June 27 -30, 2016. Westover ON. One quadrant of this small crossroads village is occupied by a large grassy drumlin. Occupied may be the wrong choice of words for the drumlin has been here for perhaps twelve thousand years while the village for barely one hundred and fifty. Better then to say, this crossroads village lies scrunched in the lee of a large grassy drumlin.
Drumlins are sculpted remnants of debris from the last ice age, some are small – not much more than a small mound, this one feels large; I’m sure there are many much larger. I recently learned that most of the upper expanses of the drumlin is public land. A beautiful undiscovered open-space treasure and superb on a summer day.
I walked its length a couple of times this week, it was like following the spine of a giant Woolly Mammoth. A clear, clean blue sky was dotted with soaring Turkey Vultures and a rearing bank of cloud in the west turned out much later to be carrying thunder cells. On one visit as I reached the crest, a small, almost impossibly thin and wheezy call stopped me in my tracks. I recognized it right away as a Grasshopper Sparrow, though there was more in hearing it than simple recognition, it was also a minor reward, an affirmation that my hearing is not quite as derelict as I thought. Really, I would have thought no one over thirty could possibly hear a Grasshopper Sparrow. The bird flew anxious circles around me pausing at scrubby landmark hawthorns; obviously I was unacceptably close to its nest or young.
I could easily hear several Field Sparrows on the flanks of the drumlin, and I followed the song of one until I found it. Their song is much bolder; all descriptions liken it to the accelerating reverberations of a ping-pong ball coming to rest. Like the Grasshopper Sparrows they favour dry-ish grasslands and seem to need some kind of retreat like a hedgerow as a song stage.
There are Vesper Sparrows and Chipping Sparrows here too and they add vocal colour of their own, but for no particular reason I’m not particularly smitten by sparrows. Some birders enjoy the challenge of sorting them out and I understand their pleasure; it could be a lifetime’s work. For me at this time and place they just kind of completed the picture.