North on the Wing

by Bruce M. Beehler

  During my sixteen days up north, I shared the campgrounds with three other groups, all fishing for Walleye. At Pipestone, a family fishing group from rural Michigan was camped when I arrived and settled into an adjacent campsite. The group was on its annual summer fishing adventure. A group of nine, spanning three generations, they were very friendly, and the morning I met them they offered me a luxurious hot breakfast of link sausages, a cheese omelet, and blueberry pancakes with maple syrup that they had manufactured themselves back home. The elder of the Michigan group mentioned seeing a wolf in the campground just before dawn that morning. As we chatted, I found out that they hailed from Fairview, in the northern section of the Lower Peninsula, deep in Kirtland’s Warbler country. I told them I had plans to visit their local environs in a couple of weeks to see a research study on the Kirtland’s Warbler, one of the last species on my quest list of wood warblers.

  THE MISHKEEGOGAMANG AND HUDSON’S BAY COMPANY

  I had planned to pay my respects to the chief of the Mishkeegogamang Band, but the death of an elder during my time in Pickle Lake prevented that, and I never spoke to a single member of the band while in the North Woods; neither did anyone from the community visit me at my camp. First Nations people in big pickup trucks zoomed past as I biked along the gravel highway, and the many hunting camps I passed stood unoccupied at this time of year. These camps—tiny, patched-together single-room cabins set in roadside clearings—serve as autumn and winter bases for fishing, hunting, and trapping. The forest, with its fauna and flora, is the wilderness supermarket of the Mishkeegogamang.

  I did learn a bit about First Nations worldviews from discussions with an Ojibwe-Cree couple, Martin Kanate and his wife. From the North Caribou Lake First Nation, they keep a mobile home right beside the Nord Road at the Pipestone River bridge because Martin has the district government contract to grade that section of the road. We met when the couple came down to the Pipestone campsite to get fresh drinking water from the river. Martin was very friendly and talkative; his wife remained in their pickup, listening to our conversation through the open window. Both were big Moose hunters, and at one point Martin’s wife piped up, “The only good Moose is a dead Moose.” She assured me that she shot every Moose she saw. This shocked my environmentalist ears at the time, but Moose and fish are the staples of life for remote First Nations communities here, which have minimal access to grocery stores. I asked Martin lots of questions about local wildlife, especially wolves. He assured me that he killed wolves on sight, saying the animals are wasteful and often kill just for pleasure, a statement best understood as coming from a subsistence hunter who believes that these major predators take food from First Nations tables.

  In later conversations with Kanate when I encountered him on the Nord Road, I came to realize that it was probably impossible for me to see the North Woods through his eyes. Our experiences and viewpoints were different: for one, I was not an indigenous North American, nor had my relatives been taken from their birth families and forced to attend a government boarding school far from home for their childhood years, among other cruelties. I have since read Marj Heinrichs and Dianne Hiebert’s book Mishkeegogamang, which seeks to capture the essence of this people, and I have done additional research on the history of First Nations communities inhabiting the North Woods. I have learned that, as with most human societies, local history is very messy and obscured by a lack of details and by the fact that the history of Canada has been written largely by white Canadians, with only minimal consideration of the travails of the First Nations peoples. History, after all, is about power.

  For many decades, the power over the wilderness of northern Ontario was held by a venerable trading enterprise: Hudson’s Bay Company. Receiving a royal charter from Great Britain in 1670, the company promulgated the harvest of fur pelts of an array of forest-dwelling mammals in a vast tract of north-central Canada then called Rupert’s Land. Rupert’s Land encompassed about a quarter of Canada’s non-icebound territory—larger than today’s Ontario. For many decades, Hudson’s Bay Company was the de facto government in these undeveloped lands. The citizenry of Rupert’s Land consisted of First Nations groups living and trapping there and an assortment of Anglo fur trappers and traders. During the fall and winter of each year, First Nations and European men trapped and prepared pelts, then traveled by canoe and on foot to Hudson’s Bay’s trading posts to sell the pelts. In exchange, they typically received popular trade goods such as knives, kettles, beads, needles, and Hudson’s Bay point blankets. Sustained primarily by the trapping of beaver pelts to satisfy the European demand for felt hats, the intensely competitive trade opened the wilds of central Canada to exploration and settlement; financed missionary work; established social, economic, and colonial relationships between Europeans and First Nations bands; and played a formative role in the creation of the nation of Canada, which achieved independence only in 1867. During this long period, the fur trade was a huge influence on indigenous inhabitants.

