Sora

May 1 2018. Kerncliffe Park, Burlington ON. What is today a city park with some intriguing wildlife was, until half a century ago, a limestone quarry. It’s easy to picture it in its sepia heyday: barren rock walls, big piles of excavated stone, a couple of glowering steam shovels and a band of overdressed, mustachioed workers, standing arms-folded above their heavy tools and glaring at the camera.

But as I started out by saying, today it is a city park notwithstanding several recent decades as a place for campfires and beer parties and somewhere to abandon old couches. In all those years of neglect a modest sized wetland grew, wildlife moved in and eventually the city thought it could become a nice piece of green space and fit with its plans to soften some of the city’s neglected corners.

Every year I pay a few visits to the park hoping to find Sora and/or Virginia Rails in the marsh. It doesn’t usually work out but the inevitable consolation prize is safe-distance views of large tangles of Northern Water Snakes sunning themselves. I understand why snakes repulse many, and I am trying to convince myself that I’m perfectly at ease with them. The truth is that instinctively I recoil from snakes while intellectually I admire them for all their adaptations. Today’s long overdue warmth had masses of snakes tangling and piling on top of each other in dozens, I suspect they were copulating; a lengthy process apparently.

My companion and I found two Sora almost as soon as we arrived. She had never seen one before and was quite smitten, I’d told her to expect something like a small dark chicken picking its way through the reeds. We did better than that and watched as two of them made their nervous way past us not two metres away, scurrying and swimming to the next island of reeds across areas of open water. Sora, by the way, is a native American Indian name, one of the few that has endured.

I pointed in the directions of the songs of a couple of Swamp Sparrows not far off (my companion already knew them and nodded in agreement), two Brown Thrashers singing to each other as they skirted the woodland edge above us and a pair of migrating Broad-winged Hawks drift-circling overhead.

All of this came after nearly three hours counting birds elsewhere. It had been a bit predictable and pleasant enough, but the Sora as an afterthought were quite a treat. Birds of the Day.