The Littlest Falcon... Getting Littler

I finally meet my kestrel

One of a pair of kestrels hunting a hay field in Northern Ontario earlier this month. All photos, unless otherwise noted, © John Degen

Maybe a decade ago, when sweeping the terrace outside our condo in Toronto, I came upon a fairly fresh bird carcass in the little well created by where our glass balcony front dips below the concrete deck. Having never seen anything larger than a house sparrow in our seventh-floor container garden, I was impressed by the bird’s size. Larger than a kingbird, smaller than a crow… it was an American Kestrel (Falco sparverius), North America’s smallest falcon.

While our glass frontage has a smoky glaze and is supposedly bird-friendly, this little creature did not get the memo, and had clearly plowed headlong into the glass while chasing prey (perhaps one of those aforementioned house sparrows — in some areas, the kestrel is called a Sparrow Hawk). It dropped out of sight into a perfectly kestrel-sized concrete and glass coffin, and was slowly being covered by blowing autumn leaves. With rubber gloves on, I extracted the poor thing, bagged it, and gave it the best bird funeral I could manage in an urban environment. But before we parted company, I had a good long look.

This magnificent kestrel capture is © Alex Shipherd / Macauley Library

Kestrels are beautifully patterned and coloured, with gray/blue and tan sections, bold cheek stripes, and a speckled breast plate. I’d never seen one up close before, and it was entrancing. I can say with confidence that has been the one and only bird-strike I’ve experienced in 14 years of living here, but I’ve never gotten over it. And once I started birding in earnest, the American Kestrel was an immediate target species for me. I wanted to see one flying and hunting. I needed a live spectacle to soften the memory of the one who didn’t make it.

My kestrels shared this prey-filled meadow with an American Crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos) and an Eastern Kingbird (Tyrannus tyrannus).

Out for an evening birding drive recently in the farmland around my northern home, I finally got my wish. A pair of kestrels were hunting a once-mown hay field from a perch on overhead wires. The late day sun deepened their colour patterns, and made them instantly recognizable, even from a distance. I pulled to the narrow shoulder, checked my surroundings and started walking toward them. Thus began a game of kestrel and mouse that gave me a good long walk. I’d stop when I thought I was close enough for a good shot, raise my camera, peer through the lens and… they were gone. The little falcons swooped low over the field, circled wide and came back to the wire a hundred or so meters further down the road.

Walk, stop, raise camera, swear.

Walk, stop, raise camera, swear.

This went on for a while.

The best I could manage of these little tricksters while on their track.

Worried I was maybe stressing the birds away from their dinner, I took the long trudge back to my car and tried a different approach, driving casually down the road as though I was just heading home. One of the kestrels took off again, but the other stayed. I managed to stop and take a short series of the wary little creature leaning from my driver-side window, and then quickly left it to hunt.

The massive range of the American Kestrel. The north shore of Lake Huron, where I spotted them, is right in the middle of their breeding grounds. Thanks to Cornell University for the range map.

Kestrels have an expansive range in the Americas, but their numbers are in a distressing decline. The north shore of Lake Huron, where I saw my kestrels, is a comfortable, wild, breeding territory, but the fierce little predators head south for the winter. Scientists speculate that loss of habitat and predation from larger raptors have contributed to a 50% decline in kestrel numbers over the last half-century. What’s more, this small falcon has responded to its population stress by becoming even smaller. According to Living Bird magazine from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, “over time, kestrels have lost both weight and wing chord (a standard measure of bird wing size). In several regions, the body shrinkage is considerable, with the weight and size loss particularly acute in places where the population decline is most severe.” Read Cornell Senior Lecturer Lauren Chambliss’s full article on the shrinking kestrel here.

And you can help protect and encourage kestrel populations by building and installing a kestrel nest box on your property. Plans and info here, thanks to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s NestWatch project.

Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye.

His wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet

Steady as a hallucination in the streaming air. 

— The Hawk in the Rain, Ted Hughes



Currently Reading:

Olive, Mabel & Me: Life and Adventures with Two Very Good Dogs, by Andrew Cotter

Evening reading on the northern porch. All images unless otherwise noted are © John Degen.

The Covid-19 lockdowns that took over most of the world in early 2020 will be pulled apart and analyzed by historians and social commentators for the next half-century, no doubt, and then likely spotlit again in a hundred years’ time at the outset of the next global pandemic, just like we all looked back and relearned about the Great Influenza Epidemic of 1918-1920.

