All posts by Jessica McDonald

Caw Caw

Blog, wildlife

One fall afternoon, while walking along SW 30th Street after attending a seminar at Oregon State University, I noticed a pair of Common Ravens perched on a power line above the busy road.  Each bird clasped a walnut in their bill.  As a vehicle approached their perch, they dropped the nuts in front of the vehicles.  If lucky, the nut was crushed beneath the tires and the large sooty birds swooped down to retrieve the exposed nuts.  If not successful, they alighted on the roadway to pick up the unbroken nuts and returned to their perches to try again.  Occasionally they would emit a deep throaty croak.  Ravens are one of my favorite birds because of their dark beauty, deep intelligence and wonderful, gregarious personalities.   They are large birds, nearly ½ again larger than their cousins the American Crow, with a wingspan of nearly 4 feet and have a remarkable intelligence, swagger and adaptability.  While seen as solitary and occasionally quarrelsome birds, they may work very effectively in pairs to capture food.   While not as social as crows, young ravens may assemble in larger flocks in late fall and winter.

The Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology described their often spectacular acrobatic abilities where the birds accomplish amazing “rolls and somersaults in the air.  One bird was seen flying upside down for more ½ mile.”  I have seen them occasionally fold their wings, turn over to drop like a stone for some distance until they lazily recover at the last minute to continue flying.  Humans are intrigued with ravens and, I think, they are intrigued and somewhat disdainful of us.  Their intelligence often surprises and confounds us.  Humans cannot resist the need to explain intelligent acts in other animals within the context of our own cultural histories.  However ravens often seem capricious and commit acts that sometimes confuse our expectations.  Ravens and other corvids have a reputation for antics, whether dropping objects (stones and twigs) on top of the heads of other creatures or hanging upside down from branches or flipping sticks and other objects at each another. There are voluminous records of some of their odd behaviors.  Bernd Heinrich, the great naturalist and writer, has studied ravens for decades and mentioned in “Mind of the Raven” how they have been observed dropping and catching feathers, a fox tail, and stones in mid-air.  He described a story from a hang-glider who observed a group of ravens doing high acrobatic barrel rolls and swoops and being joined by another raven who held a long wide white streamer of tape.  The new member to the flock swooped in and out of the flock with its streamer and then handed it off to other birds who similarly swooped in and about the group with the streamer in tow.  David Quamman in a wonderful essay on corvids in “Natural Acts” mentioned ravens lying on their backs juggling objects between their bill and feet.  He described how crows occasionally alight on ground next to sleeping animals and give them a brisk rap on the head or tail.  What motivates these behaviors is unknown, however some obviously offer rewards.  Heinrich described how a raven landed silently behind a cat carrying a mouse and emitted a loud caw.  The startled cat dropped the mouse which was quickly scooped up by the departing raven.

They have adapted to and thrived in close association with humans from Paleolithic hunter-gatherers to current urban dwellers.  Heinrich described how humans have mythologized them as “creators, destroyers, prophets, clowns, and tricksters.”  Corvid- like birds decorate the walls of prehistoric caves such as Lascaux.   Indigenous peoples of the American Northwest revered the raven as a world creator.  Ravens were warrior symbols for some Celtic cultures.  Other cultures consider them ill-omens and, because of their color and love of carrion, representative of death and unsettled spirits.  Apparently they are the national bird of Bhutan and adorn the royal hat.

Ravens clearly understand the links between humans and the availability of food, and through the ages tagged along as uninvited guests on wagon trips, hunting parties and scientific expeditions.   Ravens, like most corvids, are avid nest predators, pillaging eggs and young whenever available.  They are referred to as “wolf-birds” because they often track wolf packs as they hunt ungulate prey with the intention of scavenging their kills.  They store food in caches and raid other food caches created by foxes or other animals.   They eat anything and are adept at cleaning up road kills.  Upon finding a large carcass, young ravens may call in other ravens to assist in the feast or chasing away other scavengers.  Common Ravens occupy a broad swath of the Northern Hemisphere and occur in nearly every habitat type including the Alaskan tundra and remote Arctic ice floes, high deserts of the Great Basin, tropical beaches in central American, and farm fields in the western Carolinas.  While walking through the hummocky, heath-dominated tundra near Bristol Bay, Alaska one mid-spring day, I stumbled upon a large raven’s nest in a lone stunted spruce tree.  The wind-bent tree seemed to groan under the weight of the massive pile of sticks and vegetation composing the low-lying nest.  The raven attending the nest turned in my direction and kept a wary and warning eye on my movements.   Raven construct their nests  from sticks, bark, grasses and a cornucopia of other items such as fur, trash, bones and whatever the birds can find, borrow or pilfer.

