Do not give up! It is almost summer! At least it seems that way to us. Technically it is spring, but when we start visiting the cottage, we start to think about summer. Our first 2025 visit to the cottage was in mid-March to see if it was still there. More short visits will be made in April. Depending on the weather, we may even be able to spend a night. A spring treat for us is firing up the woodstove for heat and turning on the kitchen oven to cook a casserole at the cottage. Another treat is seeing our April friends.
A common first visitor and friend throughout the summer is the song sparrow. We have seen and photographed them as early as April 10th, but more commonly during the height of summer. Song sparrows eat insects, making them one of our favourite birds. Their song also warms our hearts. In the photo below, you can just see the song sparrow’s characteristic breast spot, enabling us to be sure this is a song sparrow rather than any other sparrow.
Until we bought the cottage and started to photograph wildlife here, we did not know that more than one species of bumble bee existed. We thought, if we thought about it at all, that a bumble bee was a bumble bee. Not true. North America is home to at least 45 species. We have seen five at the cottage on Three Mile Bay. One of our favourites is the tricolored bumble bee which is simple to identify. Bumble bees are important pollinators, but their primary purpose in collecting protein-rich pollen is as food for themselves as well as their young. They wiggle energetically head first into the blossom to gather nectar and in so doing collect pollen on their legs. The photo below, taken in April a few years ago, shows (or does not show at all) the bee with its head buried deep in the crocus blossom, the orange-belt on the abdomen in the foreground marking it as a tricolored bumble bee.
Termed a songbird, to our ears the iridescent common grackle barely deserves that description. To our ears the grackle’s ‘song’ is more like a squeak or whistle, but these sounds contribute to the overall summer melody of the lakeshore and marsh. Beautiful birds when the sun strikes the common grackle just so, we love to see its iridescent blue head, and also the iridescent purples and blues of its back and wings. The earliest we have seen a common grackle at the cottage is also April 10th. Primarily seed and grain feeders, common grackles also eat the great numbers of insects they find around our cottage.
We love to see a downy woodpecker, perhaps because we see them less often than any other species of woodpecker. The smallest of the woodpeckers at only 15 – 18 centimetres in length, the downy woodpecker resides in Lanark throughout the year. The earliest we have ever seen one is April 28th, but this date has more to do with our personal migratory habits than theirs. Downy woodpeckers eat the wood-eating insects they forage when pecking at trees. During the summer they also eat plant matter and sometimes visit our feeder.
Perhaps our most complicated relationship with an April friend is with the Canadian beaver. We love the beaver for being an icon of Canada. We love it for its efforts protecting and rejuvenating wet lands. But … we do not love it at all when it chops down one of our beloved trees. A few years ago, we planted a few tiny saplings near the shore and have been assiduously nurturing them since. After this photo was taken, we placed chicken wire cages around them, watering them with buckets of lake water which contains natural fertilizers. We understand, though, the appeal to beavers which live on bark and cambium, the nutrient-rich layer under the bark. During the summer they also eat aquatic plants. Canadian beavers’ cone-shaped houses are built of sticks and mud with under water entrances to their inner dens which provide access all year, even winter. Beavers do not hibernate and are present in Lanark year-round.
We can all rejoice that summer is almost here. We are looking forward to reuniting with our friends, some arriving after a long flight. Others need not journey at all having survived winter staying nearby. We are looking forward to seeing all of them.
For this article we fact-checked with Tamara Eder’s Mammals of Ontario, David Bird’s Birds of Eastern Ontario, and Heather Holm’s book titled Bees.
