Clyde the Birdman

By Heather Harbord

Clyde Burton grew up in a different country and a different century. At age 7, he hatched gulls' and seabird' eggs under hens in Harbour Buffett, an outport of the Dominion of Newfoundland. At age 15, he took an eagle chick from its nest and raised it. After graduating from high school, he worked as a Hudson's Bay Clerk on the Lower North Shore of Quebec, a bush pilot in Newfoundland, founded a Nature Sanctuary in  Powell River, BC. His banding of trumpeter swans led to the discovery of a new flyway to their northern breeding grounds. Later, he became the bird guru of a naturalist club. Being a Newfoundlander he is a good storyteller with a fine turn of phrase. He arrived in Powell River, BC.in 1969 and spent the rest of his working life here. The love of his life and two of her children eventually followed him here.

            The book is approximately 44,000 words, illustrated with photographs old and new.  

            The audience is birders everywhere especially readers in Powell River, B.C,  Quebec and Newfoundland.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Heather Harbord
• Release date: Nov 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201867874

Book preview

PROLOGUE

I was always a bird lover and would go to great lengths to observe them. When I was about 14, my friend Stan Hollett and I rowed out to Iron Island, at the south end of Long Island in Placentia Bay. The sea was too rough to land the boat, so I jumped ashore on the calmer north side of the island and hiked across to the cliffs where the kittiwakes nested. I wanted to study the chicks in their nests. After crossing a scrape full of loose angular rocks,[1] I climbed out onto the cliff for about 20 feet till I was eye to eye with the birds.

There were about 30 nests wherever the parents found a wide enough ledge for their mound of grasses, feathers, seaweed and mud with an indentation in the top. Some contained two eggs and some had downy young ones nowhere near fledging. The young ones were probably a week old, no more. I carefully observed everything but didn’t stay long as the parents had flown off when I arrived. I remember glancing over at Barrie’s Hole about 150 feet away. On top were the nests of the great cormorants. I didn’t go over there because I was spooked, knowing it was where Barrie had fallen to his death.

When I was almost back at the scrape, I felt the ledge I was standing on break off. I panicked and stood there. The mental pressure was so great I thought of just jumping backwards. If I keep my eyes closed, I thought, I won’t know what happened. But wait, I’ll try something else first. Pressed hard against the cliff, I quickly rehearsed a plan in my mind, then put it into action. I would jump into the scrape and scravel up the loose rocks as soon as I landed because there wasn’t much room for error.

Using my foot for leverage, I threw myself as far over the scrape as I could, landing on the loose rocks and immediately scravelled for the top. The rocks slid downwards under my feet as I knew they would, but I used my forward momentum and my will to keep going upwards. The scree ended about four feet away in a big drop-off that I didn’t want to be anywhere near. I had to go about six feet up before I could grab the grass, and then I held on tight. That’s where I stopped to regain myself.

I remember looking back at Stan in the boat far below me. He was standing up pushing on the oars. The dory was a 16-foot boat, but from where I was, looking almost straight down, it seemed only two inches long. Being young, I soon got up and walked back over the island to where he had dropped me off earlier, and he picked me up again.

I don’t remember the conversation, but I said, That shook me up. That was the end of it. We left and headed for home.

I think my love of birds is almost instinctive. It was a thing that I was born with. In the past, I could no more change my life of being around birds or with birds or knowing about birds than I could walking. I was acutely aware of all the birds I had never seen before. I wanted to know more about them.

Several years later, as an adult, I went to New Brunswick. Whenever I had spare time, I’d be out in the woods, looking to see what I could see, because I knew the birds were different in the Maritimes. I saw my first scarlet tanager in Moncton. It was in a maple tree. If I could remember things in school as well as I could remember birds, I would have been famous. It’s funny, isn’t it? That image of the scarlet tanager is etched in my memory. It hopped across the middle of the tree. Red with black wings. It went across the tree and darted out the other side and I didn’t see it anymore.

That was in 1965. I can remember that as if it just happened a minute ago. Now that’s weird. Even I find it strange. When somebody asked me Whatever got you interested in birds? Well, whatever gets somebody interested in ... baking? Or anything? People have different interests. Some people like insects!

Although I was never able to make a full-time living out of birds, I was always watching out for them 24/7. All my life, my favourite time of day has been the early morning. I like to get up at first light to go for a walk or a cycle, just me and the birds. I watch them and enjoy them. I’m not a competitive person, so I don’t keep a life list and I don’t like to argue with people about what they or I have or have not seen. I’d rather spend my time enjoying bird behavior, reading about them and sometimes photographing them. The only time I kept meticulous records of birds was while I was running the Cranberry Lake Wildlife Sanctuary. This was where my banding of trumpeter swans revealed a new and previously unknown migration route that they take to their Arctic breeding grounds.  

CHAPTER 1—GROWING UP IN HARBOUR BUFFETT

In the days when Newfoundland was still an independent Dominion of the British Commonwealth, I, Clyde Howard Burton, was born on March 4, 1942. I was the firstborn of Dick and Lilian Burton who lived in a big four-bedroom saltbox house on 35 acres in Harbour Buffett, a typical Newfoundland outport. The house was 19 feet by 18 feet. The kitchen ran the full length of it and there was a stairway out toward the front. The land, which we never or seldom used, went way the heck back up. A lot of it was swamp.

