Conrad Boyce is the editor and publisher of the Cosmos. He has a BA in English from the University of Alberta and a diploma in journalism from Grant Macewan Community College in Edmonton. He lived and worked in the Yukon and Vancouver Island before arriving in Ontario in 1995. Beyond these pages, he is the Artistic Director of OnStage Uxbridge, and the technical manager of the Uxbridge Music Hall.
A mother's determination
If you’ve never had the joy of walking Uxbridge’s Countryside Preserve (especially with your favourite mutt by your side), allow me to recommend one of the most beautiful parts of it - in any season.
Up along the northwest border of the park is a large man-made pond. At the northern end is a paved road that leads up to an old tennis court, and to the hillside overlooking WalMart. Usually Lacey and I come into the Preserve that way, abruptly leaving civilization behind as the pond comes into view.
But not entirely, because at the southern end is a large house and barn (both of them just beyond the Preserve’s official borders). The barn is rented out for storage, and the house is currently occupied by one of this town’s best painters. The building’s back deck overlooks the pond, and in particular a small island, connected to the yard by a narrow isthmus. Perhaps when the house was first constructed, this wee island may have contained a gazebo or something like it. But for the five years I’ve been walking past it, it’s been reserved for a quite different kind of activity.
They say that unless they’ve been disturbed by human activity, Canada geese will return to the same body of water year after year to nest. And for the past five springs, I’ll swear it’s the same pair that have returned to the pond even before the ice is entirely gone. The female builds a nest on the island, even though she knows full well that the occupants of the house could use the isthmus to disturb her (she knows because she uses the isthmus quite frequently herself).
Meanwhile, the male swims around the island on guard, or occasionally patrols the shore. Once the goslings are born, he ventures further afield for food. But not as far as he used to. Because the geese have much greater cause for concern than the humans in the nearby house.
The first couple of years I knew the pond, I took great pleasure in watching the goslings grow over the summer. The third year, though, I was walking past when I saw the family suddenly panic, and father goose herd his flock off the surface of the pond and into the underbrush. My companion pointed up. There, circling above the pond, was a hawk. It was so high I couldn’t be sure of the species, but it was absolutely a raptor, and it was watching the family of geese.
The next week, there was one less gosling. A couple of weeks later and to my dismay, the whole family of geese was gone. Either the hawk had killed the other goslings and the parents had abandoned the pond in grief, or more likely, the parents had taken their brood to another body of water somewhere, perhaps one less exposed to the eyes of the hawk.
I never saw the geese again that summer, and as the following spring approached, I feared the island would be empty. But to my wonder, the pair returned and successfully reared another brood, almost as if the hawk had never been there. I kept imagining the mother saying to her spouse, “Look, Garry, that’s our island and our pond, no ugly hawk is going to take it away from us. We gave up too easy last year!”
Maybe over the winter, Mrs. Goose put out a contract on the hawk, maybe got a murder of crows to persuade him to find another neighbourhood to terrorize. Whatever the reason, the pair (or maybe it’s their descendants, I can’t tell geese apart too well) are back at the pond this spring. I admire their courage. And they remind me of another feathered friend much closer to home.
Our two-storey house on Reach Street has an upper wooden deck overlooking the back yard, with a concrete patio under it off the lower storey. The second summer we lived there, that is the summer of ‘06, we noticed that a robin had built her nest in the eaves below the wooden deck. It was marvellous to watch her wee ones grow up, and finally fly away as the summer wore on.
The robin was back the next spring, and the next. But in the late spring of that third year (‘08), a tragedy happened, something akin to what the hawk had done to the goose family on the Preserve. We came home one day to evidence on the patio that something had attacked the nest. There were no chicks left there, and they were far too young to have left on their own.
For a couple of days, the mother returned to the ruined nest and even sat for a while, maybe in some forlorn hope that she could magically produce more eggs. But soon she left for good. And she never returned the next summer. Whatever happened to the chicks, the memory was too fresh.
But this spring, she’s back. The nest’s in a different place, but I’m sure it’s her. Like Mother Goose, she’ll be damned if some predator is going to mess with her fulfilling her destiny as a mom.
This Sunday will be my first Mother’s Day without a mom, since mine died on New Year’s Day. But under my deck, or on the little island at the Preserve, I have a couple of others I can easily look up to.