I won’t dwell on the horror. We all saw it, and experienced it. Families lost members in numbers too painfully large to contemplate. The world lost major personalities to an illness that respected neither wealth nor fame. The anxiety and uncertainty were heavy and numbing. Kids lost irreplaceable educational and social experiences, and I know from personal experience in my own family that those losses will never be recovered, and will leave lifelong scars.

But do we ignore the good that may have happened alongside all that bad? I spent Canada’s various periods of lockdown in a kind of unexpected early retirement in rural Northern Ontario, in a hamlet of 1400 people, called Thessalon.

Lake Huron’s far north shore is a rather frigid place a good six months of the year… and a perfect spot for lockdown, IMHO.

The panic of early lockdown saw my family pack our city lives into the car and drive eight hours north to a small house we’d bought years before… for retirement. We thought we’d be in Thessalon for a couple of weeks. We lived there for the better part of two years. While there, I walked my 10,000 steps a day usually before 9 am and always with my dog Birdy at my side. Birdy and I trudged our way through snow and ice, spring rains, summer heat, and blissful autumn chill. I grew, harvested, preserved, and prepared food in a natural rhythm I didn’t know I’d ever learn. For me — and certainly for Birdy — the lifestyle shift, while abrupt and unnerving, offered gifts.

The daily morning trudge. Not sure Birdy and I have been in better shape ever.

My lovely wife, Julia, and a very determined-looking Birdy, ready to tackle one of the local trails.

I continued to work my job every day from a hastily prepared remote office, like so many of my desk-work compatriots. In fact, given the nature of my job heading up the staff at The Writers’ Union of Canada, I would say 2020 through 2023 were the busiest years of my career. Turns out writers do not pump the brakes when a global health emergency threatens their lives and livelihoods; rather, they hit the accelerator and write even more. Membership in the Union grew by at least 25% during the pandemic, and the work our fabulous staff used to do in a very studied, regimented way at scheduled in-person meetings, seminars, and conferences became necessarily ad hoc, spontaneous, and remote. It was suddenly injected with a nowness and immediacy that made each day an exciting discovery of new ways to make things work for the creative process.

But before my workday began and then again when it was over, I giddily accepted the gift of living in an elemental landscape of fresh air, abundant wildlife, natural social distance, and a soothing slow pace measured in seasons rather than hours. Our kids — separated from friends and their familiar, comforting structure — remember it all very differently, I’m sure; and my lovely wife Julia will always be more a city than a country mouse. But I don’t think I can apologize for the tonal, spiritual shift I experienced when the world ordered us to stay in small bubbles away from everyone else. That, it turns out, is where I want to be.

I doubt I’m introducing any of my readers to Olive and Mabel, the black and yellow labrador duo who came along on social media at just exactly the moment we all needed them to be there. The phenomenon of their virality is well documented. The sudden fame of Andrew Cotter, beyond his already appreciative audience of British sports enthusiasts, was an event that hardly needs a barely-read blog post to highlight. But for those who may have moved on and forgotten, have a look:

This inaugural Olive and Mabel video is dated at March 27, 2020, which by my records is exactly ten days into my family’s residency on Lake Huron’s north shore. I don’t remember exactly when I first saw the breakfasting competition, but it must have been very soon after it was initially uploaded. I was terminally online at the time, working through each day on a laptop on the dining table, and then checking every available social channel in the off hours to get some sense of where the world was going and what might be left for us all when the light returned. If I had to guess, I’d say the video link came to me via my childhood neighbour Janet Somerville, who also owns a black and a yellow lab, and who no doubt would have been right on top of this video’s debut.

I sent the link to everyone… family, friends, co-workers, probably international colleagues around the world. And I waited for every new edition of the adventures of Olive and Mabel much as I used to wait for new volumes in a favoured book series. The premise was hokey and charming in a slightly embarrassing dad-humour way. And I loved it. Often overlooked, I believe, in Olive and Mabel appreciation is just how much some of us were missing live sports commentary. I readily admit that on my first viewing of the video, I DID NOT get the joke. I was simply hooked by Andrew Cotter’s expert play-by-play and perfect commentary voice. For me the race to the finish of the breakfast bowls of kibble, or who would get the bone toy in the end, was very real, and totally gripping.

