As we enter a new year, I always love to celebrate everything beautiful that happened before and hoping for more pleasant experiences and adventures to nourish our enjoyment of living from one day to the next. As a birder, I wish to take you along one of my most cherished memories of bonding with nature and birding, with a superb example of soundscape that I am dreaming of for this year. As I revisit experiences throughout my memory book, this one is from the morning of may 24, 2022. Here we are at the Marguerite Youville Wildlife Refuge at the Saint-Bernard island, annexed to the municipality of Châteauguay. These two recordings are from one of my favourite bird recording stations. As a blind person, I can only describe it as the first spot where the road opens up a little into a wider space and where the gravel road gives way to a flooring of Earth. It also seems to me that tall trees become more numerous int this spot. Here you can experience a reverberating soundworld where three warbling vireos stand out, as well as American redstarts, yellow and chestnut-sided warblers, Baltimore orioles, common grackles, red-bellied woodpeckers, starlings, an Eastern woodpeewee and a robin further off. More occasionally appearing birds include a northern flicker, tree swallows and a red-eyed vireo, as well as occasional sounds of birds of the surrounding marshes like Canada Geese. In the second recording, red-winged blackbirds and a great crested flycatcher make themselves heard, as well as that same red-eyed vireo we hear at the end of the first recording. Finally worth mentioning is that this is late May, which means blackpole and Tennessee warblers fan out. We hear especially blackpole ones that permeate both recordings.
Wishing you all lots of hypnotic soundscapes or otherwise experiences to elate you and carry you away, making memorable days to keep going back to and to cherish throughout. For me, this is an example of such experience. May we continue to have healthy ecosystems that reward us with some of the most dazzling sounds, textures, scents and views.
