My Famous Evening

by Howard Norman

  ANECDOTES

  Michiro Oguchi, who translated Elizabeth Bishop’s poems into Japanese, sent me a sandpiper call from Japan, made by a French company. It is a miniature pear-shaped, sepia bagpipe stitched with white thread, with two whistlelike, inch-long metal pipes. When you gently press its body, you can feel the inside stuffing, and out comes the plaintive, rusty squeak (which can echo down a beach) of a sandpiper—exactly a sandpiper’s voice. I tried it along the beaches of the Glooskap Trail, with no expectation as to what the call would produce in terms of a response.

  Now, I admit that, despite hours and hours of observation, I suffer Nova Scotian sandpiper-confusion, have, somewhat laughably, trouble in distinguishing the White-rumped Sandpiper from the Purple Sandpiper from the Spotted Sandpiper. The same applies to Surf Scoters, White-winged Scoters, and Black Scoters; the same applies to Greater Yellowlegs, Lesser Yellowlegs, and willets. Let’s not even get into the Piping and Semipalmated Plover. On certain birding sojourns my ability to differentiate gulls (Glaucous-winged Herring, Great Black-backed, Iceland, Lesser Black-backed, Ring-billed, even Common Black-headed), especially in flight, epitomized the word “amateur.” Simply put, I cannot always immediately put a name to whichever bird I am looking at, so out comes the Peterson’s, Sibley’s, or Golden Field Guide, and even then I often falter.

  Anyway, I tried out the sandpiper call at Summerville Beach (to no effect), Driftwood Beach (the same), Spencers Island Beach (a sandpiper flew off), Wards Brook Beach (no effect), Harrington Beach (possibly increased alertness in two sandpipers, for a moment), Carr’s Brook Wharf Beach (a gull squalled at me), Saint’s Rest Beach (a sandpiper flew toward me, quickly veering off), Walton Beach (no sandpipers in view), Shipyard Beach (nothing). What, anyway, would one expect from using a sandpiper call, except possibly to get some attention from a sandpiper? And then what? I believe that at each beach I was judged a fool by sandpiper or gull, and, at Spencers Beach, a crow, loon, and I think what was a Black-legged Kittiwake flying past. I take my sandpiper call everywhere.

  At Five Islands Provincial Park, I inadvertently flushed a flock of dunlins out over the water, where they veered back and directly overhead gathered in a tight formation, turned and turned sharply in perfect syncopation, wings glinting like mica. This proceeded for ten or so minutes, aerial choreographies such as I had heretofore only viewed at some distance, when dunlins seemed just so much confetti on the wind. However, this close up the dunlins had weight, their creep-chit-lit, creep-chitlit voices ricocheting in chorus off the air.

  On the beach just outside Great Village, a Ring-necked Pheasant ambled from a field of stubble—odd, lovely sight, a pheasant on the beach. When it noticed me, not more than ten meters away, it did not startle up, but stood there amid puddles (“turned into shattered mirrors,” poet Jane Shore wrote in a poem, “Wrong End of the Telescope,” set in Nova Scotia, “long shards; blue sky and clouds lying in pieces on the ground as though the heavens had fallen down.”) It was an adult female, perhaps the one I’d seen an hour or so earlier near some ditch shrubbery. It walked in what seemed fits and starts a moment or two, then flew low along the dike, then beat across a field until it disappeared into some trees. The next day I glimpsed a female pheasant in the cemetery.

  I was in a sea kayak just along the Joggins fossil cliffs, when a Double-crested Cormorant “out of nowhere” flew past, close enough that I could see its green-black sheen, bright orange chin, orange-yellow eye, and precise hook of its beak, plus hear the rush of its wings. Whether stretched in flight or kink-necked atop a rock outcropping, cormorants, to me, have always been slightly eerie figures and aroused an ancient fear; perhaps it is the way they post themselves like sentinels on buoys or wharf pilings, wings outstretched, feathers splayed like a rack of black neckties drying in the wind and sun, vigilant custodians of gloom. This, of course, is utterly subjective, yet with their bony, naked throat-pouch, in their whole reptilian countenance, each time I see a cormorant I feel as though it has somehow only just then materialized out of the fossil record. My freshman zoology professor, Dr. Arvin Williams, whose tolerance for ornithological bias is at best narrow, recently admonished me for “cormorantphobia,” reminding me that a cormorant’s tick-grunt-croak on the nest is as much the fine-tuning of evolution as the song of any warbler, “or for that matter, your beloved kingfisher, who hardly produces arias.”