So, a couple years later, Julia gifted me this volume, and here we are now at the reading stage. Would we know this book and these two dogs without the pandemic lockdowns, and Cotter’s surprise virality. Never. Of course not. I would guess Andrew Cotter was surprised by a phone call one day, and by the end of that conversation an agent had convinced him there was a lucrative book contract to be had. I hope the money he was offered fattened his retirement plan. He brought a brief window of sunshine to millions in a very dark hour, and he deserves just reward — the kind of substantial monetary reward online video virality probably doesn’t deliver on its own. What a weird gift of the global information age, though, this opportunity to learn more about the lives of two dogs I will never meet in person.

Birdy has become a courageous dog of the north. No wild animal or enormous lake intimidates her… though she is still a bit uncertain about her new little brother.

Samwich Doggenstein III… the new terror of the North Shore.

Olive and Mabel are canine athletes in a way my own Birdy (and now Samwich, a late addition to the family) will never be, and not just because I have no capacity for play-by-play and certainly no broadcasting voice. Andrew Cotter seems to have a passion for climbing very tall hills in Scotland, and bringing his two labs all the way to the top with him. I’ve no doubt Samwich and Birdy would put their best effort into such a climb. I’ve certainly seen Birdy bound up steep trails while I labour behind her. But my dogs are disadvantaged by having me and not Cotter as a companion. While I like a good long, level walk in the countryside, I’m more of an admire-the-mountain-from-the-pub-at-the-bottom sort of climber.

This book is allowing me to look backward to an odd yet unexpectedly fulfilling time, and simultaneously gaze forward to my many — hopefully great many — remaining years of dog companionship.

“…Olive… focused, relentless, tasting absolutely nothing…”

—Andrew Cotter, The Dog’s Breakfast Grand Finale.

Go Ospreys Go!

Seattle's Misnamed Sports Franchise

I wish I could claim this photo as my own. A gorgeous Osprey photographed in Florida in 2017, from Cornell’s All About Birds website. © Kris Perlberg/Macaulay Library

Years ago, I travelled to Seattle with my lovely wife, Julia, and that west coast city became one of my favourites. Many of my in-laws — Julia’s parents and two older sisters with their families — live in the scenic suburbs outside Seattle. The green splendour surrounding Seattle is wondrous, but the city itself is gorgeous, full of culture, fabulous restaurants, and undeniably exciting sports teams (no matter how much I may like to deny them).

The Seattle Kraken are professional hockey’s latest expansion phenom, with a logo borrowed from the Sylvia Hotel in Vancouver Canada, just a three-hour drive north. The Seattle Mariners are my second favourite Major League Baseball team, as they entered the league in 1977, the same spring as my beloved Toronto Blue Jays. Listening to Mariner/Blue Jay games on the radio is a favourite childhood memory from my summers in the late-70s early-80s. The time difference between Washington State and Ontario meant that evening games started at 10 pm for me, and I would drift off in bed to the game commentary, a comforting habit I maintain to this day.

Lots of beautiful aquas and greens in Seattle sports logos, though that didn't stop the red 2017 Toronto Football Club from winning the MLS Cup in a freezing cold final against them. I attended that championship match with my soccer buddies. Sylvia Hotel image courtesy Vancouver's iconic hotel. Soccer image courtesy Sportsnet.

The Seattle Sounders (named after the spectacular inland seaways of the Puget Sound) in Major League Soccer are established enemies of my Toronto FC soccer club. The two squads have contested for the League championship three times in the last decade, with Seattle coming out on top twice, dammit.

And then there are the National Football League Seattle Seahawks.

I don’t have much time or patience for American football. It’s way too slow, full of unnecessary delay, and lacks the overall athleticism and artistry of real football… the kind played around the world with a round ball and eleven players per side. But that Seahawk’s logo? That is an enviable bit of sports branding, capturing the angry intensity of the game itself, the natural beauty of the surrounding area, with an artistic nod to the indigenous history of a municipality named after a celebrated Native American leader.

And, for the ornithologically obsessed you can’t go wrong with a bird on your gear.

But what the hell is a Seahawk, anyway?

The Raven and the First Men, by Bill Reid, at the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology. © Leszek Wrona.

This was my question on acquiring my first bit of NFL swag, a cap for a friend in Toronto who immediately dubbed it “the angry Blue Jay.” No… not a jay, or any kind of corvid for that matter. It unquestionably has a look similar to some of the raven iconography I’ve seen on the west coast of Canada. Bill Reid sculptures come to mind. But it must be called a hawk for a reason, and it certainly has the steeply hooked beak of most raptors.

