Welcome to 2023! As you are reading this you are probably dreaming of the upcoming summer and thinking about what life at a cottage on an island in Big Rideau Lake might be like. Let’s do a thought experiment and pretend you are going to Fancy Free Island for the first time, and it’s mid-June.
First, turn your sound on and listen.
It’s six in the morning. You are standing on the little silken beach at the northeastern edge of Fancy Free Island looking out over the lake. The view is of the channel in Big Rideau Lake between Fancy Free Island and the mainland, which widens out as it goes off to the distance. The sky is gradually lightening and the birds are awake. All around, you can hear a new day beginning.
It’s the spring breeding season, so the songbirds nesting on Fancy Free are acting on their territorial instincts. The adults at this point in the late spring are usually either incubating eggs or feeding their young ones.
Male birds are responsible for protecting the nest by keeping interlopers at bay. Singing is an important part of territory signalling for birds, so the males move from perch to perch around the edges of their territories, boldly repeating their songs. Every species has its own song, and sometimes it may have an extra element such as a special series of notes that makes it regionally unique.
Occasionally songs may even vary slightly from one individual to another, but they always stay recognizably that of one species, and unlike any other. This makes it easy to identify what kinds of birds are in the vicinity, without even seeing them. You just need to listen.
This morning the Song Sparrows are active and their melodic notes provide the main fabric of the soundscape. There is one Song Sparrow that is particularly close to you, and his song is vibrant with spectacular trills. In the background you can hear an Eastern Phoebe, and very faintly, you can also hear the haunting call of a Common Loon flying over. Far away, you can hear a dog barking and a motorboat running.
With some basic knowledge, it’s possible even with your eyes closed to decipher from this combination of bird song that you are in a woodland area very close to a lake. Eastern Phoebes live at the forest edge, and typically they nest next to bodies of water. Loons are swimmers as well as flyers, nesting on shoreline reeds and feeding off the fish they catch when diving. Song Sparrows can be found in most woodlands in Eastern Canada. So, with this combination, you know without even opening your eyes that you are on a wooded area of land that is either on a lake or very close to a lake. Voila, you are now a budding ornithologist!
As you can tell from the recording, Fancy Free is a natural sanctuary for wild birds. Every spring, the island supports so many breeding pairs that the family calls it “the bird nursery”. It’s not unusual for us to arrive in the spring and find a Robin has nested in a crevice of the porch, or a Phoebe has set up shop on the rafters under the boathouse passageway and is actively swooping down to feed young ones in front of your eyes. Needless to say, the nests are never disturbed.
We greatly value the contribution that Fancy Free’s natural habitat makes to the biodiversity of the Rideau Lakes region, which has not just one but two UNESCO environmental designations. The cottage and island are managed in a way that allows people live to on the island in harmony with nature, knowing that their environmental footprint is as negligible as possible.
Fancy Free’s rich biodiversity is a point of pride with us and we invite you to join us in protecting it. If you have suggestions as to ways we can further work to increase biodiversity please don’t hesitate to contact us. We are always interested in hearing feedback on improving the environment of the Rideau Lakes area.
Enjoy the winter. Spring is coming!
Pam