  Of a summer’s evening on Advocate Harbour Beach, one of the best places to find driftwood in the world, I imagine, I made a driftwood fire and started to prepare some flounder in a frying pan. Gulls came by but generally kept their distance. I fried two big pieces, ate one right off with a sprinkle of parsley, sourdough bread, a bottle of beer, all the while listening to my portable shortwave radio. I remember picking up Amsterdam and, intervened by static, London and Boston. When it got dark I built up the fire, tucked inside a blanket, and, without intending to, nodded off. When I woke it was morning, the fire completely gone to ash and ember, a seagull stood in the empty frying pan, squalling, emitting raspy chirps, fluttering its wings. In the far background, gulls wheeled in the air. In the immediate background, half a dozen gulls stalked the periphery of this makeshift campsite. Now and then a gull cohort darted in, nabbed a scrap of bread, and flapped off. The gull in the frying pan merely protected its round territory, rrraaawwwkkk, rawk, rawk, raaawwwwkkk, cartoonishly turreting its head to look at me, to look at the other gulls, all of us encroachers.

  Here is the Mi’kmaq explanation for the maximum depth at which loons may dive:

  One day Glooskap decided to travel to a lake not too far from the sea. When he arrived he saw a loon flying over the lake. The loon circled the lake twice, low near the shore, as if looking for something.

  Glooskap called out, “Loon, what are you doing? What are you looking for?”

  “I was looking for you!” the loon called back. “I looked for you high and low, in back of trees and in front of trees.”

  “What do you want?” said Glooskap.

  “I will be your servant,” said the loon.

  “That’s good,” said Glooskap. Right away Glooskap taught the loon a strange echoing cry. The loon tried it out. “What is that strange echoing sound I hear?” said the loon.

  “That’s you,” said Glooskap. “From now on, that’s how you’ll sound.”

  “How can it be coming from me and still sound as if it is coming from somewhere far off in the distance?” said the loon.

  “That voice-throwing is your new skill,” said Glooskap. “No other bird will sound this way.”

  Now Glooskap traveled around. He stopped in an Indian village. The people there were happy to see him. They gave him gifts and showed him a good time. They held a big feast. Glooskap was so pleased, he suddenly turned them all into loons! Every one of those loons became faithful to Glooskap.

  In many places where Glooskap traveled, he heard Indian people say, “Oh, listen, the loon is calling for Glooskap!” or, “That bird is in need of Glooskap!” or, “Glooskap is riding out on the loon’s call!” or, “There is no mistaking, Glooskap and the loon are talking with each other!”

  But one day a loon, the best of divers, got stuck in some weeds at the bottom of a lake. The loon called out but could not be heard because its voice did not break the surface. The loon was stuck and soon would drown. But it happened that Glooskap was swimming there and said to himself, “It has been some time since I have heard a loon!” He listened hard—no loon. He stood by the lake, listening. No loon.

  It started to thunder. “Shut up!” Glooskap said to the sky. “I’m trying to hear a loon!”

  The sky said, “A loon is stuck in the bottom weeds.”

  Glooskap dove right down and there at the bottom he found the loon, nearly drowned, tangled up in bottom weeds. Glooskap swam up with the loon. He then let the loon fly away, and it landed near shore. The loon made its call.

  Glooskap said, “From now on, you can dive almost to the bottom, but not into t
he weeds.”

  “All right,” said the loon. “All right, all right, all right, I won’t go into the bottom weeds, all right, all right, all right.”

  That is why today loons do not dive into bottom weeds. Listen closely, you may hear a loon say, “Glooskap, I didn’t dive into the bottom weeds.” That is what happened.

