Birds of the Cottage Country

By William C. Mansell, William Blair Mansell and Sheila Smith

Birds of the Cottage Country is a virtual storybook account of the author’s personalized observations throughout Ontario’s cottage playground. It clearly illustrates the downright fun, vast beauty, and consuming involvement of bird watching – even for the most skeptical of laymen.

Bill Mansell’s daily experiences at birding, spread over a period of sixty-five years, result in such a familiarity with his subject that the reader is drawn as a participant into a delicately beautiful intimacy with avian nature.

Birds of the Cottage Country will be read by some solely for its humour and humanistic style; yet serious birdwatchers will also find it a refreshingly new guide and reference tool.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Jun 30, 1985
• ISBN: 9781459718319

William C. Mansell

Bill Mansell's daily experiences at birding, spread over a period of sixty-five years, result in such a familiarity with his subject that the reader is drawn as a participant into a delicately beautiful intimacy with avian nature.

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Ontario

1. THE LOONS, GREBES, CORMORANTS, AND PETRELS

LOONS — Common: Common Loon. Occasional: Red-throated Loon. Accidental: Arctic Loon. GREBES — Rather Common: Pied-billed Grebe. Rather Rare: Horned Grebe, Red-necked Grebe. CORMORANTS — Occasional: Double-crested Cormorant. PETRELS — Accidental: Wilson’s Storm Petrel.

The big common loon (3) is a favourite bird of mine, and for many reasons. Its weird, uncanny cries, sometimes the forlorn wail of a forsaken soul, sometimes the laughter of a demented one, sometimes chuckles apparently lifted from the sound-track of Frankenstein’s Monster, provoked the early query, What was that, Daddy? Uneasiness pervaded the Stygian interior of my room when, just before falling into the abyss of childhood sleep, the melancholy exchange of a pair of loons would assail my ear.

When I was old enough to go with my parents on fishing trips we would sometimes have a loon for company, one convoying us from mate and inky young, sometimes diving to constitute a guessing game of where it would resurface (no one in our party ever won), sometimes warily circumnavigating our rowboat in a wide, watchful semicircle.

The loon was usually the first swimming bird seen in the spring and the last in the fall; and sometimes was the first in winter as well, provided open water persisted into December. And it was frequently the first bird seen each day, one surpassing my early rising applauding my pre-breakfast dip with sotto voce chuckles, it’s curiosity in this strange amphibian bringing it so close to me as to refute the belief that it is a very wild bird.

The loon was one of the first birds whose nesting habits I was able to study, for they were already nesting on our lake in our first year of establishment. I suppose that as soon as the last glacier retreated before the threat of a warming sun, a pair of loons nested at the east end of one of our three islands. There the tip is low, yielding to an off-shore marsh on one side, a rocky shoal on the other. It is an ideal spot for loons, whose awkward, labourious progress on land forces them to nest almost at the water’s edge and therefore closer to the safety of their primary element. I never saw one on the land there but more than once caught the ripples and wash of one making its way to the security of deeper waters.

The nest I invariably found on that point exemplified the primitive nature of the bird, being nothing more than an accumulation of soggy vegetation made soggier by the bird itself, which is seldom if ever dry. The large eggs, greenish or brownish, were invariably two in number, not always hatching in toto. One egg always seemed to have been ignored, abandoned, or even moved into the water. Twice I found an egg in the shallows off shore. The other hatched into a downy, black chick that required no teaching of natatorial activities. But if its aquatic pursuits tired it, it would ride on the back of a parent with a smug countenance, suggesting it had finally worn down the patience of its parent and had overcome maternal objections.

The swimming and diving ability of the young, while far from approaching that of its parents, is still considerable. With some difficulty, I have caught downy young by hand from the stern of a rowboat. While a friend propelled the craft backwards, steering at my commands, I knelt on the stern seat, following the underwater progress of the little thing, ready to scoop it up in my hands when it tired. The bird swam about a foot below the surface, using its wings as though flying. A faint stripe, like that of a spotted sandpiper, showed down each wing. One of the two chicks caught in that fashion was placed in a basin of water where, undeterred by the two-inch depth, it instinctively dived, doing its best to escape its captors. The anguished wailing of its parents ceased abruptly as soon as the chick was returned to the lake.

