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7 | (continued) I’ve never seen geese among close-grown trees anywhere, but ring-billed gulls nesting on a man-made peninsula in Lake Ontario have let themselves be forced into a stand of young trees, merely from a shortage of undisturbed open ground. Some years ago, this was the site of the largest colony of these birds in the world—75,000 breeding pairs. There is in fact plenty of open ground on the Spit, but it’s constantly being disturbed by the dump trucks that deliver their loads of fill from numerous excavations in the city all day long, five days a week. Progress.
Yesterday, 22 July ’99, from my canoe, only yards offshore, a friend and I saw dozens of ringed-bill gulls roosting in dead trees on Eleanor Island, a small bird sanctuary in Lake Muskoka—a natural spectacle I had long assumed to be impossible, since a gull’s feet are webbed. They weren’t really perching, in the manner of true passerines, just sitting—but still.
The gulls near my camp would depart the fields each evening at dusk and return to the comparative safety of their lakeshore colony—their heads and breasts are chalk-white, and they’d be easy pickings for an owl on even the darkest night. The geese, however, often spent the night in one field or another (probably nibbling soya beans), especially during fall migration; I could hear their soft, murmuring honks far into the wee hours. They are also the only species I know of that flies in sizeable flocks at any time of the day or night; more than once I’ve been awakened by the sounds of their passage—not a fun moment the first time it happens.
Canada geese seem far better organized for collective defense than any species of gull—they seem more tightly social and considerably more intelligent. I once watched a flock of more than a hundred of these birds grazing on the lawn of a public park on the shore of Lake Ontario. A young couple approached, leading a large, furry dog very similar in appearance to a wolf. Much too similar, apparently, for the geese— they would not let that dog get within fifty yards of them before they waddled straight to the water and immediately paddled offshore. These are geese that no longer migrate; they live out their lives in city parks—there is actually a small budget to provide feed for them through the winter—none of them, I’m sure, had ever seen a wolf before, but such is the power of instinctive responses that not a single one failed to heed the silent alarm.
Being surrounded by animals, and cut off through the nights from human company, one cannot help but realize that other species conduct their lives far better than we do ours. They lack the surplus intelligence that causes us such needless complications. They are wholly incapable of our futile subtleties of concern, our vast constructions of anxiety, both justified and imaginary, structures that will always far outweigh the “glories” of “classic” art—to say nothing of the immeasurable man-years of adolescent “entertainment”—by which we seek to distract ourselves from the constant burden of our superfluous angst.
When winter had truly arrived, and the ground was covered with snow, I looked for black-capped chickadees, and saw a few, but I kept forgetting to buy some seeds to feed them. (They’re the only species I know that won’t hesitate to eat out of your hands, provided you’re not wearing gloves. Nuthatches will do this too, but they’re much more cautious in their approach.) I even considered putting up a number of feeders on the trees all around me, and would have, just for the company, if I hadn’t been evicted on the first of February, just when things were getting really tough for them. |
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Whether any are ever taken by great horned owls, I never knew. It seems unlikely, since the two species are well-matched in weight; the owl would have to devour a goose on the ground, surrounded by dozens of the victim’s infuriated kin.|
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