the Walnut Diary

Indian Lake Marina lies in a rough, wooded area, well away from most development. This adds to ILM’s charm — try having to wait for a doe and her fawn to get off the dock before you can unload your car — but sometimes we’d see more of the local wildlife than we wished.

The cocker spaniel next door had been a model of decorum during his first few weekends on the dock. Then he tried to defend his family from a skunk taking a shortcut across the stern of their houseboat. Newt and that skunk argued and tussled all the way up the hill from the dock, across the lots of two trailers, and into the woods.

His duty done, Newt sought assistance from his owner, whom he encountered just as Roy opened the washroom door. The enterprising dog dashed between his legs, ducked under the door into the shower enclosure, and sat down above the drain to wait for a bath. He had a long wait. Nobody, his master included, could stand to enter the room, much less wash the dog.

Poor Newt. The pup had such a gentle disposition that total strangers were often found hugging him like a teddy bear. Now he had to endure the “skunk treatment.” The supply of tomato juice on the dock ran out after one bath, but in the bilge of Jack’s boat there rusted several large cans of clamato juice. Allowed to dry on Newt’s blonde tresses, this concoction actually killed the skunk odour. Newt acquired a slightly fishy aroma and an auburn tint to his hair for a few days, but otherwise seemed unscathed by the encounter with the striped intruder.

Skunks may cause sporadic upsets, but for sheer, grinding annoyance, no animal can match the racoon. These bandits are seasonal feeders, but they insist that human leftovers are the best seasonal food available.

For years Wayne devoted considerable ingenuity to keeping the racoons at bay. At the time he had built a dumpster onto the chassis of an old Ford pickup, with a system of ropes and pulleys suspended from the shed roof to raise and lower the cover. This lid was too heavy for racoons to lift, so when it was in proper operation the coons felt free to shop elsewhere. This usually meant a raid on the one of the docks.

On a farm the .22 calibre solution to varmint problems is simple and effective, but you can’t shoot around a marina. Boaters are by and large peaceable creatures who have no desire to do violence to a warm-blooded animal who shares their tastes in food, drink, and accommodation. So the racoons thrive.

Our son woke us one evening by pounding on the cabin roof. He claimed that just as he had reached the scariest part in the novel he was reading by flashlight, he noticed the face of a racoon peeking down through the forward hatch at him. By the time we got the stern cover unzipped the intruder was long gone, of course. Our big worry was that our dog would go through an expensive screen in pursuit of the varmint. So we waited, one eye open, for the next two nights.

Then the raid finally occurred. After all that waiting the only thing I managed to do was shatter a stout mahogany boat hook on the overhead railing of our stern cover. It got in the way of my swing and created an amazingly loud “BONNNGG” which woke half the marina. The racoon was undamaged, though it prudently hopped overboard and avoided our boat from then on.

Racoons are funny on film, but they make even worse guests than human non-boaters.

Kind-hearted Andrea could not believe that any creature that cute could be so reviled by the people on the dock. That was before she brought a large bowl of shrimp salad to the boat for the pot-luck supper the following night. She put the bowl into her refrigerator and went visiting without a further care.

They must have had a sentry by the loading ramp. They raided as soon as the mosquitoes had driven everyone inside. Three of them came down the dock. They must specialize, because one unsnapped the convertible top, another opened the latch on the refrigerator, and the other, presumably less skilled vandal, spread uneaten food all over the interior of the boat. These coons did everything but spray-paint the walls.

When a neighbouring boater saw the commotion and tried to chase the burglars out, they were none too eager to leave. Freeway, a yappy schnauser, found himself unceremoniously turfed into the drink by the largest racoon. Then the victor waddled down the dock and climbed a tree. The other two used the distraction to slip overboard and swim ashore.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, for the rest of the summer the racoons kept returning, often twice a night, in search of further treats. A sleepy boater with a boat hook is no match for a marauding raccoon.