The young bird, not much bigger than a plump robin, seems to be a ball of black fluff; yet, perhaps because of its constant dampness, yields every secret of its skeleton when handled. Its oily, almost hair-like feathering serves to protect it from the chill of water but not from exploratory fingers.

The common loon, now hard pressed to find a wilderness habitat for propagation and ordinary living, has seen its numbers on many lakes reduced to zero. While nesting on larger lakes seems to have been abandoned for the solitude and safety of the smaller ones they ignored in my boyhood, congregations of adult loons will still be found on larger lakes in August. During those conventions flightless chicks will still be found on the smaller lakes, their parents visiting them from time to time to feed them.

The food is, of course, fish, caught by the parents in the chick’s native waters, but at least twice I have seen an adult flying toward a small lake with some object in the bill that could have been a small fish. These can only be isolated instances as the loon’s rise from water is such a labourious effort that energy so expended would greatly outweigh the benefits of transporting food.

I was able to study one pair nesting on a boggy island in Mansell’s Lake (a small water back of our cabin), my movements on the lakeshore 200 feet away going unnoticed. What I took to be the male could not reconcile himself to the tedium of incubating, but plucked and pecked at surrounding grasses and sedges as if at the peak of boredom. The female, on the other hand, would remain quiet, neck outstretched on the ground, her whole body then resembling a rounded, shaded rock.

It was on that particular lake that I observed the young being trained in the art of fishing. The parents would apparently catch, then release fish near the chick, which would then be required to dive for them if it wanted its hunger appeased. In its younger stages, of course, it took food from the bill of the parent but in a manner so thankless I thought it deserved a clout on the ear.

While the overtones of loon reviews are very pessimistic, I am not entirely in agreement with them. The species is in trouble, yes, but when up to eight adults congregate off our beach in August, it seems to be holding its own; and this, presumably, is because it has taken to nesting on the smaller lakes of the region.

The red-throated loon (1) nests on the Arctic tundra, keeping more to salt-water on migration and in winter. With extreme luck you may see one on Georgian Bay or any of the larger lakes of the region. The Arctic loon (2) is also a tundra bird but more western than the other. Like it, it winters on salt-water and should be looked for in the same places visited by the red-throated on those few occasions it has occurred here. The pied-billed grebe (4) is a bird of mucky, weedy lakes and rivers, waters not favoured by humans for any purpose other than birding. It will keep to cover if at all suspicious. Horned grebes (5) nest in Algonquin Park but elsewhere are transients only, occurring on almost any body of water. The larger, longer-necked red-necked grebe (6), notwithstanding one I saw in flight on June 4, is wholly transient. The snaky appearing double-crested cormorant (8) may be mistaken for a loon by the unwary. It nests on Georgian Bay islands but, so far as I am aware, has never ventured inland, apparently following the shores of Georgian Bay when on migration. Wilson’s storm petrel (7), once picked up dead in this region, is a marine bird whose flight suggests that of a white-rumped swallow. Such storm-blown waifs are usually too exhausted to exhibit flight characteristics.

2. THE HERONS AND STORKS

Rather Common: Great Blue Heron. Uncommon: American Bittern. Rare: Green-backed Heron. Very Rare: Least Bittern, Great Egret, Black-crowned Night-Heron. Accidental: Snowy Egret, Cattle Egret, Yellow-crowned Night-Heron, Wood Stork.

Being in general a family of tropical persuasions, few heron species have penetrated the harsher environment of the Cottage Country for the purpose of propagation. The dominating one, in both size and numbers, is the great blue heron (11), one of North America’s largest birds.

