Woman, Watching by Merilyn Simonds

Author:Merilyn Simonds [Simonds, Merilyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781773059631
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2022-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

“But the thrushes and the sparrows, hardier than the insect-eaters, survived. They flocked to the feeding station . . . The white-crowned sparrows, proud birds of the far north, interrupted all their activities with song; they sang as they fed greedily on the ground, as they rested, as they preened, as they chased one another through the trees. Having thus come upon the same rigorous conditions they would undoubtedly meet on the tundra, the goal of their journey, perhaps they thrilled to the illusory feeling of having already arrived and expressed it in the most enchanting chorus of haunting plaintive melodies ever heard in these parts.”

There was frost every night, and often snow, as one cold front after another pressed down on Louise’s woods. By the third week in May, the trees were still without leaves. She spent most of her time making food for the birds—suet balls, peanut butter smears on the tree trunks, bread crumbs and seeds suited to the species that were invading her small wilderness, some of them quite uncommon. Many clearly had never dined on human-made food; they didn’t even recognize it as food, but they were starving. They saw other birds devouring the tidbits, and having no choice, they ate it too.

Louise watched, horrified yet mesmerized by the irresistible migratory urge that had brought the birds to this crisis, by the behaviours the disaster provoked. “Some are adaptive to emergency situations and some are not, and those that are not do not survive. Thus those that have the power to live on—the gift of adjustment—endow their progeny with some of their adaptive abilities. And so the seven days of creation goes on eternally. Before our very eyes.”

For ten more days the murderous cold persisted. And still the birds came. “They came in straggling groups through the days, always travelling close to the ground, never once ascending into the treetops, their habitual stratum. Low-flying insects grounded the birds more than the cold itself, and judging by the behaviour of the crawling birds, there were not many of these. At one time, I nearly stepped on a tiny orange-crowned warbler sitting huddled by a small tuft of grass.”

Untold numbers of woodland songbirds died of starvation and exposure that spring. Members of Louise’s Nipissing naturalist club picked up dozens of dead birds from around the lakes west of Pimisi Bay. Hundreds more were never recovered. “In the forest, they fell into the leaves as they reached the inevitable end of the journey, upon the beds of green mosses and forest debris. And nature took care of their tiny bodies and buried them, unseen and uncounted.”

In 1956, the birds, quite literally, crashed.

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