Common Sense

It could just be natural, a result of high water or inattentiveness, or it could be a case of common sense... although no man made signs are apparent.  That's the problem with common sense...it's common, it's average, and average doesn't get one much, it won't even get you a job.

I needed some wild.  If I can't be in wilderness, the next best thing is to be where another species rules.  So, I set out on a river that I know to have a beaver dam.  I go to where a tooth driven operation does what man would need an earthmover and three dumptrucks to accomplish.

the dam

The beaver dam has a breach in it.  I did not expect this, but that is what happens when one seeks out something wild...things happen.  When I set out in the mill pond and turned north at the second point, and ascended the river, I expected to nose the canoe into the corner by the tree that forms one end of the dam and slide the canoe over.  But, that is all changed.  The water rushes through the breach and bars my passage to that corner by the tree.  Instead, I sidle up next to the dam and climb out on a firm spot and drag the canoe over somewhere out in the middle.

Common sense says, most of the time, that beaver wreck stuff...killing trees, blocking rivers, flooding low lands.  The science says other.  Beaver create habitat for other animals, the dams filter water and create pools for fish, the downed trees in the river are cover for fry, the flooded low lands become home to a hundred new species and eventually become a meadow.  It's not rocket science, you just have to be a tiny bit above average to understand that.  You just have to be a tiny bit above average to care.

The water above the dam is a foot lower than normal.  This means that all of the downed logs that I floated over on previous trips are blocking.  Progress is slow as I climb out and slide the canoe over each log.  I know that somewhere up above the third beaver lodge the going will just get worse.


Anyway, "I don't know"....It's a breach and the nearby lodge looks a little shaggy, so maybe the colony has moved on and left the dam to its own devices.  I turned back just a bit beyond the third lodge.

Observations

My wife goes to her Sunday meeting, and I go to mine...different places, same purpose.

It is a slow and easy trip, a watchful paddle starting at low tide, the tide where the birds that come down to the water are most exposed.  The top of the bank forms the near horizon, a long line two feet above my head topped with new spartina grass.  The willets have just begun to use their loud sentinel call, the warning to all within earshot that there is an intruder.  Perhaps nesting hasn't started yet, because many of them stand still and in silence as I pass, it is only a few that carry on.  One flies away from me calling the warning and I can see how it sets its wings for a glide, and then the wings flutter and vibrate as it sends out the call.

There is a willet in this photo.

The willets become fewer as I ascend the river.  They prefer the wide open short grass expanse of the lower marsh.  But, other birds fill in - great and snowy egrets, a family of Canada geese, and some sparrows, and turtles become increasingly present. 

The turtles slide off of the bank before I am close and I watch one with less grace tumble end over end into the water.  Once in the water, they poke their heads up and watch me...dozens of thumb sized periscopes.  I don't expect to see the glossy ibises as they usually are up in the grass jabbing their bills into the mud, but when I am midway between the rock pile and the stone arch bridge, a flock takes flight and I count 17.

glossy ibises

I tun out of enough water at the Duck Hole Farms and turn back.

Great Egret

Duck Hole Farms

This time, I find the ibises at the rock pile bend.  I hear their call for the first time...a nasally swallowed drawn out ducky croak/honk.  It is better than the call of a great blue heron, but not by much.

willet

Deception

It's a 300 yard carry on a berm that may have been the mule track of the old Farmington Canal...but so much time has passed.  The last bit is in the footprint of the aquaduct, the canal-bridge that passed over the Farmington River.  Just a few portions of the stone pillars remain.

I head upstream with a wind behind me planning to get to the old gristmill dam and cover a short stretch of river that I haven't paddled yet.

It is a good day for it.  The temperature is below 60F and the sky cloudy and threatening.  I'll see no one on the river, and this is one of the more popular routes in the state...wide and full of water and safe for most anyone.  The wind is variable.  Normally just a breeze, it comes on strong every once in awhile...a great exhale that ripples the water and shakes the green.  Then, it calms...a long slow inhalation.

It is a canyon, a tree lined slot channel.  It seems that it should have more wildlife than it does.  There are kingfishers and mallards, always a few great blue herons and some wood ducks, and the trees ring with the calls of songbirds, even over the sound of the wind.  But, it seems not enough.  It is the deception...a river lined with what is usually a rather narrow band of trees.  Behind the trees are towns or farm fields...or golf courses.  Narrow strips of trees are habitat for some critters, but many others need larger patches, and some need the critters that need the larger patches.  I understand the farm fields, I understand the towns, but golf courses...no.

Quinnipiac

I go up to where I need my saw, but I haven't brought my saw, so I turn back.  The tide is up and the river has plenty of water, so I've made it up to and past most of the ruins - the remains of a 1950's housing development that was platted out in a flood plain, the houses just five or six feet above a normal summer level.  The project must have flooded almost every spring.

It is a day for me to reconnect.  Nature and being in the wild has become so ingrained in my spirit that a few days away makes me feel out of sorts.   There's not much to document, today.  It's just a good place to be, to think, and to not think.

Some might see it as a healing process, and I would agree with that if I frequented the wild less frequently, but in my case it is a leveling... a reset to where and who I am.  As abused as this little river has been, it has returned to the sacred, and seeking out the sacred is good for the soul.

Spirit Animals

The guy rows his dinghy back to shore from his small sailboat that is moored in the North Cove at Essex.  We talk some, he's a good guy.  He asks if I have seen the eagles behind Knox Island.  I haven't.  And, I'm not sure where Knox Island is, and I don't ask not feeling that I need to know.

