Pheasantly Surprised

A rare sighting before the field grass grew up.

As much as I want a couple of goats and a donkey and a pig, all pets, of course, I have to accept that we are bird people. As much as I want farm fur, I'm resigned to being surrounded by feathers.
For several years, my husband has been slightly obsessed by pheasants, this mild obsession started perhaps by seeing them abundantly during our 2010 trip to Scotland but fuelled at home by the presence of a mostly heard but not seen male pheasant whose "gronks" we hear in the shrubs and tall grass around our property.
For a few winters, he showed up underneath the bird feeders in our front yard but we thought the heavy snow of 2015 may have been the end of him. Happily, he survived to gronk again.
A few weeks ago, I looked out the bathroom window and saw something on the gravel pile. I wondered if one of our chickens had flown the coop then I realized it was the pheasant.
"I've got to get him a female," Dwayne declared.

We love babies! Although these are more like toddlers.

After a couple of years of trying, Dwayne finally tracked down young pheasants to buy and we picked them up on Tuesday night. We now have ten settling in to their new abode in our backyard. They will be released in the fall, not for hunting but for our personal enjoyment.

Sitting on the back deck looking at our array of bird houses, my husband swept his arm out and said, "Ospreys, chickens and pheasants. We are a bird sanctuary."
Come the fall, we'll see how our pheasants fare in the wild; we might end up being the bird brains.

Bearly There

I'm not sure what I like better about this photo: the beautiful wildflowers or the handsome little fella in the middle of them!
We think he's been enjoying the wild strawberries that are among the delicacies offered up by our sumptuous summer field.

Early Babies

My friend Jane became a grandmother a month earlier than expected (mother and baby girl are fine) and our osprey babies showed their heads two weeks earlier than usual. Not sure what this means, or if they're connected (the June full moon?), but as surprising as nature can be, it's still a delight since back in April, we weren't sure if the osprey pair was even going to return to this nest to raise young again.
Like anyone else, all we want -- whether its human or bird -- are healthy babies and happy parents so it's all celebration. For us, that celebration -- another three osprey babies -- is tinged with anxiety and not the new-parent kind.
So what's the plan, you ask, to prevent another eagle attack like last August? Once both parents are leaving the nest each morning to fish for their three growing fledglings, I'll be getting up at dawn to do guard duty. Not sure how I'll scare away the eagle -- my lawn chair and roar of rage may not be as scary when the eagle is ten feet above -- but I have a couple of weeks to figure that out.
My mother has a BB gun. Maybe the sound of that itty bitty gun -- along with my roar -- would be enough of a deterrent. I'd hoped to muster up an army of crows but they didn't settle around our yard this year.
I'll figure something out, not to worry. The eagle will not win this year, if I have to shimmy up that pole and sit in the nest myself.

Here are the links to the posts about last summer's devastating eagle attack (I still can't talk about it without getting angry):
http://fieldnotescumberland.blogspot.ca/2015/08/we-are-bird-protectors.html
http://fieldnotescumberland.blogspot.ca/2015/08/nature-takes-its-course.html
http://fieldnotescumberland.blogspot.ca/2015/08/nature-sucks.html
I love the poem in this one:
http://fieldnotescumberland.blogspot.ca/2015/08/all-is-quiet-now.html

Just Another Country Morning

It's my mother's birthday today so it's a no-work day as we celebrate her (for me, in particular, her unflagging support of my writing career). We spent some time this morning on the front deck, enjoying our coffee and the sunshine and watching this little darling take one peanut at a time and bury each one in a different spot in the yard.
Every third or fourth peanut, she would pause to eat. Given the exhausting back-and-forth she was involved in -- across the deck for a peanut then across the yard to hide it -- we decided her hard work and commitment, but also her sense to stop and replenish her energy, meant she is female. A completely arbitrary assignment.
We do know this isn't Oswald, the tamest squirrel; I'm pretty sure he was hit by a car the other night.  He was named for Santa's squirrel navigator in a Christmas movie we watched last year but my country boy has started calling the other squirrels Lee and  Harvey.
Insert a sigh here. 
I'm not sure I want my squirrels named after a presidential assassin. 

There Are Enough Stories

Mama, when are you going to stop writing...?

I received the loveliest email the other day. It wasn't what was in the message that pleased so much as what the subject said: Author Questionnaire.
Sara Jewell, author. Finally, as my mother keeps saying.
Soon. Less than four months. Pub day is September 30. I will be out standing in my field on that day.
Answering that questionnaire helped because speaking of questionnaires...lately I've been questioning the content of my Field Notes book. I keep thinking I missed a couple of essays that should have been included.
I know, I know: the curse of the Should Haves.

In order to answer a couple of questions on the questionnaire, however, I needed to refresh my memory on the content of my essays and as I scrolled through the Table of Contents, I realized, "This is okay. These are good essays." Most importantly, I said, "These are enough."
Sure, perhaps, the one about the green bins should be in this collection but that's about it; and I could have added it during the last editing go-round but I ran out of time and energy, to be honest.

The good news is I have already started the file for Field Notes 2: Further Afield. And in thinking about this again today, I know that the essays about the green bin and the pet chickens and those first few dates with a Nova Scotia country boy will fit in the second book just as nicely because there won't be any "back story" essays in book two. Those are the ones that describe what it was like to leave Vancouver and end up on a dead-end road with no streetlights or sidewalks in rural Nova Scotia; that subject is sufficiently covered in book one. Book two will be the continuing adventures... and my country boy now has a deadline for teaching me to shoot a gun.
So check another line off on the To Do list: Stop worrying about the book! You will never run out of stories to tell.

Endangered Chimney Swifts Counting On Us

As published in the Citizen-Record newspaper on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, by Sara Jewell.