Turns out, there is no bird officially named a seahawk, but a couple birds that do enough hunting around the salt water of the Puget Sound for them to stand in. None of them sport blue and gray face colouration and moss green eyes. The mighty Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) does not approximate the lines and markings on the Seahawk. The NFL Seahawks do have an actual live bird mascot they bring out at home games, but it is an Augur Buzzard (Buteo augur augur), which is not native to the Pacific Northwest and is in fact an African bird that mostly hunts on land.

My feeble attempts to capture the majesty of the Osprey, here in Northern Ontario. I’d be proud to cheer for such a mascot.

If any bird is actually appropriate to the logo it’s the Osprey (Pandion haliaetus). These large, fish-eating hawks breed and hunt along the Washington State coast, and sport the dark eyeliner and extreme beak of the Seahawk logo. Osprey populations have rebounded since the banning of certain pesticides that were thinning their eggshells and poisoning the birds themselves. They are now considered a low conservation concern.

So why not the Seattle Ospreys? Only the marketers know for sure.

 “At night, when the streets of your cities and villages shall be silent, and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not altogether powerless.”

                                                             — Chief Seattle, 1854

See here for a post I did about books I’ve recently read. I didn’t send it out to subscribers as it was not bird-related in the least. Let me know in the comments if you’d like to get all the posts as a newsletter, even the bookish ones.

Recently Read

Winter Garden, by Beryl Bainbridge, and The Confidential Agent, by Graham Greene

A couple of paperbacks from the ‘light touch’ era of cover design. All images in this posting, unless otherwise noted are © John Degen

Gather round online generations. There was a time when a young person of some small means would sew a Canadian flag onto a large, unwieldy backpack, say goodbye to their family, and disappear for months without any reliable communication keeping them attached to the home base. No texting, no facetiming, no emails; just the very occasional long-distance phone call from a dodgy booth on a heath somewhere, and physical post that was by its nature weeks behind on the actual news.

Between March and September 1987, I backpacked my way through Europe, visiting German relatives, and even crossing the iron curtain briefly to ride the rails through what was then Yugoslavia on my way to Greece with a friend. At the end of my wanderings, I spent 12 weeks living as a Londoner in a little bedsit on the ground floor of a three-story walk-up on Philbeach Gardens in the then-grimy Earl’s Court neighbourhood of Kensington. With my live-in partner, Judy (who has remained a beloved friend despite our lives going in very different directions), I jumped into the cosmopolitan life of what quickly became my absolute favourite city in the world.

March 2017, before Big Ben underwent the extensive cleaning and repair that saw the tower scaffolded for several years, and just days before the Westminster Bridge terrorist attack that killed 4 and injured 50.

I remember with perfect clarity the end of that experience, sitting in my aisle seat on the Heathrow taxiway in early September, waiting to take off for a return to Canada and my suspended university studies. Head down as though praying, I thought “I will graduate and immediately return. I will live in London the rest of my life.” Three decades later, in March of 2017, I finally touched down back in London, on a business trip. The intervening years had seen me stay in Toronto, build a career in writing and publishing, father two sons, and ride the wheel of emotional fortune through marriage, divorce, and blessed re-marriage.

I will admit to some tears when I walked up to my old apartment in Earl’s Court, feeling arthritic stiffness in my joints and noting that my £15-a-week room had become yet another £1 million luxury home in London’s west end. Being a hyper-connected man in late middle-age, I immediately texted a selfie to Judy to show her where I was. I don’t remember her exact response, but likely it was “Gah!” or “OMG!” or some other exhalation meaning how the hell did we get so old?

Old man returns to last place he saw his youth. Sadly, it was no longer there.

We tend to think of the times we’re living through right now as somehow more dangerous and more filled with global strife than most of recent history (see the above reference to Westminster Bridge), but recall that 1987 was two years before the end of the Cold War, and one year after the catastrophic nuclear accident at Chernobyl in what was then the Ukraine… still part of the USSR. When Judy and I shopped at the outdoor markets that summer, vegetable vendors would loudly declare the provenance of their wares so that one might check against the radiation-spread charts we’d all saved from the daily papers.

Train stations all over Europe displayed wanted posters for various known terrorist bombers and warned never to stand near abandoned luggage. Harrods department store had been shattered by an Irish Republican Army bomb not four years earlier. That attack killed six and injured ninety. This was one of the most contented times of my life, but it was tinged with near constant anxiety over physical safety. Not a year after our summer there, a bomb would kill a soldier and injure nine others at the Inglis Barracks in North London.