I head out through the cut in the long marshy spit that forms North Cove, the cut being the shortcut into the main channel of the Connecticut River, and then I follow that spit of marsh upriver.  An osprey flies into view with a mature bald eagle chasing it.  They circle overhead for a few moments before the issue is settled, and they go their separate ways.

I was heading to Hamburg Cove, a deep inlet on the far side of the river that gradually narrows to where Eight Mile River comes down from the hills.  But, as I top the island that stands off of the mouth of the cove, wading the sand bar instead of going around it, just because it is pleasant to do so, I change my course.  I follow the east side of the river, ridges and hills of bedrock with a very real "carpet" of forest - a thin layer of soil and moss stitched to the rock by the trees that have managed to find a crevasse to bury their roots in, I follow it upriver.

I start to think of spirit animals, for no particular reason.  One has to be careful about talking about such things, I suppose.  People who are afraid of the wild and afraid of wandering in the unknown won't understand.  I have learned to quit trying to understand...it's just something that is.  I've met a very few people that are in the same mindset.  They are especially good company in the forest.  In "The Abstract Wild", Jack Turner wrote about the old weathered male cougar that was his spirit animal.  Such a fine spirit animal to have.  I always thought that mine might be a beaver or a caribou.  But, finding a spirit animal doesn't seem to be how it works.  Rather, it finds you.  Mine came in the most vivid dream I have ever had, a dream that came after many frequent days of canoeing, a dream that took place, or at least, was centered around a canoe.  My spirit animal was a squirrel....a squirrel that ran wildly about the middle of the canoe making that part of the canoe glow.  It was not just a squirrel and I don't know why I knew it, but I did, it was a female squirrel.  And, it seemed to me that it was my creative spirit.  When it left the canoe, the canoe stopped glowing.

I go a ways up Hamburg Cove, but not all of the way.  I return to the river and head downstream, past Essex and into the South Cove for the first time.  There are several swans, and one swan nest, which the unrelated swans are keeping at a distance.

How Far Can We Go?

S has been away all week and not out in the canoe in far too long.   I take her to the East River where the spring migration is still in action and where the early arriving osprey are getting near to hatching their eggs.
We head up the Neck, then up Bailey Creek and through the sneak back into the East River flushing willets and tiny sandpipers as we go.  The osprey pay attention and sometimes move off a bit, but mostly they seem to see us as no threat.  Birds are everywhere.  If you don't see any, you aren't looking...osprey, willets, yellow legs, sandpipers, cormorants, ibis, a little blue heron, mallards, kingfishers, red-wing blackbirds, a hawk, wrens, goldfinch, geese.

Just upstream of the highway bridge, we find the flock of glossy ibises.  S says it must be a couple dozen.  I tell her it is fifty.  I count and it is... forty nine.

The tide is high and we can go well up the river.  S asks, when we get to the stone bridge, how much longer are we going to stay out.  But, when we get into the cattail marsh above that bridge, she asks, how much farther can we go...a much better question in my mind.

We get to the downed tree before the Foote Bridge and slide through the gap between two large branches, and pass the Foote Bridge, which can be shallow at lower tides, and stop for a moment just before the river enters the canoe-limbo jungle.   There is a very big downed tree under the surface here, but S doesn't know that.  It is something you learn by coming here in different conditions at different times.

This is how far we can go, today.

Mennunketesuck River

Sorry, no photos today.  My memory card went belly up near the end of the trip.

I'm reading Turner again.  No other nature writer jump starts my head and heart so well.  He has penned a lifetime of thinking in the "Abstract Wild" and it cuts through the bullshit and preliminaries and aims a person in a direction and lets them find the way.

A report came out this week about the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.  The idiots, and I am using the term correctly and accurately, who have been denying climat change are now beginning to change their story to, "the people don't believe it"...doing whatever it takes to avoid any blame for 20 years of stuffing voter's heads with shit.

Willets have returned to the east marsh in force, as I noted on my last trip.  Today, I put in from the little bridge over the Mennunketesuck River and paddle downriver to that river's own salt marsh.  It is not quite as large or expansive as the East River's marsh, but it seems that it should be large enough to draw willets.  The day is cool with a light breeze and the tide is low but rising once again and as I start my eye level is even with the spartina grass, a perfect vantage for spotting bird heads and necks as they pop up from feeding to take a look around.

I round the first couple bends, where the river gradually takes on a wider margin of marsh, leaving the last of the bedrock outcrops, moving away from the trees.  The first of the shore birds is a solitary medium sized sandpiper.  I spot a great egret nearby, and a couple more egrets of unknown specie several hundred yards away - the snowys and greats both being stark white, but not discernable from that distance.

It is not until the last bend before the railroad bridge that I spot a willet...startled into the air, it shows its clear wing bars and as if that wasn't enough, it lets out a full variety of its calls.  Another is nearby.
After the narrow railroad bridge, I spot a very large wild turkey shuffling through the spartina grass, but not too much else.  This is the wrong side of the tracks and I turn back away from the edges of the massive marina that lies further down.

Fifteen glossy ibises fly over as a flock, their deep red-brown pencil-ness becoming more familiar to me.  They fly necks and feet outstretched, and with the long curved bill, they appear very thin. 

I turn up the Gatchen Creek.  It holds a wide variety of birds, even more than the river.  A couple dozen yellow legs, a single glossy ibis busy feeding, a little blue heron, some ducks, and several of the small sanpipers.