Spring Birds at Haig-Brown House

Fox Sparrow

This week has brought some of the nastiest winds Campbell River has seen in a while. A south-easter ripped across Discovery Passage and into town, uprooting 130 foot high firs and tearing large limbs off countless trees.

When the weather abated this week I got out to take some shots of the birds that are singing in the garden here. The Fox Sparrows here on the West Coast are so much darker than ours on the prairie, and they have an almost uniform brown tone on the back, reminiscent of a Hermit thrush, which also has the russet tail. Here is another shot of a Fox sparrow taken right in front of the house:



Of course some Fox sparrows have been here all winter, but now the odd one sings (listen to a sample here from the Cornell Laboratory page on the Fox Sparrow). The Song Sparrows are much more vocal (listen to a sample here on the Cornell Laboratory page on Song Sparrow).





The Spotted Towhees have also been singing this week (listen to a sample here from the Cornell Laboratory page on Spotted Towhee). Here is a male, with what looks to me like very light spotting compared to our interior Spotted Towhees in Saskatchewan.



Finally, though they do not sing, these two twitterpated bald eagles were making a racket in one of the big firs, high above the Haig-Brown world, where Roderick once estimated he had seen hundreds, even thousands of eagles roosting atop his favourite fir over the years.

Writer in Residence Experience--on video

Crocuses have been up for two weeks here. . . .

The local cable company here in Campbell River (I still have five weeks of my winter Writer-in-Residence time here remaining before we return home to Saskatchewan) has produced a couple of segments I thought I would post here.

This first one is a short piece on the Writer-in-Residence program and my time here this winter. Some shots of the property and the river, and I get to talk a bit about the Haig-Brown legacy--which will also be the topic of a lecture I am presenting for Earth Hour on March 31 (here is some information on that event.)



The second video is a half hour show on the community channel talking about the Words on the Water Writers Festival here in Campbell River on March 23 and 24. Co-founder Trevor McMonagle and I talk about the festival, the writers who are coming, and about books and the rapidly changing landscape of publishing.



Here is a shot of the rainforest above Elk Falls, in the provincial park just west of Campbell River.

Red-winged Blackbird (down my road)

If this were mid-April in Saskatchewan I might be able to hear one of these fellows singing at Cherry Lake, the first males perched high and singing hard to the ice-bound lake. Two months ahead of that, here on the West Coast Canada's earliest Red-wings are already back and staking their claims for the spring.



On a sunny afternoon, Karen, Maia and I walked the Pub to Pub trail from Oyster Point to the Oyster River. Plus fifteen degrees, a clear view all the way to the coastal range across the strait; Surf Scoters, Harlequin Ducks, and Red-Breasted Mergansers in the rising tide.



Heading back to the trail head with the light failing I started to hear a Red-winged Blackbird in full song up the trail. I found him on the very top of a big alder next to one of the ponds. He was facing the sun to catch the last of its rays, but he was also facing the direction of another redwing who was singing a half a mile away. I stopped to watch: face the sun, listen for the neighbour to sing, then gather up your strength, turn in his direction and give it your best.

Redwings know how to get the body involved in a song. They don't hold back. The feathers on his back and crown rose first, then the wings and tail began to spread, the bill opened and the song burst forth with enough energy to make him quiver from head to foot. Looking something like this one (image courtesy of Wikipedia):



I think these Redwings sound a little different from ours. I may be imagining it but their trill seems to be faster, as though the little stridations in it are sharper and closer together, giving it a faster, higher pitch. Perhaps there is a different sub-species here.

The first Red-winged Blackbird song of the year always reminds me of a James Keelaghan song named for the bird. Keelaghan has long been one of my favourite Canadian folk song writers and the opening lines to Red-Wing Blackbird will pick up the spirits of anyone waiting for spring to come: "Thought I heard a Red-winged Blackbird,/Red-winged Blackbird down my road. . . ."

Here is a link to a site where you can get a preview of the song.

Fallen Giants: Haig-Brown Legacy

a circle of firs growing on the Haig-Brown property

This morning on Michael Enright's Sunday Morning (which is one of the best things on CBC radio), he hosted a discussion on Leo Tolstoy. His two guests, academics who have studied Tolstoy's life and writing, spoke about his family land, Yasnaya Poliana, where he lived most of his life and wrote his great books. They made the point that Tolstoy's writing and life were greatly enriched by dwelling where his family had lived for generations, and that today we have trouble understanding the influence of such a relationship.

