American Pipit

Bonaventure, Quebec. September 11 2021. The first time I drove around the Gaspé Peninsula was a couple of decades ago. I had taken my son back to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and decided to take the very long way home to Ontario, circling the Gaspé Peninsula. I have very few memories of it, I think I must have crammed too much driving into too little time. But what scraps I do have include the impression that the south shore of the Gaspé is much less scenic than the north. And so it is, as we found out this week. It is typical of maritime Canada, lots of open space, small towns and villages with indeterminate edges but tied together with a scattering of modest, white with red trim, roadside homes.

Needing a mid-day leg-stretch and hoping that our travelling snacks were at least as tasty and nutritious as the packaging promised, we pulled into a tidy waterside parking lot beside the Quebec Acadian Museum in Bonaventure. Bonaventure is nice looking place, and I fantasised that it would suit me well if, by some kind of sorcery, I were to be transported here and told to make a go of it. It would, of course,  all be contingent on me grappling with day to day life in French.

Congenial as it was, I don’t think we did Bonaventure justice.  For one thing we opted not to check out the museum, we weren’t in a museum frame of mind. Instead we headed out to sightsee the harbour and lighthouse, they’re always worth the visit although when I think about it, once you’ve seen one lighthouse you’ve seen them all. But, from the lighthouse, we found a good walk, a few hundred metres on an elevated path along a breakwater out to its tip. The harbour entrance was to our left and a long seaweed lined beach off to our right. There were fragments of nautical stuff, logs, floats and boat bits, lodged among the huge, black, angular rocks that comprised the breakwater, it made me feel small and fragile imagining of the sort of brutal stormy nights that had tossed them this way.  A brisk wind buffeted and tugged at our clothes raising little offshore whitecaps, a fair wind for a mariner I suppose.

It was as we walked out to the light at the end that I noticed a handful of rather anonymous streaky buff, brown and grey birds picking for food, flitting in and among those large rocks. They rarely stayed still but scampered and bobbed in a rather charming way, reminiscent of Eurasia’s wagtails. They were American Pipits, a bird I rarely see in Ontario. We only encounter them as birds of passage, they spend their summers in the Arctic and winters far to the south of us. That’s what these birds were, on their way south, and perfectly comfortable seeking food in this windswept and debris entangled, shoreline rockpile.

The reference to wagtails is deliberate because pipits and wagtails are of the same family, although wagtails, it must be said are, in general, prettier and perhaps even daintier. Like this Grey Wagtail photographed in England three years ago.

There has been some name-changing going on with this species, too complicated to get into here but suffice to say that it was once called Water Pipit, is now American Pipit and may yet become Buff-bellied Pipit.  Anyway, American Pipit was my Bird of the Day for decorating a rather grim stretch of shoreline and for having that enchanting wagtail air about them.