The problem abated considerably the year a local building contractor set up his trailer between the woods and the garbage depot. He didn’t say anything, and we knew better than to ask. All we knew is that for as long as he was at the marina, no screens were destroyed, and occasional food left on tables in boat cabins was likely to be there in the morning.

I’ve always thought of the male American robin as a drab, persistent and boringly family-oriented bird, but it turns out that a great deal of his compulsive activity may be the result of pretty orange plumage and that distinctive egg colour.

Saturday I helped Philina English disassemble a net she had used to trap the robin who had laid her eggs in our barn. She disconnected the hair-thin web, spun it into a rope, and then stuffed it into a bag, lightweight poles still attached.

The robin had found herself cached in a soft, dark bag in the back of a van full of lab equipment while Philina examined each egg with a spectrometer attached to a laptop to determine its colour, and then entered a wide range of data pertaining to the egg’s age, mass, and fertility. Undergraduate student Fraser Cameron dutifully wrote down each item muttered to him by the pair of Queen’s graduate students.

While we worked on the net Lori Parker collected blood samples and breast feathers from the bird for the plumage study and D.N.A. tests. Then they tagged her and let her go.

A graduate student from Portland, Susie Crowe originally located the nests on the farm for the study and will assist with the sampling. The crew plans to gather data on about a hundred robins over the summer, establishing family trees through D.N.A. testing and seeking to develop information on the relationship between egg and plumage colour and breeding success.

Family trees of robin chicks show that the males from neighboring nests routinely father one or two of the hatchlings. Robins mate socially, sharing chick-rearing duties, but apparently aren’t adverse to occasional casts outside the gene pool. English refused to see this as a sensational bit of gossip from the hedgerows. From her point of view, it’s just another evolutionary device the species has developed.

Lori told me that only the female robins incubate the eggs. Apart from fertilization duties, after building the nest the male partner doesn’t go to work again until the feeding stage, and the bulk of the team’s research deals with attempts to quantify the signals which bond the male parent to the clutch of eggs so that he will put a significant effort into rearing the young. Once the chicks hatch, the crew will film two-hour blocks during feeding times to determine the male parent’s involvement and attempt to correlate this investment with egg colour and the brilliance of the mother’s plumage.

Philina even showed me some fake eggs, both strongly-coloured and faded, which they plan to secrete into selected nests. She hopes the variations in the colour of the eggs will enable them to determine the extent to which the male’s memory of the nest picture drives him to provide for the chicks.

I noticed that when the crew had removed the eggs for study they were careful to cover the empty nest. Lori explained that under no conditions could they allow the male to see an empty nest, because then he would abandon the whole project.

A day later the mother robin was back on her nest, still making a ruckus loud enough to startle the resident skunk every time anyone went near her nest. She seems no worse from her session with the crew yesterday.

The second test subject was a little less co-operative. Nesting in a stunted apple tree in the horse pasture, this bird carefully avoided their nets in early afternoon Saturday, then wandered off to feed and play with the other robins until the crew had moved elsewhere. Sunday morning when Lori and Fraser returned, she waited until they had the nets set up, then flew between them and away. Their respect for this “clever girl” grows with each capture attempt.

All of this activity seeks to answer the question: “Why is a robin’s egg blue?” English suggested that this study might at first seem frivolous insofar as it has no immediate conservation benefit, but ultimately it’s human to wonder about subjects like this, and graduate students strive to provide answers.

The advent of the inexpensive spectrometer has opened new doors for research on colour, suggested Roslyn Dakin, another member of the Montgomerie Research Group at Queen’s.

This study will continue throughout the summer at the Croskery farm, Chaffey’s Locks and Newboro, as well as at locations nearer to Kingston.

If you’d like to offer access to robin’s nests on your property to this very amiable crew, drop an email to Lori Parker at the address below.

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Email 6pae1@queensu.ca or call 613-547-9096 along with:

1) your name and contact information

2) name and contact information for property owner (if known)

3) directions based on street/road addresses OR GPS coordinates of the nest

4) description of nesting stage (under construction, eggs seen etc.)

5) if available, photographs of nest location (not necessarily the nest itself)