Category Archives: Nature

Pleasant View Cedars

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Today I joined a Nature PEI walk through Pleasant View Cedars Natural Area near Miminegash. I understood we would see some large, old eastern white cedars, but wasn’t prepared for how breathtakingly enormous the stand was! At one point in the middle, all I could see around me was cedar, something I’ve never experienced before. It is a rare landscape on our tiny Island.

I always find it difficult to photograph forests, but trust me, that’s a lot of cedar!

There is a cedar stand on the property we occupy, an area that was too wet to be farmed, and some of the trees there are very old. The walls of our log cabin are unpeeled cedar logs, a few of which probably came from that cedar stand. Some of my earliest memories are waking early from sleep and staring at the patterns on the bark. I could see faces in the knots, would pull at the stray threads of bark that were peeling off. I was partly raised in the comfort and solidity of cedar trees.

The drought we’ve been experiencing meant we were walking over dry land that should really have been quite boggy, which was good for us but possibly uncomfortable for the trees. There was very little undergrowth due to the tall canopy. It was a cloudy morning, so it was very dark and quiet as we walked through. I sort of felt like I was in a fairytale woods – Hansel and Gretel came to mind, as it was a little spooky, with odd-shaped trees all around.

There were many trees that looked like they had legs and could walk! This perfectly-healthy cedar would have started life growing on top of a dead fallen tree, which eventually rotted away leaving this space at the bottom.

Our guides, Mark Arsenault from the provincial government forestry division, and Rosemary Curley, former provincial biologist and Nature PEI president, were genial hosts and excellent teachers. I’ve been on many walks with Rosemary, mostly scouting for mushrooms, and am constantly impressed and inspired by her vast knowledge of our province’s natural areas and her life-long passion for sharing her love of the natural world with others. I highly recommend spending time with her whenever you get a chance.

Northern red belt fungus

Nature PEI hold many field events each year, and they all seem to be free, but a membership to support their important work is only $20 a year, which includes a quarterly newsletter. This morning’s hike was easily worth 10 times this year’s fee. I’ll never forget being surrounded by those trees.

Me next to the biggest cedar I’ve ever seen on PEI. This is a rare photo of me, so enjoy.

Hummingbird Hanger Hack

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Ruby-throated hummingbirds are back on PEI, and the first one arrived in our yard on May 8. They are beloved summer residents, adding zip and zing to our summers and then heading south again the first or second week of September.

I have two feeders for them (three, really, as I have an extra one to replace one that is being cleaned). The sugar water they drink also attracts ants, who motor up and down the ropes the feeders hang from, many of the little souls drowning in the feeder wells. Hanging hummingbird feeder moats that hold water can be purchased to block ants from reaching the feeder.

Or you can make your own for free from some wire and an old spray can lid or something similar. There are a million tutorials online. Poke a hole in the lid, bend a wire hanger into a hook and push it through the hole, and seal and glue the hanger in place. I made some over 10 years ago and they are still saving ants from a sugar-high death.

Backyard

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I am still slowly dealing with debris from long-ago storms Fiona and Dorian. Most of the downed trees, hundreds of them on the 23 acres we occupy, will never be “cleaned up”. It’s too big of a job for me, the tangle of toppled 60-year-old spruce trees impenetrable in many places. I did a walk a couple of hundred feet from our house the other day and had to haul myself over trees piled four or five feet high, a brief panic of wondering if I was suddenly too old for such exertions followed by the relief that I am still quite physically strong.

Visitors comment on the destruction, on the fire hazard I’m allowing to remain. Yes, it’s true, it is all a fire hazard, but living in a forest full of conifers is a fire hazard anyway, dead or alive, so I’m used to it, and as a full-time caregiver I can’t do much more about it than I have. There are endless opportunities to worry about risks real and imagined, as I was reminded of at an emergency measures training I took many years ago.

We were to list what possible disasters could befall our municipalities, and we ticked off all types of natural disasters and possible human-caused chaos. The instructor, knowing exactly where my house is, said, “What about you, Thelma, what’s overhead all the time where you live?” Fuel-filled jets heading from North America to Europe, that’s what, and they could crash in Portage, he said, causing the western end of PEI to be cut off and straining the resources of our local emergency crews to deal with a disaster of such magnitude. Wide-eyed, we nervously laughed at this, thinking it so unlikely, but internally my younger self, who listened to the planes flying overhead on summer nights in our uninsulated cottage, wondering if some of them might be Russian missiles headed to the US, didn’t think it so far-fetched.

So I pick away at the fire hazard in the forest, my only real goal to reestablish walking paths that were there before Dorian in 2019 or, more likely, make new paths where an easier way through is evident. There is a lot to be said for taking the easy way, especially in nature. Nature just wants us to leave it alone to do its thing, to recognize that constantly trying to bend and shape it to our needs is futile and counterproductive. When you get comfortable with the mess of nature, less anxious to constantly clean everything up, the mess of life becomes more bearable. My Mary Oliver poem this morning certainly agrees:

BACKYARD
I had not time to haul out all
the dead stuff so it hung, limp
or dry, wherever the wind swung it

over or down or across. All summer
it stayed that way, untrimmed, and
thickened. The paths grew
damp and uncomfortable and mossy until
nobody could get through but a mouse or a

shadow. Blackberries, ferns, leaves, litter
totally without direction management
supervision. The birds loved it.