Coreen Tizzard & her daughter Amy stand next to the big chimney in Oxford.

When Amy Tizzard pulls her car to the edge of the pavement at the corner of Duke and Waverly Streets in Oxford, I notice her specialty license plate: “Conservation – Species at Risk”. No surprise, then, that she’d volunteer to spend several evenings in Sigrid Wood’s backyard watching the top of a huge chimney for a couple of hours.

Amy is volunteering with Maritimes SwiftWatch, a program launched five years ago to monitor chimney swift populations in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

The chimney in Sigrid’s backyard was once part of the Scotia Woodworkers mill; according to the date stamped into the brick, this chimney was built in 1919. Until a few years ago, when a previous resident burned garbage in the bottom of it, this chimney was a roost for hundreds of swifts.

On the first night, despite several hours of watching the insect-eating swifts flying in the air above the chimney, not a single one enters it at dusk to roost for the night.

Swifts use chimneys for two separate purposes: for roosting en masse in late May and early June after they migrate north, and for nesting as individual pairs.

According to Maritimes SwiftWatch coordinator, Allison Manthorne, the four-night count conducted by Amy (along with her mother and a few friends) is part of a national effort to

track their population and determine factors for their decline in some areas.

“It also helps us connect with landowners because pretty much all the sites are on private land,” Manthorne says. “Although the birds and chimneys are protected by law while the birds are in them, over the winter, there’s no legal protection for the chimney itself. The count is a way of collecting information and relaying it back to the landowners to show them how important this structure is and what they can do to protect it.”

Amy has three pages of data to complete for each night of the count, filling out information about the chimney structure and the habitat around it, as well as weather conditions such as temperature, cloud cover and wind speed.

Over her four-day watch at the mill chimney, only two swifts roosted there, but because of the number of swifts spied overhead in the hours before sunset, she is not discouraged.

“We had seen up to ten swifts flying around on one night and they are probably roosting elsewhere,” she says. “The birds are somewhere around Oxford so people can keep a look out.”

Chimney swifts are identified by their rapid twittering call and short, stubby tails.

One evening, Amy and her mother were driving through town looking at chimneys and they realized there are a lot of uncapped chimneys no longer being used. Unlined brick chimneys are ideal for swifts.

Allison Manthorne says the easiest way to determine if swifts are nesting in your chimney is to stand outside and look at it.

“If they’re nesting, they’ll go in and out of the chimney about every half hour to forty-five minutes. If they’re roosting, they only come back at night.”

For information on chimney swifts in the Maritimes, check out the Bird Studies Canada link, www.birdscanada.org/volunteer/ai/chsw/

BLOG BONUS: How do I know if there are swifts nesting in my chimney?

“You might hear them if you’re in the house," says Allison Manthorne of Maritimes Swiftwatch, based in Sackville, NB. "If there are young, they make a dry, rattling sound; they almost sound like rattlesnakes. You’ll hear the adults twittering to each other." 

As stated in the column, thought, the best way to know is to go outside and look at your chimney to see if any swifts are entering and leaving your chimney at least once an hour. That means they're feeding babies.

According to Manthorne, swift bodies and legs are designed to cling vertically to a surface so if you see a bird perched on the top of a chimney,  it’s not a swift.

“They have these cool tail spines that act like a brace to keep the bird propped up overnight.”

They also are known to nest in the highest, deepest, darkest corners of barns; there is one site like this in Great Village. 

So, Manthrone says, “We’re asking people to keep an eye on their chimneys but also take a look in their barns, especially the older wooden barns.” 

If we're losing chimneys and barns, how about building something especially for swifts? Manthorne says a lot of people are trying to create an artificial structure but so far, none have worked in Canada. 

Knowing if swifts are nesting in your chimney becomes extremely important when a cold, wet June day comes upon us and we decide we want a fire on to take the damp away.

“If we know a pair is nesting in the chimney and we’re able to talk to that landowner, we ask they not light a fire until they know the birds are gone," says Manthorne. "They are protected by law,” she adds. “If someone was to light a fire, that is illegal.”

She admits that law is not well known by people, and honestly, we all know someone who would bristle and say “It’s my house and I’m lighting a fire."

Manthorne  is just hopeful that doesn't happen. “By and large, the nesting season is late enough that we don’t see that conflict.”

The massive unused chimney in Oxford is an ideal roosting spot for swifts.

Under An Oak Tree

Fourteen months after Stella died, we finally planted her ashes with an oak tree. I didn't do this last summer when her ashes came back because I thought I was going to be writing the first draft of her book last summer and felt she should be with me. Writing more sample essays for the Field Notes book put an end to that plan, or at least, paused it (pawsed it?), although I did write about Stella's death while it was still fresh.
This spring, when the Pugwash Communities in Bloom had trees for sale, I decided to buy an oak tree and get it planted as soon as my mother returned from Georgia. My friend Jane wanted to be part of the moment when the tree, along with Stella's ashes and the fur I took out of the lint catcher after washing her blankets for the last time, entered the ground. This past Saturday was the day.
You'll see in the photo that Abby wanted to be part of the event as well.
We didn't plant Stella along the walking path as originally planned; Dwayne thought a better spot was next to the garden where he plants the cherry tomatoes because she spent a lot of time there, hiding behind the tomato plants, eating the fruit! It's on the way to the path so I'll see it every time I head to the plantation, and Stella's tree has a view of the osprey nest. 
And I have a view of her tree. Because of where we planted her ashes and tree, I see it every time I get in and out of bed. I did not expect that to mean as much as it does.
Despite the fact I believe in the presence of spirits, I did save some of her ashes and some of her fur in a little Irish pottery jar with a screw top so when I do get a chance, perhaps this fall, to write the first draft of her book, part of her will be in the room with me. One of those weird things that writers do.