THE BIG POND TIMES

MAY 2003      VOLUME X No.5

SPRING IS HERE, FINALLY

COMMUNITY NOTES

Arabelle & Alex Fougere are having their 40^th Wedding anniversary on Saturday, 17 May, 9:00PM at the Big Pond Hall. George, Alex, Shawn and Ricky are inviting friends and neighbours of their parents to celebrate. Best wishes only.

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Joe & Ann Marie Donovan would like to announce the birth of a new grandson, Daniel Roy, who arrived on 11 April to Kim and Michael Crowe, a little brother for Mary Sarah and Amanda.

 

BIG POND HALL EVENTS

17 May: Alex & Arabelle Fougere’s 40^th Anniversary. 9:00PM.

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24 May: Pub/Dance with John Ferguson & Buddy MacDonald. 9-1. $6.00

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31 May: Big Pond Dart League Banquet

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The Big Pond “Run for the Cure” team is sponsoring a 45s card game as a fund-raiser for the team at the Big Pond Hall on Sunday, 8 June at 2:00PM. $5.00 Admission includes prizes and lunch.

A flea market and auction will take place in July as part of the fund-raising effort. Save your good stuff for the sale. For more information, Ann Thomas, 828-2287

 

BOOKMOBILE SCHEDULE

Thursday, 22 May:

Big Pond, 11:15; Irish Cove: 1:15 PM

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BIG POND HOME PAGE

http://ccor.d2g.com/bigpond

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Interested in working on a committee to organize the 40^th anniversary of the Big Pond Summer Festival in 2004? Call Sharise McKeigan, 828-2787.

 

 

COMMUNITY COUNCIL

The regular monthly meeting of the BPCC was held on Wed. April 2 at 7:30 PM. There were 12 members present. There was no Financial Report.

Joe Donovan reported on the wharf situation.  As far as the lease is concerned, the community owns it outright but it has to be registered.

Frank MacNeil, who is taking over the restaurant (MacNeil’s Diner), stated that his lawyer requested a few changes. Frank is planning an introduction party for the local community on Sunday, 1 June and he hopes to be open for business on Friday, 6 June.      

The floor in the kitchen is in need of repair because the old freezer leaked water. Joe Donovan and Ed MacIntyre volunteered to fix it, and would like to have a workday April 12 at the restaurant.

Paul MacLellan suggested that the community council remove the old rink shack from the MacPherson property because it is not only unsightly but a fire hazard.  Ed MacIntyre said maybe the fire department could look into burning it.

There was lengthy discussion on the impending removal of the tennis court, where it will be reinstalled, costs involved and the future meeting with representatives from all the different groups.

Anne MacPherson suggested that the BPCC pay $75 towards the amusement license that the Parish acquired for holding Bingo once a week throughout the summer.  It was agreed that if BPCC, parish, and the fire department contributed to this license all groups could benefit. 

The subject of the summer grants was discussed but it was believed that Dave MacKillop was looking after that.

Secretary, Ann MacIntyre

 

The Changing of the Yard.
"'Tis a month before the month of May,
And the Spring comes slowly up this way."
Spring comes slowly up this way too, Mr. Coleridge.  Very slowly. With the changing of the seasons comes the changing of the yard, as a friend of mine puts it.
In the first days of spring, changes in the yard come little by little and we can keep track of them, but suddenly there comes a
great flood of happenings which overwhelm us, and we cannot take them all in. And we cannot write about them with coherence without having  the time and the will to take considerable pains. What I am trying to say here is that discriminating readers should unread-have the spin-doctors invented that verb yet?- the following mishmash.

 

    *Two days into spring a small brown head popped up through a barely noticeable hole scarcely three feet from my front step. Tamias the Chipmunk had come up  from his underground home where he had over-wintered. Tamias means steward, I understand.  Steward in the appropriate sense of the word is one who looks after stores of food, so this perky, friendly little neighbour is well named, as those of us who know him must admit.  But is there a Latin word for vacuum cleaner? I would be tempted to name him that. He will spend the next seven or eight months appropriating the white millet that I put out for the sparrows, and carting  it down the stairwell into his subterranean digs. Birdseed is expensive! Just how much grist does his little mill need to keep it running! Maybe we should call him Millet.

    *Sometimes on moonlight nights I come downstairs in the dark to look out over the corner of the yard where I have my feeders. In the wee hours of  the fourth day of spring,  a stocky,  shadowy figure oozed by my kitchen window and into the pines, flowing in the direction of  the ponds;  a wraith gliding along with no visible means of propulsion like a float in a parade.  My first glimpse of Mr. Raccoon since last fall. I doubt that he ventured out of his den very often, if at all, during the long, hard winter.  He will help himself to a lot of my sunflower seeds before he goes back to his den in the late fall. Birdseed is expensive! - I may have said that already.

    *16 April.  This was just a so-so winter for local bird feeders.  A Varied Thrush  dropped in for a couple of days at Malcie and Marie MacPhee's feeder and was very willing  to entertain visitors,  but other than that there was little of particular interest. Either not seen or rarely seen  were  Pine Siskins, Red Polls, Evening Grosbeaks, Crossbills, Snow Buntings, Pine Grosbeaks and Bohemian Waxwings.
But today my feeder area is awash with birds. There are the familiar year-round residents, and a few Tree Sparrows which came down from the north around Christmas time and which will soon return there to breed, along with a few Evening Grosbeaks and Pine Siskins which may stay in this area. Song Sparrows are here in numbers, some to summer nearby, some to move on. The big, chunky Fox Sparrows have been here for the past two weeks but will soon leave for northern nesting grounds, perhaps no farther away than the Cape Breton Highlands.