Mary Oliver 
from Owls and Other Fantasies, 2003

Spruce Cone

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After an absence of over 40 years, I have been attending church regularly for nearly a year. The same church I had been raised in, with some of the same people who were there when I last attended regularly in my mid-teens.

My mother stopped driving in 2016, so her cousin and his wife kindly took her to and from church. When my mother’s mobility declined after three hospitalizations in the winter of 2023/24, I felt it unfair for these thoughtful older relatives to have the responsibility of looking after my mother, so I told her I would take her.

This past Sunday, the minister’s sermon was focused on the baptism of Jesus, which is part of Epiphany, the season that follows Advent. One of the scripture readings was from the third chapter of the Gospel of Luke:

When all the people were being baptized, Jesus was baptized too. And as he was praying, heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.”

Luke 3: 21-22

The minister, a thoughtful and interesting speaker, asked the congregation if we had ever seen a dove descend from heaven, if we had ever heard God speak. There was silence, indicating that no one had, or nobody was prepared to talk about it if they had, and he went on to talk about what that might have been like to hear God (and he talked about Eric Clapton, too, which isn’t usual in the Presbyterian Church of Canada, but most welcome, at least by me).

I’ve never heard the booming bossy voice of the Christian God as described throughout the Bible. I’m pretty sure he’s not that well pleased with me, despite me taking my mother to church every week, so I’m just as happy to not hear what he has to say.

What I do hear is the voice of the eternal spirit, the beating heart of the cosmos, the kind and merciful universe. Where? In the rustle of the leaves in trees, easily one of my most favourite sounds in the entire world.

Today I was walking through a field near our house, a field surrounded by tall trees that have watched me move around this land for nearly 60 years. The sun had just come out briefly, a rare occurrence so far this year, and I heard a flock of finches in the forest, always calling to one another as they move through the trees.

Suddenly, I looked up and saw a solitary finch flying high over the field, and it had something big in its mouth. Just as I thought I’ve never seen a finch carrying something so big, it dropped its load, and as it fell I could see it was a spruce cone. The cone bounced on the snow and the bird continued on its way as if that had been the plan all along.

I hurried over to see it and it was indeed a spruce cone, complete with a couple of spruce needles stuck its base. I could smell the distinct odour of spruce sap, and realised the bird must have plucked this directly from a tree, a gift from high up in a tree, a place I could never visit.

I put the cone in my pocket and brought it home and put it in a little dish. The seeds are already dropping out of it. It still smells of sap.

With you I am well pleased.

Windy

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Yesterday the air temperature and wind direction stayed nearly constant throughout the day, a rare occurrence. In fact, the wind shifted to the north around noon on November 12 and remains there as I write this at 8 a.m. on November 14. Wind speeds mostly stayed between 25 and 35 km/h, though my anemometer is not placed high enough to give an accurate reading. It’s chilly.

Bird Notes (tweets, I guess)

A Northern Flicker, a ground-foraging brown woodpecker with a lovely red cap, just landed in our yard and dug around for ants and worms. Earlier today I saw something new: an American Goldfinch drinking from a hummingbird feeder, with a friend sitting on a branch nearby until a feisty hummer ran them both off.

After a couple of years without any Great Blue Herons living and feeding on our river, which they have always have done in my lifetime, there are now two and sometimes three. All three flew together over our yard the other day and I felt like I was in Fred Flintstone’s backyard, their huge wingspan and loud rusty-hinge squawking casting ancient shadows as I looked up (mouth closed…always close your mouth when birds are flying over. You’re welcome.).

A juvenile American Robin, nearly as big as its parents and almost the same colour except for the speckled breast, bounced across the lawn at about 5:30 this morning, capably finding its own food, but still quietly calling for its parents to share what they were finding. Soon the youngster will be on its own, and the parents could easily set some more eggs this summer. It’s a dangerous world for baby birds, so this little family is a great success story.

My life list on the Merlin app sits at 36, all viewed from my yard. Such richness, the morning chorus this time of year filled with joyous conversations and hope.

I wonder what my chickens think of the sparrows who sometimes forage in their run, or the flocks of geese that honk overhead, or the noisy, feisty Blue Jays that rattle the mornings. My guess is that they don’t really pay any attention to other birds unless a danger call is broadcast, a warning that a hawk or eagle is in the area, and they take cover.

Otherwise, they are just busy being chickens, and that seems to be sound advice. Just be the bird you are meant to be.

Invasion of the worm snatchers

BirdCast

There are many websites for people to submit sightings of different migrating birds and monarch butterflies as they travel across North America, but BirdCast uses weather radar to produce live bird migration maps for the continental United States, as well as nightly forecasts.

