Christmas bird count. The one positive note has been a pair of cardinals moving into the neighbourhood.
I haven’t seen a Great Blue Heron flying near the mouth of the Cornwallis River for a couple of years. Swallows no longer dip and swoop the way they used to. In fact, the province had to add barn swallows to the list of protected species in 2013.
There is, however, a resident population of ducks in Wolfville harbour. The other day I had to chuckle watching them swim in the mud. There are hunters on the edges of town, so the ducks are actually quite clever to seek muddy camouflage.
The late great Robie Tufts wrote in his autobiography, Looking Back, about trying to protect ducks and geese as a migratory bird officer as early as 1919. While he had no qualms about hunting himself, Robie viewed shooting early spring migrants as a crime against nature.
The flocks heading to “their nesting grounds were already mated and the females were heavy with eggs developing in their ovaries.”
Robie, who is remembered as a tremendous character, viewed hunting as criminal “when the killing is done in the name of sport rather than a necessity for food as in the case of primitive folk.”
His job was almost detective work and he had to brazen out some hunters in the wild.
In 1934, Kentville Publishing Company produced Robie’s Common
Birds of Nova Scotia. Nicely illustrated, it was intended as a bird primer for school children.
Because he had so much field experience, Robie could tell great tales. For example, he wrote about a female ‘Turdus migratorius’ or robin that built a nest on a railway boxcar. When the freight train moved on, so did the mama bird and nest.
What is quite lovely about this old bird book is the poetry that Robie included. Every listing has a fragment of a poem. For the blue jay, he quotes Longfellow, “that audacious, over-bearing, haughty, heartless, dangerous fellow.” Bliss Carmen, the poet with Valley connections, wrote, “the bobolinks fill the fields of light with a tangle of music, silver bright.”
The copy that I picked up second hand has signs of spring listed in the back by date. Apparently, the wild duck turned up every year about March 1 and the first robins were spotted between March 20– 25. We can look forward to their return, but some stay all year.
Robie Tufts had a contemporary in Evelyn Richardson, who won the Governor General’s Literary Award with her 1945 memoir ‘We Keep a Light.’ Bon Portage Island off Shelburne County is still an important breeding ground and migratory bird site. So much so that Richardson wrote an amazing book entitled Living Island about the winged creatures that stopped off.
Fortunately, research students today continue to observe and count the birds that Mrs. Richardson recorded with such care. Bon Portage, which is located near Shag Harbour, is owned by Acadia University. The Richardson Field Station in Biology operates on the island and is maintained by the biology department. A Natural History Field Course is offered there. The Atlantic Bird Observatory also operates banding stations. This is important work that, with 80 per cent of the population living as city dwellers, isn’t really appreciated.
Of course, no matter where you live it is worthwhile noting that cats are considered the number one killer of bird life in Canada. One study by Environment Canada has suggested that cats kill more than 200 million birds a year in this country, which is just sad.
Last month there was an interesting article in the New Scientist about the nature we are losing. Apparently, since 1970, Canada and the United States have lost something like three billion birds due to pesticides, habitat and insect loss or feline predators.
The problem of forgetting the vast natural abundance of the past or of new generations not knowing about it, has now been termed shifting baseline syndrome. This concept was coined by Daniel
Pauly at the University of British Columbia in 1995.
If we as a society can’t remember what we’ve lost, luckily our predecessors, like Robie Tufts and Evelyn Richardson, documented the wealth of the natural world.