What birds are singing?

Here is a great link to a chart done by a Vancouver Island birder who is tracking the evolution of the dawn chorus.

Music, peacocks and choice in eating

Another touch back on the island between trips, this time heading from Victoria and going off to Cornwall, Ont. Last night there was a big group of people at The Snug, eight mainlanders joined us for Irish tunes and the weather was so fine that we sat outside for the whole evening, only going in at 10:00 when the mainlanders headed for the ferry.

It was a glorious night last night, punctuated only by the plaintive chirps of a couple of Tessa Goldie's peacocks who have been hanging around our place lately and who decided to roost last night in the fir trees. Plaintive chirps is a joke, as anyone who knows peafowl will realize. These creatures make a loud piercing cry, and they seem to like to do it at all hours. By the dawn, they had carved out a space of 100 meters around them, where no other bird dared go. I was by then fervently wishing that the ravens or eagles would dive bomb them and force them out of the tree. Alas, the peacocks left under their own steam.

Heading into the Cove this morning, I met a friend getting out of his car. To open his door, he had to reach out the window and pull the outside door handle. I remarked that I liked his Island car move, and showed him the jury rig parking break on my car. Seems that my 1996 Honda Civic has a problem whereby the button that releases the handbrake has disappeared into the handle itself. When I take it to Honda they never have the part, so the only solution, rigged up by our island mechanic, is to take a four inch long bolt and tape it into the hole left by the retreat of the button. My friend laughed at seeing this. We're actually proud that our once pristine brand new Civic has finally become an island car. Other friends have cars whose doors open only from the inside, or with some magic combination of enchantments and hope. Still others are missing hubcaps, aerials, wing mirrors – stripped off my close encounters in ferry loading – and other assorted bruises and scrapes. Island living is hard on the car, by Chris Leigh, our local guy, has a great triage operation/hospice program, and he is able to nurse a lot of life out of otherwise dying beaters.

And while I'm thinking about the Cove and prolonged life, there is a new restaurant in the place of the short lived Bow-Mart. Mik-Sa opened last week, offering tapas and cocktails and a rotating menu. The food business is heating up in the Cove now. Blue Eyed Mary's is going to open for breakfast, The Snug and the Happy Isle are both opening for dinner and there is one new place “downtown” All in time for the summer, we'll see how long it all lasts, but right now, you can feel the life building in the village, as everyone welcomes the influx of traffic and the warmer and drier weather.

Snow? Did we have snow this year?

The rhythm of the morning

Another beautiful morning here: clear and still.  In the dawn chorus, there are a pair of chickadees nesting across the road from us that are the champion singers.  They are doing their little call which is a two note descending tweet-tweet.  One chickadee does it and the other follows on with the same song, but sung a note lower.  Their rhythm is steady, and when they get out of synch, they stop and start again.  

In the meantime, the crows and ravens are cawing, the flickers are drumming, towhees wheezing in the undergrowth.  The nature of spring means that everyone is repeating their various sounds on a regular interval, and the forest is full of rhythm.  Once in a while, warblers and wrens let loose with solos over top of the whole thing.  It's as if someone has sampled all of these birds and put them into a bed track.  You could rhyme over top of it easily.  The rhythm shifts and changes subtly but it is so engaging that I lay in my sleeping bag for a full hour listening raptly to the chorus, and feeling all of these beats beneath it.

New birds, quiet beaches and coffeehouses.

Yesterday was sweet. Warm again in the afternoon after a cool and rainy start to the day. I was in town yesterday and I walked back through Deep Bay and along Pebbly Beach and then up to Miller Road. I stopped for a while on Pebbly Beach to stand by the ocean and drink it in. Standing right on the place where Wolfgang Duntz, one of our neighbours wants to put a big concrete and steel pier for the docking of his boat. Resolved more than ever that that is a bad idea.

Whilst standing in a state of rapt meditation, a loon called out from water. Always a surprise to hear these birds on the ocean, so strongly are they identified in my mind with my younger years spent on the lakes and rivers of Ontario and Quebec. A common loon warbling in the calm of a spring afternoon was perfect medicine: it made me ache to get our canoe on the water.

After getting home, I wolfed down some dinner and headed out to The Happy Isle Cafe where an open mic night was in progress. A number of musicians and poets had gathered to lay out some good stuff, poems about our place in the cosmos and our place in the family, songs about the soft places inside hard men, and the things we cling to. Aine and I sang together, which is something I love. She has The Gypsy Rover nailed, and she sang beautifully. Then she joined me on a couple of other songs.

A nice way to ease into the long weekend.

Birds of the midwinter

Even though it is technically midwinter, the spring migrations have started. Yesterday down on Mannion Bay I came across this flock of black turnstones hanging out with the mew gulls stopping off here to feast on crabs and sand fleas. They overwinter here on the south coast. preparing to make their way slowly to their breeding grounds on the Alaskan coast. These ones are all done up in their breeding plumage, ready to return to the breeding grounds, but they have a few more months before things thaw up there.

Also on this little walk, a great blue heron and our resident ornery but beautiful swan. Oh and for good measure, our resident fawn, who hangs out with the feral chicken we look after. We had two chickens, but one succumbed to the red tailed hawk that was hanging around here a few weeks ago. All that is left of poor Huckleberry is a pile of feathers and some well picked over shoulder bones.

It's funny weather right now. Along the beaches and exposed roads down low the smells of summer are wafting around - dry fir needles and dust - while in the forest and the low lying meadow in Crippen Park, there is still several inches of snow. There has been snow on that meadow since December 16, and we have had so little rain - less than 30mm this month - that it shows no signs of washing away anytime soon. Usually snow like that, even in great quantities is gone in a few days, but the extended snow falls of Christmas combined with a thaw/freeze cycle and the generally dry and sunny and cold weather has prolonged winter for an extended spell.

Photos

On my way to the Cove yesterday I shot some photos of a spring-like February:

• Magic ducks and gulls standing on the ice in the lagoon.
• Mallards swimming on the ocean side of the Causeway.
• The welcome to Snug Cove from the ferry and the government dock.

A visitor

Awoke to a dusting of snow on the ground with a little more expected, although it's not snowing at the moment. Also awoke to a juvenile red-tailed hawk calling out from a fir tree in front of our place. I saw this bird yesterday for the first time, and this is the first red-tailed hawk I've ever seen on Bowen. Looks like it's hanging around, but who knows for how long. Haven't seen much of our neighbours semi-feral chickens either. Hmmm.