  “Kingfishers have punk haircuts,” my then ten-yearold daughter said. Nova Scotia has the Belted Kingfisher (Ceryle alcyon), which has the signature disheveled tuft of head feathers, “combed” upward and back, the rather large head and long black beak, stout grayish-blue body with white collar. You see them around almost any body of water that has fish; I’ve seen a Belted Kingfisher diving into saltwater from the mast of a moored lobster boat at Whale Cove, but kingfishers, to my knowledge, rarely hunt in saltwater. If I could choose a “favorite” circumstance having to do with birds in Nova Scotia, it may well be seeing a kingfisher teaching its three offspring to hunt. I observed this near Parrsboro along the Glooskap Trail over a three-day period in 1980. I never definitely determined the nesting sight, though I think it was an excavated tunnel in a wind-eroded cutbank along a stream, because I saw both the mother and father kingfisher fly into it once. Most of each day for those three days I sat with binoculars as most frequently the mother and offspring worked from two different branches above a pond. The parent would dive along its sight line, emitting the deep crazy rattle befitting some notion of lunacy, that is a kingfisher’s only call. When it nabbed a small fish, the parent carried it back to the branch, stunned it with its beak or talon, then dropped it onto the surface of the water. Again sounding its throaty rattle, the parent encouraged the offspring to dive at the stunned fish. Naturally, this led to comical moments. Twice I observed two fledglings dive for the same fish at the same time, narrowly averting a collision, and neither managing to secure the fish. Both splashed into the water, curved back up to their excitable sibling on the branch. A kingfisher can hover over the water, rapidly beating its wings, and dive from that position. But mostly they fly straight from a branch or some other elevated spot.

  The fledglings had seemed to have intuitively mastered the required motionlessness posture as they stared at the water, but as for actually catching fish, I had the distinct impression that I had witnessed only the very beginning of their education. In a notebook I jotted down that the parent-kingfishers dropped thirteen stunned fish onto the surface of the pond, whereas the fledglings were successful in plucking up merely two. Though I pride myself in the fact that kingfishers are my most beloved species, these were haphazard and unprofessional observations and data; I returned each morning merely to sit by the pond, crisp sunny mornings, warm afternoons, thermoses of coffee, cheese and tomato sandwiches, solitarily observing the age-old fishing apprenticeship of kingfishers.

  Here is a Mi’kmaq story about kingfishers:

  Glooskap could concoct mischief with animals and enjoyed that a lot. If he felt in the mood to make crows fly upside down, crows flew upside down and heard Glooskap’s laughter upside down. If he felt in the mood to make woodpeckers knock against the bark of trees all night, just because he liked the sound, woodpeckers did that. He was proud of inventing many kinds of birds and he especially enjoyed bird-song and bird calls of all sorts. And he enjoyed playing tricks on birds, too.

  When he first made kingfishers, though, Glooskap didn’t come up right away with a sound this bird could make. So, the kingfishers would dive into the water and get fish and not make a sound. Kingfishers would sit on branches silently and eat the fish, but the sound of a kingfisher gulping down a fish was not a bird’s song, not pleasing to Glooskap’s ear.

  Meanwhile Glooskap went on inventing different kinds of birds and gave each a song or call, and some sang in the morning, some sang at night, some called during the day, but the kingfishers were silent.

  Then one day, Glooskap was sitting on a beach and he noticed a hollowed-out piece of wood. He put some stones in this hollowed-out piece of wood, held it to his mouth, and blew into it, and it rattled and whistled at the same time.

  It was a high-pitched rattling sound—and, after blowing and whistling and rattling all day, Glooskap said, “This is the voice I will give to kingfishers!”

  Before he set out to find kingfishers, though, he decided to cause some mischief with birds. He caused crows to fly upside down. He caused some woodpeckers to knock against tree bark all night. He caused seagulls to scratch his back because sand flies had bitten him. Then he set out to find kingfishers.

  It was hard work, finding all of the kingfishers, and each one he found, he gave the rattling-whistle-cackle voice to. When he was done, he retreated to his cave. He fell asleep, but right away he woke to the sound of rattling-whistling below his cave. He looked out to see kingfishers flying in the air, diving for fish, sitting on branches, all making a loud rattling sound from deep in their throats.

  “Maybe this was a mistake,” Glooskap said. Then he decided that the kingfisher’s call was all right, but not so many at once and not so many birds all together. So he made it that kingfishers kept a good distance from each other.

  That is why today you usually find only one kingfisher at a pond or using a long stretch of river to fish in. You might see kingfisher families together for a while, but usually you see just one kingfisher. Or you hear it.