In the haze of long and fond memories, I seem to recall asking the name of the big bird standing, motionless and seemingly forlorn, in one of the region’s few marshes, perhaps the one through which the steamers sailed between Fairy and Pen Lakes. I was told it was a ‘crane,’ and ‘crane’ I called it until, a few years later, the ability to read the text accompanying the frequently examined pictures in Reed’s Bird Guides told me the members of my family were greatly in error. They, however, had been led astray by others of their and preceding generations who, fancying the great blue heron was the same bird as the sandhill crane, grossly misnamed it.

The great blue is, undeniably, great, standing four feet tall, slightly less than the quite unrelated sandhill and whooping cranes. It is, however, far from blue, being, generally, a dull gray which, in some lights, has a faint bluish cast.

The great blue heron frequents the shallows of lakes of any size, seeking marshy outlets, reedy shores, the marshes themselves and nearby wet swales in pursuit of finny prey and frogs, from which it is easily diverted by a small marsh bird, a meadow vole or a snake.

It is one of our wariest species. I doubt if I have ever been closer to one than 100 feet, and on most of those occasions was that near only because my silent progress in a canoe surprised the bird (and me as well) as I rounded the entrance to a small marsh. The result was a boring constant. A harsh, flat quok, ungainly flight with long neck outstretched to be withdrawn later, the spat of a jet of excrement as it hit the water, and the gradual transformation of an awkward pterodactyl into a bird of grace and majesty as it entered the classic heron flight pattern of retracted neck, trailing legs and powerful wing-beats. In full flight its characteristic shape is easily identifiable, yet I have seen one so high that I required binoculars to determine the bird’s identity.

Sometimes when performing my matutinal ablutions on a calm morning, I would see the dinosaur-like imprints of its toes on the sandy bottom. Always an early fisherman, one frequently explored the shallows before late-rising humans drove it to more secluded fishing grounds. One morning there was indisputable evidence that such a bird had approached our dock from the north, disdained an upward step of two feet to the platform and instead continued in a crouch to pass under the structure, the clearance being a mere twelve inches.

Another bird on a similar prowl entangled itself in a fish line and was quite ensnared when discovered by my uncle and his family. Mindful of its formidable spearlike bill, and suspecting, rightly, that the eye is a favourite target, they prudently tossed a blanket over the bird before arranging for its release.

Great blues nest from the ground up to near the tops of tall trees, with terrestrial nests usually resulting from necessity. As trees are in good supply in the Cottage Country, heronries here are almost invariably tree-top affairs. That presupposes the four-foot, long-legged bird perches in trees. I think it goes farther and sleeps in them. One evening toward dusk, three approached a majestic lakeshore maple and, with much flapping and croaking, began to settle for the night. It seemed, though, that as fast as one approached serenity, another became dissatisfied, flapping and shifting position with consequent bough-shaking while all three joined in harsh protests. This game of (hardly) musical chairs was still in progress as I paddled around a bend, wondering if any of them would rest that night.

The American bittern (9) is more often seen in flight than on the ground, but sometimes a lucky observer will see one in the classic pose of bill pointing skyward, eyes somehow focussing around it as it outstares the intruder of its private domain. One of the last I saw in this region was north of Aspdin, vainly trying to emulate a reed-clump. As the sharp eyes of my wife spotted him (or her, both sexes look the same) it was not a success-dodge. I stopped the car and reversed, as the sight of a bittern on the ground is an event not to be lightly dismissed. My wife’s eyes have truly sharpened with age because thirty years previously she had been unable to see a motionless one to which I was trying to direct her. Not until we were within twenty-five feet of it was she able to see it. Rather than discredit her vision, I must admit that that particular bird was taking greater advantage of its cryptic plumage.

In the Canal marshes many years ago one had me wavering between admiration for its versatility and berating its clumsiness. It was treading a boggy island in the marsh when it either misjudged a step and fell in or entered the waters of its own volition. As it swam very well, I generously conceded the bird had more than one talent.

The normal range of the green-backed heron (15) ends just above Lake Couchiching. Users of the CNR may see it in one of its most northern haunts as their train swings around a large wetland, plentifully grown with dead trees, just north of Washago. Occasionally, birds have