A Winter in The North

At the end of last summer H and I packed up our little apartment into a little U-Haul trailer and hitched it to my little truck. We were leaving Vancouver Island, headed east. We moved quickly, crossing the mountains and prairies, and weaving our way through the lakes and exposed rock of northwestern Ontario. After five days of driving, we had landed in Sudbury, Ontario. We had moved from the west, to The North0.

We had about a month and a half of blissful Ontario fall, where it's cold enough to keep the bugs at bay but still warm enough to jump in the lake. Then, it was winter.

Winter is different here. The birds that I think of as hardy winter species move south and only truly northern species stick out the winter. Pine Grosbeaks, Redpolls, Ravens, and Chickadees. Every body of water for hundreds of kilometres is frozen over, so the winter waterfowl are reduced to Mallards and Black Ducks huddled together in the only fast-moving section of water around.

In early March we thought we had weathered the worst of it. It was above zero, and the ice and snow had begun to melt. Then, a historical storm hit. It takes pretty serious winter weather to shut a city like this down, but the city busses stopped running, the university closed, and the plows took nearly 3 days to get to our out-of-the-way neighbourhood.

And now it is May. The snow has melted, the Fox Sparrows and Rusty Blackbirds have come and gone, and the earliest of the warblers are starting to trickle in. H and I are packing again, headed south this time. I start grad school in the fall, and have a fieldwork contract on Georgian Bay for the summer. Plenty of change on the horizon, which just means there is plenty to look forward to.