It’s Saturday night on Pelee Island and the highlight of Springsong has arrived.
Held every year on Mother’s Day weekend, the event is billed as a three-day celebration of books and birding. Its location – a bucolic parcel of farmland surrounded by the waters of Lake Erie – is home to Canada’s southernmost community. It may also be one of the country’s least appreciated natural gems.
Every spring, the island serves as a temporary landing pad for hundreds of thousands of migrating birds arriving from as far away as the Amazon rain forest. They stop, feed and depart again, driven by a restless instinct to complete a journey they will then have to reverse in the fall.
Pelee Island is also a seasonal roost for Canada’s best-known author. For nearly 40 years, Margaret Atwood has made a home away from home here, and she has left her imprint on island life. In 2002, Ms. Atwood helped to launch Springsong with her partner Graeme Gibson, who died in 2019.
Last month, at the Springsong 25th-anniversary gala, Ms. Atwood stepped to the microphone and reprised her role as star performer, backed by the event’s now-legendary rubber chicken choir.
Rubber chicken in hand, Margaret Atwood, who helped launch Springsong 25 years ago, leads the group in song.
“Chickens on high,” Ms. Atwood commanded with her signature deadpan delivery. The chorus line assembled behind her dutifully complied.
Ms. Atwood then launched into to the event’s traditional opening number: a rendition of Old MacDonald , augmented by the sound of many rubber chickens squeezed to the rhythm of the familiar tune.
Squawking and laughter filled the island’s eponymous winery, where more than 200 attendees had gathered for the dinner and the entertainment.
The unflappable Ms. Atwood then proceeded to her second selection, When the Red, Red Robin (Comes Bob Bob Bobbin’ Along) . By the song’s finale, the rubber chicken choir had reached its hysteric crescendo.
Afterward, guest lecturer Tim Birkhead, an ornithologist from the University of Sheffield, elicited a round of applause when he summed up the experience with a laugh. “This is the weirdest bird event I’ve ever been to.”
The pinch point
There is a purpose to the fun.
Across North America, birds are in trouble. In a landmark study published in 2019, a team of U.S. and Canadian researchers estimated there were about three billion fewer birds on the continent than in 1970. The decline is especially pronounced among migrating species, whose populations have diminished by 28 per cent.
This is grave news for birds but also for wildlife conservation in general. Bird migration is not just a biological wonder but a key component in a continent-wide cycle of ecosystem renewal. Without it, Canada’s biodiversity would be impoverished.
Even those who pay close attention to the phenomenon find its scale and impetus hard to grasp.
How could a species like the Blackburnian warbler – an exquisite, tiger-striped songbird weighing no more than 13 grams – possibly be better off travelling 8,000 kilometres from the foothills of the Andes Mountains to breed in the boreal forest?
Yet evolution has honed this tiny bird and many others for precisely such an undertaking, because it optimizes their survival.
What they get in return is a chance to feast on something that even the most ardent nature lovers tend to despise: our bugs.
“There are lots of insects in the Amazon Basin, but not like this,” said Dan Mennill, a biologist at the University of Windsor who studies migrating bird behaviour and communication. “The seasonal boom we have in Canada is unlike anything those birds can get anywhere else.”
Drawn by this massive surplus, many songbirds move northward in waves that typically peak in May and June. As they travel, they follow well-established flyways tied to geographic landmarks.
In the eastern half of the continent, one such route runs along the Mississippi River valley, while another hugs the mid-Atlantic coast. The two routes overlap at the Great Lakes, a watery barrier that birds must conquer to access the northern wilderness beyond.
For those that cross at Lake Erie, Pelee Island can provide a crucial safe haven. Measuring roughly 12.5 by six kilometres, it is the largest island in a freshwater archipelago that runs north from the Ohio shore – a final stop where exhausted birds can gather the strength they need to complete the leap across the lake.
During migration season the island acts as a “pinch point,” as Ms. Atwood calls it, concentrating a wide array of species into a relatively small area.
That makes it a choice spot for birdwatching and also for bird science. Whatever changes are taking place in the avian world more generally are often best observed here, where the winged torrent runs strongest.
“Pelee Island represents this magic place where you can dip your finger into the flyway and figure out what’s happening,” said Ian Davidson, Americas regional director for the global conservation group BirdLife Internati…
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