Here, where conservationist and writer Roderick Haig-Brown lived and wrote his 25 books during the mid-twentieth century, the larger community of Vancouver Island people, as well as fly fishermen, and environmentalists from all over the continent, have come to see the property as a spiritual home.

Lesley, a naturalist friend who knew Ann Haig-Brown and lives north of the river, told me today that when she lived in the house for a year she would often run into American fishermen while she was walking along the river trails. "I'd see them casting into the Line Fence Pool. They'd come all this way just to have the experience of fishing in this little pool in the river because it was in all of his [Haig-Brown's] books."


The Line Fence Pool

This town has had a couple generations of passionate defenders of salmon and the Campbell River all following Haig-Brown's example. Every creek has its committee of volunteers and there are brass plaques everywhere along the river in honour of people who gave their time and resources to protect and restore salmon habitat.

Here is one on the bridge at the outlet of Kingfisher Creek, which itself runs through the Haig-Brown property and was restored by volunteers in the decade after Roderick died.


During a walk on the property today, Lesley showed me where the great tree Haig-Brown called "the Big Fir" blew down many years ago. It was a Douglas Fir, which people here tell me is not a true fir, not that I would know a true one from a false one. In the late 1940s. Haig-Brown wrote lovingly of the great tree in the August chapter of Measure of the Year:

The Big Fir is slowly dying. It is dying because it is old, because it has a disease woodsmen call conk, and probably another disease called stump rot.

Then he talks about it being spared by the first generations of woodsmen, about people advising him to cut it down, and why he does not listen to their logic.

My guess is the tree has another fifty years of dying ahead of it, or somewhat more than I have. So long as any part of it is green I want it to stand.

The Big Fir was a good-sized tree before Hamlet was written and has managed to hold not only identity but life far longer than Hamlet's author held either. More human identities have been lost in every year of the tree's life than the tree itself has shed seeds. . . .If it were young and vigorous, I think I should not een resent its permanence. It is only just mortal, it is also only just living. But its enormous substance, lasting so long, yielding so little, seems to emphasize how short a time there is to look at things, to feel and know and think things.

But it did fall before Haig-Brown did. A winter storm took it down years before a heart attack laid Roderick on the earth not far away.

Here are two images showing all of the life growing from the nurse log formed by the Big Fir. In its death it is nourishing dozens of trees and shrubs all along its 130 plus feet. Large maples now reach for the sun, their roots feeding on the nutrients being released from the old fir.





How many writers and defenders of this good earth have been and will continue to be nourished by Haig-Brown's life on this land, his own time of standing tall here with "enormous substance. . .yielding so little," feeling, knowing, and thinking things?

Birds of Christmas: Haig-Brown House, Campbell River

Hooded Merganser on a side channel of the Campbell River

On the 2nd of January my wife Karen and daughter Maia and I had a chance to join some new birding friends here in Campbell River to take part in the Christmas Bird Count for the city and surrounding area. Kim, Lesley, and Vicki are responsible for counting birds in the area north of the river's estuary and then the side of the river from the Haig-Brown House on Campbell River Rd up to the dam.

We were lucky with the weather. It was a bit windy, but warm and no rain. During the day I got my best looks ever at Golden-crowned Sparrows coming to the feeder of a friendly old gentleman who enjoyed our stopping by and especially the hug from Kim.

We ended the day with a race against darkness to see if we could locate at least one American Dipper on the upper river. We looked at all the usual spots near the dam and the bridge and were heading back to the car when Kim spotted on sitting on a metal platform at the base of a stairway. I took this photo of a dipper singing in the same general area a few days earlier.


Other highlights included great flocks of siskins buzzing overhead in the hundreds, and good looks at hooded mergansers.

But for me the highlight was here on the Haig-Brown property when we found a bird who, to me embodies the contemplative, insular spirit of this place. We were making our way through the brambles on the eastern side of the property, and looking at kinglets. We had just counted 20 Golden-crowned and a single Ruby-crowned flitting through the mid to upper storey of the woods, when I came across a lone bird that looked much like another Ruby-crowned, except that it was moving very slowly and sitting still for a few seconds at a time. The broken eye ring looked different and it did not have the dark patch below the bottom wing bar that Ruby-crowned Kinglets show. But the thicker, vireo bill was the main feature that cinched the ID--a Hutton's Vireo.

This odd little bird has caused some confusion because after being vocal and easy to find all spring and summer it goes all quiet and solitary in winter, leading naturalists to assume originally that it was migratory.