    But this morning it is the blackbirds that are really getting my attention. (We call them black birds, and so they seem to be to the casual observer on dull days, but up close in good light we see that they are really beautifully coloured.) A flock of a hundred or more are hustling and bustling about, overrunning the feeders and the nearby trees. Birds not of a feather flocking together: grackles and red-wings and starlings, and a lone cowbird that arrived overnight with an influx of redwings; all rested, well-groomed, in best bib and
tucker, lusty, hormonally charged and primed to do nature's bidding.

    Look at that handsome grackle with the bright sun full upon him: basic black to be sure, but see- how could we miss seeing? - the beautiful glossy  green and blue and purple sheen on his head and neck, and the iridescent bronze on his back. He knows that he is a pretty fine-looking fellow,  and now and then he strikes a sort of yawning pose and fluffs out his feathers and spreads his wings to show himself to best advantage. We shall see him strutting his stuff in earnest when the coy females arrive from the south within a couple of weeks. The male grackles have come up early from the south to open the summer bungalows, so to speak. They have already inspected last year's  nesting spots  in the Virginia Creeper on the barn  and in the ornamental cedars  by the house or in the pines, so no time will
be wasted when the courting period is over. The vines on the barn are favorite nesting sites. Nests are easily anchored there, and they remain basically intact over the winter, needing only a little refurbishing come spring; also, there is relative security in the vines, - although I have seen a raven lean over the edge of the barn roof to extract a young bird from the nest, and I often see squirrels around the vines during egg laying days.

(Grackles are gone before we know it. 7 May 1983 I checked six nests, some with incubation underway. By 18 May the young were born. By 11 June the bob-tailed young were tended by parents in shrubbery a
distance from the nest.  I did not make a note of this, but I suspect that by 20 June the nesting grackles and their young had moved on.) The grackles may be gone by the time that the kids get out of school for the summer, but the starlings are basically always with us.  A mixed blessing. In their winter dress they are basically salt and pepper birds, but in their spring finery with its glossy black, and purples and greens and browns, they can turn heads with the best of them. This morning they are behaving like a teenage street gang, swarming the feeders, shouldering other birds, even the bigger, tougher grackles, away from the sunflower feeders and hammering away at the suet with their little picks. I suspect that the local starlings have their nest sites picked out now, - holes in  buildings, tree cavities, mailboxes, woodpecker holes, nest boxes- just about any cavity will fill the bill. One spring a pair watched with great interest as a pair of flickers carved a nest in a Balsam Poplar down by my ponds. When the flickers had finished the project, the starlings made their move: they harassed the bigger, tougher birds until they threw in the towel and left the nest to the intruders who raised a family therein.

Each year I usually keep an eye on a starling nest box or two and make some notes about eggs and young and breeding success. Starlings are smart, wonderful parents, but they will never receive the Good Nestkeeping Seal of Approval. The young must be relieved to get out of the filth and the stench. (One year a young neighbour brought me a baby starling which he had found on the ground beneath a nest that had come to grief for some reason. Sparsely feathered and very cold to the touch, the little unfortunate was near death when I put him in with a brood of starlings in a nest box by the barn. He immediately made himself at home, snuggling down among his new nest mates; and he was accepted and cared for by his foster parents as well as if he were their own.)

    The other two blackbirds in the flock must be satisfied with a few words for my ramble must come to an end. When I stepped outside my door on the morning of 29 March, I heard Okalee! Okalee! for the first time this spring. Swaying on the topmost tip of the Silver Maple by the garage were two Red-winged Blackbird of the year. Today there are a dozen or so, among them several immature males that arrived overnight. At least one breeding male will stay nearby and establish a territory, perhaps by Angus Anthony's Swamp, where he will put on quite a show when the lady redwings come back, his orange-red shoulder patch being the main attention- getter.  

And finally, the Brown-headed Cowbird, a species that in recent years has undergone a pronounced decline in numbers in this area, based on my observations.  As I said, there is one here today, a male as we would expect.  If he stays around, we shall see him one day soon making overtures to a plain, dowdy little bird who will may never inspire a poet to compose an " Ode to a Cowbird", but of whom he is plainly enamored and who is very clever.  Successful or not in his suit, the little black bird with the mouse-brown head  may well romance other females tomorrow, but we must not judge him by human standards: there is no need for a strong bond to be formed for there is no nest to be built,  no territory to protect and no young to nurture. The female will simply sneak into other small bird's nest early in the morning when the owners are away and hurriedly lay an egg and leave. The odds are good that at least one of the birds imposed upon will hatch and raise a cowbird.  

One of my students, George MacInnis, once showed me a cowbird egg in a Red-eyed or a Solitary (now Blue-eyed) Vireo's nest, I forgot which, the only such egg I have ever seen. ©Jack MacNeil

  

 

 

BIG POND TIMES is financially supported by the Big Pond Community Council.  Contact Don MacGillivray, 7271 Route 4, Big Pond, Cape Breton, B1J 1V2.  Don_MacGillivray@uccb.ca

“It is a newspaper’s duty to print the news and raise hell.”-Chicago Times, 1861. For subscriptions contact Josephine McCarron, 7584 East Bay Hwy., Big Pond, NS B1J 1Y6. Rates: Canadian address $7.00; American $8.50; International $13.00. Please make cheques payable to Josephine McCarron. This issue was brought to you by Sharise McKeigan, Don MacGillivray, Josephine McCarron, Jack MacNeil, Ed & Ann MacIntyre.