  Fur trapping remains an important occupation in the North Woods today. A 2013 article in Canada’s National Post outlines the details: North American Beaver, which drove the initial trade, remains the second most valuable pelt in the trade, generating more than two million dollars a year. The article provides a list of the number of animals trapped and killed in Canada in 2010 to supply the international fur trade: 265,000 Muskrat, 140,000 North American Beaver, 92,000 American Marten, 47,000 Coyote, 28,000 Ermine, 16,000 Fisher, 9,000 River Otter, 7,500 Canada Lynx, 2,900 Bobcat, 2,900 Timber Wolf, 2,000 American Black Bear, 260 Polar Bear, and 8 Grizzly Bear. These rather chilling statistics lead to several conclusions. First, virtually every watershed in the North Woods has suffered annual commercial harvests of wildlife for more than two centuries. In addition, the incidental by-catch of birds and nontarget mammals by trapping is probably double or triple the totals of the harvest numbers cited above, because the traps are not species-specific. Over the decades, trappers in the field also killed additional millions of edible mammals and birds for subsistence consumption.

  The most significant impact of trapping is that the strong economic incentives of commercial wildlife harvest drove wholesale geographic movements of populations of Anglo and First Nations peoples across the landscape. As an example, the Mishkeegogamang (a band of the Ojibway nation) are not the original tribal inhabitants of the land north of Pickle Lake, where I surveyed birds. The area was historically Cree land. Apparently, driven by the economics of the fur trade, Ojibway bands from the Great Lakes region moved northward to trap wildlife, driving the Cree into more northerly territories.

  Over the past century, the lives of the First Nations bands here probably have been more influenced by Christian missionaries, Hudson’s Bay Company trading demands, mining interests, and Canadian government interventions than by any cultural imperatives of traditional First Nations ways of life. Little of their lives, as I observed them up north, seemed ancient or traditional, but instead seemed an unfortunate by-product of the economics of western business interests. It was a contrast to my decades of fieldwork experience in rural Papua New Guinea, where forest-dwelling indigenous peoples remain the owners and masters of their lands and resources. In spite of decades of Australian colonialism, local cultures, traditions, and languages survive in Papua New Guinea, and the spirit of the people is strong and confident.

  The existential angst I sensed among First Nations people at Pickle Lake may be the end result of many decades of buffeting by outside forces. Poverty, loss of cultural traditions, loss of tenure over the land, and harmful government interventions have impacted indigenous groups inhabiting the wilds of central Canada. The human/natural ecosystem that I experienced in the North Woods may be the result of a struggling indigenous population inhabiting an unproductive landscape, which has driven the substantial overharvest of the wildlife resources that underpin the local economy. Why did I see so few mammals? Probably because the Jack Pine barrens have a low carrying capacit
y, but also probably because chronic year-round harvest of meat and pelts keeps mammals scarce. The wild mammal population in suburban Bethesda, Maryland, where I live, is likely considerably larger than the one in the habitat I visited in the distant woods of northern Ontario.

  I read The Maine Woods while in northern Ontario. Published in 1864, Henry David Thoreau’s narratives from his back-country travels in Maine address four general themes that resonate in today’s rural Ontario: (1) the terrible social conditions facing indigenous people living in an Anglo world; (2) the systematic overharvest of timber by rapacious timber companies; (3) the overhunting of Moose by resident indigenous people; and, of course, (4) the ever-annoying mosquitoes and black flies. Today, timber harvest in Ontario continues to have broad-scale impacts, although it is now substantially better managed, but it is astounding that the problems that concerned Thoreau in the mid-1800s in the boreal woods of New England are still relevant in a similar wilderness habitat in Canada today. Have we as a civilization progressed so little over those 150-plus years?