Here is a note from an account of the vireo in an online atlas of B.C. fauna:

This species is generally more common than records suggest due to its quiet and retiring nature throughout much of the year, especially during the winter and in mid-summer when it is particularly difficult to detect.

Once people learned its call notes and how to separate it from the kinglet hordes, the Hutton's Vireo was established as one of the more interesting resident species of Vancouver Island.

In fact, the island has its own sub-species, vireo huttoni insularis. It is one of only four endemic birds on the island.

Kim, Lesley, and I stood transfixed as this quiet little greenlet foraged through the blackberry and rose brambles a few feet away. He was in no hurry to move on and in that moment seemed to me a wise forest hermit and I wanted to ask him what he knew of this place, this mid-winter of rain-drenched leaf and mossy branch.

I didn't have the camera with me, but made this drawing when I got back at the end of the day.



It was a fun Christmas Bird Count, and we recorded 48 species in our area alone, as well as this Red-throated Loon just outside our area.

Photo Album: Winter Birds at Campbell River

A pool in Kingfisher Creek on the Haig-Brown property in Campbell River

I have had some great luck with weather since arriving here in Campbell River to work on this new book. I take an hour or two each Sunday to walk the beach and look for birds, and the last three Sundays have been warm and sunny. Here are a few of the birds I've been able to photograph (there were lots more I couldn't get a shot of:

This flock of mostly male Surf Scoters was near the shore at dusk where the Oyster River runs into the sea.


Lots of cormorants here--I have seen Double-Crested and Pelagic. This Double-crested looked like he was surfing on a piece of flotsam just below the surface.



Harlequin ducks are easy to find in the bays right in town.


I've seen all three merganser species here, but Commons are most abundant of the three:


I had some fun following a couple of Black Oystercatchers around a rocky beach along the sea walk in Campbell River.


These little Northwestern Crows here are real characters--always on the waterfront looking for a meal. It is actually a separate species from the American Crow.


One of the best parts about being here in the Pacific Northwest is to see all of the Great Blue Herons--they seem to still be in good numbers in this part of the world. This one was near the outlet of the Oyster River at the end of the day.

The Haig-Brown Legacy

A portrait of Ann Haig-Brown, hanging on the walls of the Haig-Brown House

There are many genial spirits in this house, but the one I feel most clearly is Ann. I do most of my writing in her kitchen, watching the birds come to the branches by the window as they would have for her.

I was told that Ann was with Roderick when he died. He was in the yard working. Ann called him in for dinner. He turned and collapsed from a heart attack.


steam rising from the cedar fence on a cool morning on the Haig-Brown property

The Haig-Browns were both known for their compassion for people in trouble. Ann would open their home to battered women using it as an informal transition house. Today, the transition house in Campbell River is named after her.

Roderick, meanwhile, took his job as a country magistrate very seriously. He was thought of as being perhaps too lenient by some people--going easy on a teen caught with a small amount of marijuana--but he would always look at the whole context around the infraction that came before him, see the person and their life before making a decision.

Sometimes young men brought before his bench received sentences that included coming to the Haig-Brown farm once a week to learn about fly-fishing in exchange for some farm work. There were days when, between Ann and Roderick's social reform efforts, the perpetrator and the victim of the same crime would be on the property, a man out in a field with Roderick and the woman in the garden with Ann.

Roderick told one man who appeared in his court that if he stopped drinking and changed his ways he could live in the cabin on their property as long as he liked. He took up the offer and was living there when Roderick died and in fact remained in the cabin three or four years after Ann's death in 1994. The cabin was torn down just last year.



There are stories too of their bond as a couple. Roderick appreciated Ann's intelligence and would always consult with her on things that arose in his life as a writer, a conservationist, and a magistrate.

One story comes from someone who accompanied Ann to the airport to pick up Roderick after one of his many trips away from home in later years. Their reunion kiss, was reportedly altogether much too long for people of their age.



As I move through the shadows of this house alone and walk the trails on the property, I think of the two of them, the love that bonded them to one another and to this place. Exemplary people can live in cities far from any contact with nature, and people who live in the country can be coarse and heedless. Even so, when I hear of people like the Haig-Browns, their generosity of spirit and untiring service to the world, I cannot help thinking that it comes from a maturity of soul that can only be engendered by what Roderick called "participation in the world's real life, of steadily increasing intimacy" with nature.

Every day I learn more of their legacy here in Campbell River and in the conservation of river habitat all over the Pacific Northwest.


(No, the snow only lasted a couple of days.)