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After a really active spring, I've found myself tied to my desk through most of June and July with only the occasional quick outing by canoe or on foot in the mornings. Saturday, my daughter and went for a swim in the narrows on Black River Lake. I was disgruntled to discover the Nova Scotia Power has locked the road gate at the top of the access road and I had to park on the Methals road and carry the 200 m to the lake. The water was wonderfully warm and we had great fun gunneling and swamping the canoe and sliding off its overturned canvas belly like seals off a rock. Canoe wrestling, my kids call it. Sunday morning, I got up early and went out to visit on of my regular haunts, the White Rock headpond on the Gaspereau River. In the canal below the powerhouse the chickadees, red-eyed vireos and eastern phoebes were busily fluttering about in the trees, singing their hearts out. The activity of a pair of robins revealed a nest in a red pine branch overhanging the water which I hadn't know about. How had I missed it all the other mornings? After a brief turn on the pond, I went to the pool above the bridge, where upstream navigability terminates, and I beached the canoe and walked up the riverside trail a ways to see what could be seen. I climbed up on a tangle of eye-level deadfalls that overhang the trail and sat for a while, listening and watching. There were chickadees, robins, crows, goldfinches, northern parulas, song sparrows, eastern phoebes, and red-eyed vireos singing and fluttering along the riverside; a bald eagle and belted kingfisher flew downstream. After a while, I slid off my perch and returned to where I'd beached my canoe. High overhead I could hear a single-note call repeated over and over, and I eventually spotted a the fluffy white underbelly of a fledgling straight overhead in a maple tree. There was no better vantage point from shore, so I launched my canoe out into the pool to see if I could get a better view from there. It took a while to find it again with my binoculars, but finally I located the little guy. After a few minutes an adult bird arrived, and after feeding, greeting or grooming the fledge (I couldn't see well enough to say) the two took off together. Then things really got interesting. As soon as the pair left the shelter of the maple a blue jay screeched in from nowhere and struck the fledge, and the three of them dropped out of sight in the foliage. There was an incredible racket and commotion, and I could see two adult birds now darting in and out making a great deal of noise. When I regained my wits, I paddled back to that side of the pool and creeped up the stream. The trees were alive with many birds now -- robins, chickadees, sparrows -- all, like me, closing in to discover the cause of the ruckus. As I inched up the stream along the bank, I discovered the jay perched not eight feet away in the low crotch of a maple sapling with the dead fledge in its clutches, digging in with its beak, the two adults repeatedly mobbing it and retreating, screaming "Murder! Murder!" all the while. I watched until the jay fled further into the woods, the outraged parents following. Watching this unfold, I was filled with wonder. I want to say that these were red-eyed vireos, given the habitat, and their shape, colour and eye bar. I had also heard vireos singing here when I had been sitting upstream on the deadfall. But I never got a really clear look at them during this episode, they darted so quickly, and they only screamed and never sang their tell-tale song. Actually, I felt sure that they were vireos until I got home and looked at some books. Everything I saw suggested that they would not have fledged young this early in the season. So, is it possible that red-eyed vireos would have hatched and fledged by mid July? ____________________________________ Andrew Steeves ¶ Wolfville, NS
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