The map for the entire United States at 11:30 pm Atlantic Time May 23, 2024.

I’m watching the live data for Washington County, Maine, and at 11:45 pm when I’m writing this, BirdCast estimates there are over 430,000 birds in flight over that one county right now heading north east in the direction of PEI. The dashboard estimates average flight speed, altitude and even provides estimates of which species are most likely to be on the move tonight, many of them tiny summer visitors who nest near our house like the Common Yellowthroat, Ovenbird, Northern Parula and and Blackburnian Warbler.

I have spent a lot of time wondering what the landscape around me looked like before European invasion, how it would have felt to wander through the ancient forest that was felled to build sailing ships and fine furniture. Until someone invents a virtual reality program to allow me to walk through an approximation of what had been here, the next best thing is to stand outside with my eyes closed each morning at this time of year during the dawn chorus and listen as each newly-returned little songbird offers up its timeless song, creating an ancient aural landscape. My heart is beating as fast as their little wings right now in anticipation of their arrival.

Celestial Awe

A total solar eclipse last month and a spectacular aurora borealis show on the night of May 10th have both luckily occurred during that sweet spot on PEI when the snow has disappeared but the biting insects haven’t yet emerged, when being outside is a pleasure.

I have seen the aurora on the northern horizon before, but between 11pm and midnight they danced and flickered dimly overhead and all around, something I’ve never experienced. We don’t live in a completely dark-sky environment, as there are a few yard and street lights dotted around, and the glow from the lights in the town of Alberton to the north can sometimes be detected, but it’s pretty close, and I got some nice photos.

To the south
To the north

It was only 4C on Friday night and I hadn’t dressed appropriately for the cold, damp weather, but I stretched out on the grass anyway to watch the show. Last night I was better prepared for another cool night, donning long underwear, heavy sweater, gloves, hat, winter boots and splash pants.

Alas, the northern lights stayed undetectable except in long exposure photos, just a glow on the horizon. So my careful preparation wouldn’t totally have been in vain, I recruited Steven to join me in a gimmicky shot to commemorate our month of celestial awe, but now looking at it, I think it also captured how we have moved through our life together over these past 25 years: arm in arm, heads up, finding each other in an infinite and beautiful universe, walking through the darkness toward the light.

Silence

The audio that accompanies this article in The Guardian broke my heart, and I’m still thinking about it, especially when I hear a new seasonal visitor has returned to nest in the forest near our house. I’m not sure why we humans are continuing to ignore warnings that we have very little time to change how we live to ensure future generations of humans and other species can have a livable planet.

I think part of the problem is that the people who wield the most power in the world live in large cities. Some of them possibly have country homes as well, but they do not have a healthy relationship with nature and therefore don’t care about it beyond what it can give them; they try to control it, bend it to their will, extract from the natural world things that will make them more and more money. It is difficult to care about what you can’t see.

When I lived for a brief time in London in the mid-80s, I knew a young woman who had just moved to the UK from the Cayman Islands. Maria and I both shared much of the excitement and challenges of coming from a small place and living in a massive city, but she had a physical challenge I didn’t have: she was often uncomfortable because she had never worn shoes for any long period of time. She grew up walking on bare feet in sand, not because they were poor, because they weren’t, but because they didn’t need shoes. She found the cobbles and pavement of London hard and noisy, wearing shoes and socks constricting.

She said couldn’t get the sense of the land, couldn’t feel a part of the place without her feet in the sand, in the soil. She was homesick in part because she missed her family, but just as much because of the loss of a connection to the land and the freedom of living so closely with the natural world. To be honest, I didn’t know what she was talking about. Who wanted to live in a backwards rural setting any more? I certainly didn’t. Give me history and theatre and art and Oxford Street and pubs and life!

I lost touch with Maria, but I would bet she returned to her home, and so did I.

I hear a robin.

Lone

I was weeding a flower bed a few minutes ago, taking advantage of these sweet long evenings before the biting insects emerge. I would be outside all day long at this time of year if I could, but usually I have to steal a few minutes here and there.

A small flock of Canada geese flew down the river towards Yeo’s Bridge, probably aiming for the fresh-water pond just beyond. They were very low and close enough to me that I could hear their whistling wings. A few minutes later, I heard and saw another goose up the river, wheeling around in an unusual way. Then, as I was fully occupied with destroying some particularly stubborn weeds, a loud call came suddenly from the river just in front of me.

There was the lone goose, bobbing along in the water in the direction as the small flock had gone, calling over and over, the same call as when they are flying overhead, which I always imagine to be “here we are, stay together, don’t straggle, we can do it!”

But this was sadder, one insistent voice and no response. It cried, for that’s how it sounded to me, for at least five minutes, swimming further away. A mourning dove in the woods kept it company, coo wooo wooo wooo, you’re not alone.

And then it stopped. I will imagine it heard its friends and flew to join them in the pond.