Kindle
Cormorant Swimming By Ice
We look at life and places through many filters that we have gained through years of living. Sometimes what you see today brings back memories of what you experienced years ago and far away. Being able to separate the context of today from yesterday’s memories is perhaps a mark of sanity.
Walking along the edge of the marshes not far upriver from Bogue Sound is a treat that I enjoy summer and winter. An early morning walk in late January can even bring back flashes of spring in Canada many years ago. I first saw a cormorant when I lived along the shores of the Bay of Fundy. As I see the melting ice in the early morning sun, I am reminded of late April on our farm in Tay Creek, New Brunswick.
Little brook as we called the stream down the hill from our barns was relentless in working its way through the built-up ice of winter. Usually it was April before we would see melting ice and glimpses of running water. Only then could I put away the axe that I sometimes used to chop watering holes for the cattle.
Canadian spring can be harsh. Our son was born in mid-March and the temperature that night dropped to minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit. The largest snow we ever got on our farm just north of Fredericton, New Brunswick, came one day early in April 1973. It was thirty-three inches of heavy wet spring snow. Most years the grass was not long enough to turn the cattle out on the pasture until the first or second week in May.
Our coastal winter is pretty nice to us. Spring here in the marshes along the big rivers of eastern North Carolina is not nearly as harsh as it is in the hardwood hills of Canada’s New Brunswick. Actually our marsh and Raymond’s Gut, the inlet which drains it towards the White Oak River, is something of a wildlife refuge especially in winter. We need no weathermen or weather ladies to tell us when the weather is getting ready to turn nasty, the big birds will start showing up. There is nothing worse than a five egret storm with a great blue heron kicker.
We have a small salt marsh pond tucked in behind the marsh grasses just off the gut. It is sheltered almost on three sides by pine trees. In the worst storms the little pond provides an effective haven for great white egrets and great blue herons. They know it and they will often spend the night before a storm roosting in what I like to call the heron haven. I have written about the spot in an article , Where The Egrets and Herons Go To Hide.
It does not take much of a mental twist to say our marsh is also where those of us who shoveled too much snow and faced too many brutally cold days have come to permanently escape real winter.
Even now at the end of January we have lettuce growing outside and a few dandelions are already blooming. This evening I saw some daffodils pushing their way through the ground. We even have an amaryllis that lives outside and seems to thrive here by the marsh. It is already sending out a new shoot even before the ground hog gets to rule on winter. Of course nothing the coastal winter has ever thrown at them has ever bothered our pansies.
While the rest of the world is focused on the super bowl, here in the marsh we are eager watching the signs that dictate the end of winter. As spring and the warm mid-February sun gets closer and closer, it will not be long before ice on the edges of the marsh will be gone for another ten months. Before we know it, there will be ripe local strawberries.
Here on the Southern Outer Banks we will continue to be on alert for our big marsh birds, but do not panic if we almost ignore the super bowl. With a sunset like this one that closed out January 2015, who needs football games. Spring and warm waters cannot be far away.
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We hope to get our next newsletter out around Valentine’s Day.
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