  THE WILDERNESS, THE AMERICAN BLACK BEAR, AND THE MOOSE

  When planning field adventures, city-based naturalists such as myself love to imagine wildlife-rich “wilderness”—some place far away and different, empty of humans and possessing fearful wild creatures. This myth is part of our historical American frontier legacy. We now know that such fantastic wilderness places never really did exist, that humankind long has occupied much of the landscape, and that people long have been harvesting most things of economic value from virtually every quadrant of the earth’s landscape. In spite of these rude facts, we dreamers manage to convince ourselves that such imagined wildernesses do exist. I had fallen into this trap with regard to northern Ontario: I had driven to the end of the road—akin to the “end of the earth”—with mildly delusional visions of great conifer forests bursting with big, scary mammals and trees full of colorful migrant songbirds. What I found was a fire-scarred pine barren inhabited by an impoverished and underserved indigenous population who were living by their wits and largely forgotten by the rest of the world. This underdeveloped land was built upon a glacier-scoured shield of granite, with sand and gravel for soil. Because of past and present impacts of recurrent fire, an array of gold-mining operations, and the centuries-long fur trade, the land was scarred and bruised.

  And yet it still holds treasures for visiting fishermen and wilderness canoers, who found the lakes and rivers perfect for their needs. And for the adventurous birder, it holds avian riches in small dollops, hidden in spruce bogs here and there, requiring considerable effort to find. I had to work hard to find my Connecticut Warbler, my Great Gray Owl, my Spruce Grouse, and my American Three-toed Woodpecker. And I had had to pay my dues. On warm and humid days, black flies and moose flies seemed to boil up out of the boglands—those were head-net days. Was I disappointed by what I discovered? Like a person who has had a glass of cold water thrown in his face at an unexpected juncture, I was shocked and brought up short, but the experience was bracing and memorable. I got what I deserved.

  The wilderness I imagined was in my own mind, and I was able to conjure up a wilderness experience that fit my own psychic need. In fact the wilderness was that Connecticut Warbler in a tall row of Tamaracks. It was that Great Gray Owl in a stand of spruces. My wilderness was the ever-present concern that I might turn a corner and encounter a five-hundred-pound American Black Bear a few steps away (that’s why I carried a canister of bear spray on my hip every time I went out). There were times in the field when I felt the presence of something wild, and the little hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I would then stand still, listen intently, and try to search out what it was. Perhaps this was the wilderness speaking to me, telling me to be humble, to be cautious. The American Black Bear is the king of the North Woods where I camped, because it is treated with respect by the First Nations people who live here. This is the ancestral home of the American Black Bear, and one can feel it. I saw eight American Black Bears during my stay, and I am sure at least eight more American Black Bears saw me during that time.

  The Moose, on the other hand, is the local meat market. They are harvested to sustain the Mishkeegogamang, and thus I saw the animals infrequently. The Moose were doing their job, hiding in a thicket, waiting passively for that local hunter to collect them and to convert every bit of heart, liver, meat, sinew, and bone into something useful.

  There is satisfaction in following the passage of songbird migrants from the coast of east Texas northward up the Mississippi and then finding them on their breeding grounds in northern Ontario. I found, among others, Tennessee Warbler, Magnolia Warbler, Swainson’s Thrush, Ovenbird, Red-eyed and Philadelphia Vireo. But there was disappointment in seeing the North Woods so impoverished. Why did the forests here support so few birds?

  One explanation is that this situation is a product of disparate geographies: winter versus summer. Subtropical and tropical habitat available to the wintering Neotropical migrant birds is rather circumscribed (mainly ranging from Colombia north to Guatemala and southern Mexico, plus the Caribbean islands). By contrast, the summer habitat available to breeding songbirds is massive—from Alaska and the Yukon southeast to New Brunswick, New England, and the Appalachians. Presumably the small geographic extent of the tropical and subtropical wintering habitat can sustain only so many wintering Neotropical migrants. When, at the end of northern winter, the surviving pool of wintering birds moves back north, it is greatly diluted by the vast expanses of the boreal forest—hence the emptiness I encountered. This great disparity in available winter versus summer habitat might explain the paucity of migrant songbirds in the boreal forest. My position in the middle of a Jack Pine barren simply added to the impoverishment.

