Winter Harbour
Created | Updated Oct 2, 2006
Ice brings the white-winged gulls to the harbour and if the first sign is just a premonitory skim, they will show. The white-wings are the glaucous and Iceland gulls of the High Arctic that wandering south from the lonely shores and desolate seas carry the very essence of these places with them. They are the harbingers I wait for so I give no credence to winter until I have counted the first of the season.
The harbour lies near my home at the mouth of a turgid river on the north shore of Lake Ontario. Like other small-boat harbours along that coast, it is closed to navigation during the winter months and after the first ice has set its seal, it becomes a harbour in name only. The lake, in its unbroken sweep to the south, remains open throughout the season, nothing moving upon its emptiness except cloud shadows or the occasional flicker of wings. As the days and weeks pass, it becomes more and more remote, until its presence is forgotten, or just taken for granted, like the sky. It often lies in untroubled sleep though the least catspaw will set it shivering like harpstrings that will not still.
Gulls have long laid claim to the harbour and as the ice builds, becoming layered with successive snowfalls, they gather in great numbers, the ringbills settling in tight groups, herring gulls mixing with them, and the Great blackbacks standing prominent and solitary. Glaucous and Iceland gulls are always few but easily identified, their plumage uniformly white against the black-tipped wings of the crowd. Gulls, generally, favour sleeping on one leg, an obvious ploy to retain heat and when further exposed to freezing cold or strong winds, they nestle down with head tucked under wing. Shortly after sundown, they stream noisily out to the lake, the presence of a great horned owl, sometimes seen flying across the harbour, making it prudent for them to roost on open water.
One blueskyed winter evening, after a day of strong winds, I watched the gulls returning from foraging upcountry. They came gliding in with hardly a wingbeat, high on the crest of an offshore gale. At a certain point, each would turn abruptly into the wind, changing direction without a flap and stopping above the harbour for an instant, before dropping at speed. I put my binoculars on a big glaucous gull and followed it down. It came swiftly, head into the gale, webs spread and feathers ruffled, spilling wind as it dropped, bucking the forces that would tumble it. Awkwardly, it fell like an empty bucket down a well, not quite out of control but somehow constrained, as if on a tether, wings held high and straining for equilibrium. Only when it was below the level of the trees, in the lee of the buildings, did it start to ease up, then finally, with a nonchalance that belied its seeming freefall, it tiptoed to a landing on the harbour ice. After one good shake of its feathers, it stood composed and at peace.
The fact that the Iceland gull is the rarer of the two white- wings speaks of a more solitary disposition. Longer winged in proportion and not as heavily built as either a herring or a glaucous gull, it is more nimble and delicate in flight. The whiteness of its plumage gives it an immaculate appearance, the apparel of polar seas, its mantle the palest of greys, while the trailing edges of its wings are touched with frost. Its red eye-ring is also diagnostic of its species. I have not seen a winter without at least one appearing in the harbour but have never counted more than five, that including, immature birds.
While looking over a mixed flock of gulls in the harbour one afternoon, I lit upon an especially interesting bird a Lesser black-backed gull, a European species that has been found nesting in North America. As I watched, it stretched its wings vertically, a common habit of newly arrived birds, then it proceeded to bathe in a depression filled with meltwater. After thoroughly dowsing and preening itself, it settled down to sleep. It was considerably smaller than the Great black-backed gull with which it can easily be confused and of which there were several scattered about upon the ice. A car's backfiring sent a cloud of gulls into the air and amongst them the Lesser black-backed was easy to follow. I noted its long wings and how well its dark back and wing surfaces contrasted with other gulls. When it had settled, I took time to note its finer points through my binoculars. I made a careful check of its yellow legs and feet, and its shallow keeled beak with its red subterminal spot on the lower mandible. It was even smaller than the herring gulls around it. Having found this rare bird near my home, I considered myself well rewarded.
Although the white-wings stand brightly in my mind in vivid contrast to the riffraff harbour gulls, their manners are the same. These birds from the clean untrammelled arctic solitudes eagerly wing their way to the town dumps of the southern lands to forage, shoulder to shoulder, with their local relatives and like them, gulp their food down whole. They are also not averse to eating the bread that an old lady from the village, empties in bagfulls, upon the river bank on Saturday mornings. In the ensuing free-for-all, which is well attended by the local population of Canada geese and a host of itinerant gulls, the white-wings may be found, right in the thick of it.
Sometimes after an onshore gale the harbour ice remains intact, several breakwaters offering good protection, but when a strong wind comes with due south in it, great surges play havoc by ripping out catwalks and cracking ice far upriver. In the worst weather, continued wave action grinds the ice into a slurry that seethes in the corners and small embayments. Despite such unstable footing, the gulls come to roost in their hundreds, quite able to rest and find momentary sleep. They rise and fall on the broken mass and the cold air echoes with their wailing cries as they endlessly change position.
One memorable afternoon I found the harbour bright with huge slabs of polished ice and empty of gulls. A long rolling, gentle swell, had broken the white plane into a collection of massive colliding plates, washed clean of snow. At the moment of impact, they would shudder violently, their tensile strength keeping them intact while their mirror surfaces reflected brilliant semaphores that dazzled the eyes. The gulls, capable of sleeping in what often seemed to be impossible conditions, found the jarring action too uncomfortable and had left en masse for the easier rocking motion of the lake.
The white-wings are few, becoming harder to find as the year wears into spring and there comes a critical moment when there is a fining of the weather, a balmy front from the Gulf of Mexico or a warm breath from the south-west, when the last one leaves. With this in mind, on a morning of dirty weather in March, when combers were crashing upharbour and the blockship, the old Ridgetown, looked as though it would sail again, I set out for a last look around.
I found one, an Iceland gull, preening itself upon a heaving riprap of broken ice blown in by the storm. It stood out amongst a thousand or so ringbills and herring gulls that kept dancing up on their wings as the grinding mass rose and fell beneath their feet. As the ice slowly became more untenable, an occasional larger wave would send them all screaming into the air but the wind was shifting and there came an unmistakable change in the weather, an additional excitement to their screams. By noon it had turned mild, the wind subsided and swiftly as the closing of a book, winter was over.