Harbour Buffett was located on Long Island, one of three large islands in Placentia Bay. The largest of these is Merasheen Island, whose name was derived from the French Mer aux chiens (Sea of dogs, which may be a reference to seals). Next to it is Long Island, and south of it is the smaller Red Island. Placentia, originally called La Pleasance, the Pleasant Place, was on the east side of Placentia Bay, four miles south of where today’s ferry docks at Argentia.

The Burton family, who came from Poole on the south coast of Dorset, England, arrived in Newfoundland in 1740, and generations of them settled in Harbour Buffett. By the time I was born, Harbour Buffett was a community of 150 souls, mostly of English descent.

A mile away, on the other side of the long narrow island, was the tiny Irish community of Port Royal. Its inhabitants were Irish Catholics with surnames like Ryan and Hann. Their children attended their own two-room school. Five miles away, Kingwell was a third community whose inhabitants were of Scots/Irish descent, chased out of the old country by the law of the day. They were Church of England, with names like Brown and Berkshire. These people were mainly fishermen or boat builders, like my grandfather. Harbour Buffett was strictly Church of England. This segregation of small communities by religion was common in those days. Unlike some places, the Catholics of Port Royal and the Harbour Buffett people got along well because in my father’s day, the two clergy had been friends. Nobody worked on Sundays, not even to cook. Women prepared meals the day before, and everyone dressed in their best to attend church.

Harbour Buffett, like any other small community in Newfoundland, was 95 percent fishermen. My mother’s father, Charlie Dicks, was a fisherman. He had a 20-foot sail boat with oars. Locally this was called a punt. He’d fish till he had a boat load of cod or lobsters and then come in to the buyer. He’d get two cents per pound for the lobsters, which was good money in those days. In Newfoundland, fish means cod. Every other fish is named.

If the men weren’t fishermen, they had something to do with the fishing industry. My grandfather was a cooperman (a barrel maker) and my father was an engineer, but even he did cooperman work at times when he came home and was between boat work. He’d build barrels for a couple of months and then he’d be off again. He didn’t like to stay in one spot too long.

The main businesses of the place were two fish plants located close together. W.W. Wareham owned the biggest one, and his cousin, Alberto Wareham, owned the other. Alberto would buy and sell fish from the fishermen. The Warehams had all the business, except for small operations like my uncle Howard’s small general store.

It was W.W. Wareham & Sons that took the schooners out to fish off Cape St. Mary’s with dories. Later they had their head office in St. John’s. It was a thriving business. They imported apples and coal and vegetables from Sydney, Cape Breton, on the mainland, as we called it, though it is an island off Nova Scotia. Old W.W. Wareham died during my time, and then the business was run by his sons, Leeland, Fred (my uncle) and Harry.

Alberto, the other Wareham, also had a store selling shoes and clothes and food in cans. They were almost in competition with one another. Alberto had a big herring plant and so did the other Warehams. They bought herring in the winter. Both were thriving businesses, with fishermen who dealt with them all the time. When I was growing up, the Alberto Wareham business was run by his son Frank. Frank’s son, Bruce, was in the fishery business in Newfoundland.

In 1957 when W.W. Wareham was modernizing the old premises, they put in a big electric drying plant to dry the salt cod artificially. They had to blast to level the ground for the building. That was the time that Aunt Gert’s goat got blasted. Everything had to be blasted by hand. They had a big pile of green boughs, and they put everything they could find on top so that the rocks would loosen but not fall on the houses. While they were waiting for the fuse to go off, Aunt Gert’s goat got up on the pile to eat the green leaves. When the blast went off, the goat lifted right up. The funny thing about it was that it never hurt him. He went up straight legged and he came down straight legged. Then he stood there for a while before he decided to get the hell off the pile. He couldn’t figure out what happened, I guess.

My father, Richard Burton, known as Dick, was born in 1908. At the age of 17, he worked on a Norwegian whaler out of Rose au Rue on nearby Merasheen Island. The ship was powered by steam and he was one of the stokers. About 150 miles offshore, they caught a blue whale and towed it in. Its young one followed the carcass all the way, only to be harpooned when they reached the slip. I remember Dad said they retrieved ten 90-gallon puncheons of milk off the mother. That’s 900 gallons. The mother was about 104 feet long. They flensed her and got the oil out of her. That whaling place closed down in 1942, the year I was born.

Later, Dad got a job as an engineer running the boat for the government’s weights and measures inspector. They sailed up and down the coast, checking that all the scales in the local businesses matched the ones they carried. The first boat he was on burnt up, but he and the inspector escaped with their lives. Inspector Warfield was in charge of his second boat, and in addition to weights and measures they also inspected dog licences and other things.

One day at Come By Chance, unbeknownst to them, they were drinking rubbing alcohol. I don’t feel well. I’ve got to go to the hospital, said Warfield. Dick watched his broad shoulders recede as he stomped off up the hill. Soon Dick followed. He went totally blind for 30 days and swore off the booze. Unfortunately, having been an alcoholic since the age of 18, he was unable to keep his promise. Warfield died in hospital.

Dad never fished for a living. He was too interested in engines. Like me with birds, he was that way with engines. He’d be out at sea, working on the engines, and what would he do when he came home but the day after he got there, he’d be working on engines. Everybody in the community would bring their engines to him. There was another guy too that used to do engines who was really good. When I was older we had an engine in our dory, and I’d go out and mess it up and Dad would have to fix it.

Later, Dad became an engineer on the Coast Guard ship Sir Humphrey Gilbert, which patrolled the Arctic.