  On June 13, the voice of a Swainson’s Thrush in a young White Spruce just behind my tent woke me at 3:45 a.m. The air temperature was near freezing, so I put on a woolen watch cap and long underwear before heading out into the chill morning air in search of something wild. Out bicycle-birding, my fingers tingled with cold in spite of my work gloves—that’s the weather one comes to expect in the far north. I finally encountered a flock of Pine Siskins, a new bird for the list. At 2 p.m., I sat on a rock and watched hundreds of cumulus clouds scud by through the huge expanse of deep blue sky across the lake. It reminded me of a summer day in the Adirondacks in 1964. In that summer I had my first taste of the deep woods. I climbed my first mountain, saw my first American Black Bear, and caught my first Smallmouth Bass.

  After dinner I read Annals of the Former World, a big, fat John McPhee book about the geology of North America. It started to get dark around 10 p.m. A full moon was rising, and the Swainson’s Thrush was singing, once again, behind my tent. Here, in my little circumscribed world, I remained out of touch with the world at large. I was living full, rich days and felt no need for a newspaper, radio, or TV. The mosquitoes were starting to swarm outside the tent, their vast numbers producing an audible hum. I was woken briefly at 11:30 p.m. by a vocalizing pair of Common Loons as they flew overhead. Then I heard the drumming of the Ruffed Grouse—he must have been moonstruck.

  In my sojourn up north, I had made observations of eight additional breeding wood warblers species on their breeding habitat, bringing my total to thirty-two. I now had five more to track down on the remainder of my quest.

  EIGHT

  Great Lakes Country

  Late June to Early July 2015

  Blue-headed Vireo

  The longest day of sunlight…comes at the beginning of Summer rather than in its midst. In consequence, all Summer long we are inclining towards Summer’s end instead of building to a climax and then tapering off.

  —HAL BORLAND, Sundial of the Seasons

  On June 21, I rise at 4 a.m., break camp, and head down the Nord Road to Sandbar Lake Provincial Park, not far from the town of Ignace. I am heading back into civilization after sixteen days in the far north. Sandbar Lake is 225 miles south of Badesdawa Lake, and to
day it is the summer solstice. I am on my way, by a circuitous route, to a mountaintop in the Adirondacks, where I will hunt for my last breeding wood warblers and the last vestiges of spring.

  I looked forward to shifting south into biologically richer territory and away from the scourge of the fire-prone Jack Pine. The drive from Pickle Lake to Sandbar Lake is famous as a route to see big game, and my haul was fair: two cow Moose, a Red Fox, a Snowshoe Hare, a tiny unidentified rodent, and two hen Ruffed Grouse, each with a batch of fuzzy peepers. I crossed a high ridge with a wide vista of forest near the Sturgeon River, passed through the tiny hamlet of Silver Dollar, and came upon roadside scenes of brutal clear-fell logging just south of Savant Lake. Here I saw, for the first time, big stands of roadside Bracken fern (I had seen no ferns up north). About twenty miles north of Ignace, tall pines stood out as welcoming sentinels above the forest canopy. I was now back in White Pine country, more familiar territory.

  Sandbar Lake is a tidy but unremarkable provincial park. SUV-sized glacial erratics stand in the campground—a reminder of the recent history of glaciation here. The area has a southerly aspect, with abundant ferns and a forest of Paper Birch, Quaking Aspen, Balsam Fir, White Pine, and White Spruce. The Pileated Woodpecker was common here, a species absent farther north. At 5 p.m., many birds sang, and in the evening, I sat writing field notes at my picnic table, which was mosquito-free (when I’d left my car door open while departing my more northerly camp this morning, the car filled with the voracious pests). As the night sky darkened, I heard a Swainson’s Thrush. It had sung for me in evenings from Arkansas to Ontario.