The Loghouse Nest

By Louise de Kiriline Lawrence

A charming account of the author’s special relationship with the birds and wild creatures who shared her northern homesite at Pimisi Bay, near Mattawa, Ontario.

The Loghouse Nest is another Natural Heritage classic by Canada’s internationally acclaimed nature writer, Louise de Kiriline Lawrence.

Delightfully illustrated throughout by no less than Thoreau MacDonald, with endpaper drawings by the author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Mar 15, 1988
• ISBN: 9781554883349

Louise de Kiriline Lawrence

A trained nurse, Louise de Kiriline Lawrence ran the Dionne Quintuplets' nursery for a year, then married and moved to the Ontario woods. There she became interested in nature observation and through her own determination and effort became a world-renowned ornithologist, bird bander and writer.

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INTRODUCTION

I fell in love with Peet, my Black-capped Chickadee, the moment he curled his firm little claws around my finger to get the sunflower seed I held out to him. That elfin grip was like a handclasp of friendship from another world. From out of the mysterious spheres of Nature this elusive sprite had come to me of his own free will. Without fear or hesitation, with one airy gesture, he cancelled all the inherent distrust between man and the untamed bird. It was a wonderful occasion that I shall never forget. It opened the gates to an undiscovered world, the fascination and grace of which I had never dreamed. It transformed our woods into a Garden of Eden where all of a sudden the right to walk as an equal was conferred upon me.

From that moment Peet gave unstintingly of himself to confirm our friendship. He became greatly interested in everything that concerned me and took every opportunity to investigate my curious ways of living. Whenever he saw me from the top of the highest pine he would swoop down not only to see if he could get another seed, but to talk to me of this and that which seemed of interest to us both at the time. That is how I learned his language, expressed eloquently by the inflection of his cheeps and twitterings, and soon we could hold long conversations with each other. As I opened the window he would hop in over the sill with a most amusing air of sociability and comport himself amid plates and dishes. He loved to go for walks and he would sit and wait for me outside, letting me know in various ways that he was there. If I did not appear at the usual time, he would hover close to the window with the question plainly written on his perky face: Why, what’s holding things up this morning?

But, as spring came, Peet got too busy with other and more important things to worry much about me. This was the time when I began to find out what he was doing and make my investigations about his way of living, his friends and his environment. As I had welcomed him, so he now welcomed me with the one reservation that I must behave with a certain discretion and tact so as not to make a nuisance of myself. He soon found I was quite trustworthy even to the extent of being shown his nest and, after that, he revealed to me many other wonderful secrets of his winged world, undisclosed to the casual observer.

It is upon this intimate friendship with Peet that I have based this story. I have followed him here through a year of his life, just as I have followed him over rocks and windfalls, in the swamps and on the wooded ridges.

Some of you may argue that birds do not think or speak or act as a result of mental processes. You may be quite right from your point of view, but Peet, were you to discuss it with him, would sit up on his twig and twitter brightly: Tuiteree-tuiteraa! meaning, as you should know: I can chirp with the best of you!

The reward I have gained from my observations of Peet and his friends is a conviction of the essential sanity of Life. In this world of Nature nothing happens haphazardly. All has a fundamental meaning rooted in the basic law of proportion and balance. Everything — beauty, force, growth, development, happiness, tragedy, dearth, redundance — is interdependent, neither to be avoided nor enforced, but properly balanced to achieve the greatest fullness of life. Hence, only those who live each phase of life to the limit of their power live their lives in full. To them there exists neither boredom nor loneliness under whatever circumstances, nor is their life divided or adulterated by unessentials. To them every minute of the hour, every experience of life is real and worth living. To them life has substance and becomes utterly absorbing, because they know its most intimate reality.

And now, if you care to turn over the page, I shall introduce you to Peet who, if you walk gently, will take you for this flight through his domain, while I retire into the role of Peet’s idea of me, She of the Loghouse Nest.

Rutherglen, Ontario,

September, 1945.

THE LAND AND THE BIRD

At the place where the Mattawa River flows out of Pimisi Bay there is an old dam. It was constructed some hundred years ago to take the timber over the rapid during the great river-drives of the past. Now most of the upper structure has gone down the river too, years ago, but under the surface the smooth-washed logs still hold together, opposing the force of the water. Sometimes, during rainless summers, the logs will come into sight, shining white in the sun, with the green slime that covers them shrivelled to dust. It is a matter of speculation how many years more that old dam will be able to keep the water of Pimisi Bay at its present level.

By the dam stands an Old Pine. He is older than the dam, much older, but not as old as the river. He is the oldest one of all the trees for miles around and had not lightning struck off his proud, feathered top two years ago he would also be the tallest. The base of his trunk is a good yard in diameter, measuring at least a couple of hundred years of growth. His roots twist far down into the river and into the crevices of the bottom rock. Strands of vine run in spirals up his trunk, in spring garlanding this forbidding forest giant in maiden green and in autumn in rich scarlet.

The lightning has run down the south side of the Old Pine from top to root and seared all the life out of him there, but on the other side, absorbing every drop of life-giving sap, his branches strive skywards, strong, thick and vigorous, and the top one unfolds above his battered head to crown him once more in fresh splendour.

What this venerable Pine does not know of the history of the land for the last two hundred years or so is not worth writing down. But he seldom speaks. It is only when the light summer breezes play hide-and-seek in his needle tufts, or the winter gales tear brutally through his knotty branches and make them creak in protest, that he may be heard muttering to himself. Then he may shake his mighty limbs and speak sadly of the good old times long, long ago before the great tree slaughter, when trees stood closely side by side, defiant against the winds. And then he tells of an unforgettable day when strange creatures came up the water-trail in large canoes, unrooted beings white of face, who hid their skins under odd garments. Although men in canoes had been using this waterway since time immemorial, they had looked and behaved differently, as if they belonged there. But the sight of these newcomers sent a swishing murmur through the virgin forest like a whispered foreboding, and from that day, says the Old Pine, things began to change in the course of the years and the peace of the untouched forest was gone forever. But that is really speaking of things too far back even for him to know except by hearsay, since in those days he could hardly have been older than a newborn seed in a cone or a sapling nestling in the shadow of his parent tree.

Then, with a shudder running all through his frame, the Old Pine recalls how that mighty forest had fallen to the axes of those same pale-faced creatures who had come into the bush like a plague of locusts. Without regard either for the dignity of the past or the needs of posterity they had crashed their way through and left nothing standing but amputated stumps, thus laying the forest floor open to the wide heavens. When they had taken all there was to take and sent it down the river, they left, and fires came in their wake to ravage acre upon acre of the razed forest land.

Look at it now, murmurs the Old Pine mournfully, "even the river is not the same. In summer it dries out to a mere trickle that can no longer control the floods in spring. What kind of company is there left now for an old-timer like myself? Bushes and scrubby trees, a crop of weak-stemmed aspens and sparsely rooted evergreens not yet