May I recommend this wonderful novel by Maureen Duffy for a sense of London in those long-ago days? Best read over a pint or two at the pub.

Our immediate neighbourhood was rough — how else could we afford it on our measly earnings from washing dishes and serving lunches to bankers in the City? A heroin dealer lived in the basement of our building, and we would regularly be woken by “customers” banging on our street-facing window to be let in for a late-night purchase. The 1983 novel Londoners, by the wonderful Maureen Duffy, ends with a pub bombing in Earl’s Court, so the zeitgeist was not very optimistic about us either.

Novelist and poet, Maureen Duffy, was a dinner guest on my return to London. A delightful vegetarian restaurant in Hammersmith, as I recall.

I mention all this to build some atmosphere for a discussion about two of my recent reads; books that took me right back to London in my head and pinned me to the couch with remembered anxieties and experience. As it happens, I read Winter Garden (Beryl Bainbridge, 1980) and The Confidential Agent (Graham Greene, 1939) at the same time — doesn’t everyone have several books on the go at once? — and enjoyed how they mirrored and spoke to each other. The similarities were so striking, I sometimes had to remind myself of each book’s cast of characters before diving back in, so I knew which plot I’d be following.

These are both literary entertainments (as Greene was fond of calling his work) involving clandestine travel and international intrigue. The Confidential Agent is more typically a spy novel set in what seems to be Spanish Civil War times — though to say Greene’s writing is anything like typical will start an argument — while Winter Garden is a dark comedy involving a bumbling middle-aged Englishman attempting a complicated extramarital assignation on a secret trip to the USSR during the Cold War. The threat of violence emanates from the pages of both books, mystery abounds, and neither ends in a very satisfactory manner for its protagonist. That is not a spoiler, because neither feat of writing here could be spoiled by knowledge of plot. If after the first page of either, you are hoping for a happy ending, you’ve come to the wrong hotel. What the reader gets from these books are brilliantly understated characters engaged in sharp dialogue, in the service of a rather grim existential dread that, in both cases, is inexplicably entertaining.

Why are these people walking past a bookstore? I don’t understand.

The Bainbridge I bought at the wonderful Any Amount of Books on Charing Cross Road in London several years back, and while the Greene is most definitely a UK edition (its price is listed on the cover as 3/6) I picked it up in Parry Sound, Canada at Bearly Used Books.

The store that now adds an hour to every northern drive I take.

But let’s travel back to 1987 again. That was the summer of Margaret Thatcher’s last election victory, and London was positively vibrating with protest and politicking. We had many doorknockers come by, loudspeaker vans cruising the roadways, and soapbox speakers at every weekend market. I followed the campaigns very closely, amused and astonished by how absolutely filthy UK politics can be at street level. A local candidate was caught up in a sex scandal, and shouts of “Shame!” rang through the neighbourhood. Literally. His political rivals must have hired leather-lunged blokes to walk the sidewalks with large photos of his face, and bellowing out their one-word disapproval. It was an absolute circus.  

In all of that, I found myself made suddenly hot-under-the-collar by an Evening Standard newspaper columnist who made, in my opinion, ignorant assumptions about the disaffected youth of Britain and their ability to responsibly engage with politics. Feeling for my generation, I plunked down with pen and paper (there were no online comments sections back then), and wrote directly to this columnist care of the Standard. “How dare you… etc.”

Britain’s astonishingly well-run postal system being what it was, my note went out in the next morning’s post, and I received a response THE SAME DAY in the evening mail. The columnist’s note began “Well, I seem to have rubbed you the wrong way…”; it went on to convincingly explain to me that I was incorrect on facts if not feeling, it wished me well, and ended…

“Cordially,

Beryl Bainbridge.”

Author (and trenchant columnist), Beryl Bainbridge.  © Jane Bown, 1981

I seek out Dame Bainbridge’s books whenever I’m browsing, and never miss an opportunity to keep learning from her. May she rest in peace.

“Ashburner descended the stairs so forcefully that a shallow wardrobe, standing with its back to the skirting board in the hall, rocked violently. Its door, in which was set an oval mirror, swung outwards. He was confronted with an image of a face similar to his own, wobbling, as though reflected in water.”
— from Winter Garden, by Beryl Bainbridge

For a delightful television interview with Dame Bainbridge circa 1977, see here.