  2. Garganey are Known to Wander

  In my Natural History travels in the company of others, I have taken note that those of foreign extraction may come entirely undone at the sight of a rare migrant species of bird. There is a curious identification with that individual bird, or pair, perhaps been blown off course by the wind or otherwise wandered to a place foreign to its nature. I regard with astonishment and perhaps some little envy that in the sighting of such a bird a foreigner recognizes their own soul, as it were, as if the sighting has forged in man and bird, then, a single philosophy: “God shall send us where He pleases, and we shall be given, for better or worse, the experience of that.”

  —Rev. Eliot Fitzmorris, 1919, Halifax

  Poet Robert Kelly writes, “Everything I love most happens every day.” I’ve so often seen this or that bird, summer, winter, autumn, spring, in this or that exact same place in Nova Scotia, familiarity, never redundancy, courses in the blood. The year-round residents comprise dozens of species, of course. There are the predictable come-from-aways, who are in residence roughly spring to autumn, who nest and apprentice their young in Nova Scotia. There are the passers-through, who rest and linger along their migratory routes north and south.

  Then there are the “accidentals,” or, “rare migrants,” those birds which happen to show up, defying their extralimital range, “blown off course,” no rhyme or reason to it except Fate and Happenstance writ large. Garganey (Anas querquedula), for example, are not supposed to occur at all in Atlantic Canada. W. Earl Godfrey allows that Garganey are a “casual visitor” to Alberta, Manitoba, Yukon, Quebec, New Brunswick, with the proviso that “although we cannot be completely sure some of these were not escapees from captivity, the species is widely distributed in Eurasia and is known to wander.”

  Well, every moment of life contains paradox, does it not? I saw a Garganey off the coast of Meat Cove, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. I was with two crack ornithologists who saw it, too. Godfrey writes of the male Garganey (the one we saw was indeed a male), “Body size and bluish upper wing coverts suggest Blue-winged or Cinnamon teals, but the blue is paler and more grayish. Adult male (except in eclipse plumage) is readily separable by a conspicuous white narrow curved area extending from above the eye to the nape, by lack of white crescent in front of the eye, and by sharp contrast between dark breast and white belly. In both sexes the gray, instead of yellowish, legs of the Garganey distinguish it from Blue-winged and Cinnamon teals.” Indeed, it was seeing the Garganey take flight and noting its gray legs that first alerted us to the possibility that it was not a teal. Mary Parker, who had done field work in Europe and Asia, had an in
kling: “You know, it kind of reminds me of a Garganey.”

  “If that’s true,” Michael Caplin said, “then that bird’s way out of town, isn’t it?” Within a longer journal entry all I could allow myself was, “Beautiful, clear day. Watched unknown sea duck for at least twenty minutes.”

  Years later in 1994 I published a novel, The Bird Artist, set in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, in which the protagonist, Fabian Vas, sights and sketches a Garganey.

  In January 1999 I received a letter from a Mr. Alan Clarke, which in part read, “The likelihood of your character seeing a Garganey is far-fetched, though I suppose not impossible. But how would he even know to call it a Garganey? You don’t mention that he had access to a field guide or monograph of any sort in his small Newfoundland village that would supply such a reference, allowing him to recognize the species he drew.Besides, why import from another continent when there are in the very pages of your novel you have so many species native to the waters of the province that eventually became Newfoundland and Nova Scotia?” I scarcely mind this sort of letter, full of odd scrutinizing and complaint, opinion and even disappointment in that an author hasn’t got things quite right.

  Garganey at rest

  I took this letter to Halifax, the Haliburton House Inn on Morris Street, my preferred place of residence in that city. There I wrote Mr. Clarke, suggesting that rather than a Garganey “importing an arbitrary eccentricity” (his phrase) into the story of murder, a love-triangle, and art, it was merely an opportunity for young Fabian Vas to test his artistic flexibility, i.e., drawing any bird requires certain perceptions and skills. My complete response, five handwritten pages, now that I think about it, was no doubt a stifling disquisition on literary imagination. To his credit, Mr. Clarke wrote me a second letter, quite autobiographical in tone, which summerizes his own research into the distribution of Garganey, and furthermore addresses the issue of artistic license: “Your reply has helped me to understand The Bird Artist and why you chose the Garganey for its metaphoric role. I respect your comment on verification vs verisimilitude. Is that what separates artists, word or otherwise, from lawyers? (Anything that separates real people from lawyers is worthwhile!)”