The Willamette Valley has numerous ravens.  They occasionally feed on the carcasses of dead sheep in grazing pastures, and scavenge left over hotdogs outside of football stadiums.  While kayaking down the Willamette River, I occasionally see a lone, large black sentinel perched on the limb of an ancient  cottonwood guarding the river shores and waiting for something to happen.

Consider Beginnings …

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“Hweat we Gar-Dena in gear-dagum” is the way the brilliant and dark Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf launches us out into its tale. “So. The Spear Danes in days gone by. . .”  Casually, we start in mid-stream, as if we’ve joined a narrative already in full swing whose birth we did not witness, but here we are; the time is upon us. Who knows what has gone before, who knows what follows once this particular narrative fades. How did we come to this point? The Beowulf poet knows that wherever we are, we are always in mid-stream, trying to hold on to what seems endlessly passing, unsure of how we came to be here.  What do we do about it?

Beowulf is atmospheric in the extreme—the product of a culture with few pleasures beyond celebrating what brief stability it could force upon an unrelenting world of change.“Men were drinking wine/ at that rare feast; how could they know fate,/the grim shape of things to come,/ the threat looming over many thanes/ as night approached. . ..  “ Dark days, few lights, little warmth but what they generated around their necessary fires. They struggled to preserve what they made, what they had kept back from the sweep of men’s doing, what they had pulled out of the perpetual erosion of nature and time. The Angles had more immediate concerns than preserving the wilderness, home of Grendel and his more fearsome mother; these two, and others like them, were keepers of the fens and outcasts from the circle of warmth cast by men’s hearths. In fact the forest itself is forbidding, its wetlands threatening and haunted. It is to be cut back, cleared, or avoided:

“A few miles from [the hall]
a frost stiffened wood waits and keeps watch
above a mere; the overhanging bank
is a maze of tree-roots mirrored on its surface.
At night there, something uncanny happens:
The water burns. And the mere bottom
Has never been sounded by the sons of men.
. . . .That is no good place.
When wind blows up and stormy weather
Makes clouds scud and the skies weep
Our of its depths a dirty surge
Is pitched towards the heavens.”
(trans. Seamus Heaney)

Yet the Danes whom Beowulf rescues, and the Angles who produced the poem about that rescue are indeed like us; they strove to preserve their way of life, their joy.  When we hear that plaintive note—“So”—it tells us more than we want to know about our efforts. We start right where we are; here, now. We can’t change what’s gone before but we can play our part in what comes next; this has always been our horizon.

So. Beowulf arrives to deal with the threat to the great hall, a threat to the very lives of its tribe. After his success and the hall is once again safe, “Happiness came back, the hall was thronged, and a banquet set forth; black night fell and covered them in darkness.” We imagine the scene—the warm hall, the company, the food and wine. . .  and once again hear the note of elegy this poem is known for; it celebrates the sense of something passing, something we do not fully grasp but which we register all the same, and the joyful but temporary restoration of that which we would retain if only we could. Cherish what is worth preserving—it may not last. We’re prepared to learn that this hall will burn and its tribe will be scattered, as others have been.

Now, I am certainly not the type to dwell on morbid thoughts, least of all at the onset of another New Year, but when members of Greenbelt were gathered recently at my house for our annual holiday party, quite literally around the fire—the thegns and ealdormen represented by the board and staff, the king obviously being Ethan or Michael (or their wives—if you know Beowulf you’ll know what I mean) . . . – I won’t finish that particular pathway –but the point here is that we, in some way a representative body of the greater Greenbelt tribe were gathered around a fire with dinner and wine and conversation.  Passing the mead-horn, thumping our shields, tossing orts to the dogs. All was wonderfully convivial- -if such harmony of persons and purpose should prevail elsewhere we’d all be swimming in warm surf.  What heroic talk flew through our particular hall really took wing after Michael’s invitation for us—the staff and board and their spearmen—to reflect on the moment, to celebrate what has happened in the past year and to peer forward into the unlit future and say how some of this plays out in the next few years. We all wanted to say thank you for the warmth, for the success we have now before us, for the particular brilliance of the staff in transforming Greenbelt into the brightest star in the constellation.

The future is, as always, pretty unfathomable and while it holds no Grendels it has already thrown down challenges we have not yet fathomed.  We, like Hrothgar and the Danes, aim to preserve what we have here. And our territory grows. So far our hall remains warm and bright—we’re closing in on Bald Hill Farm, and have already closed on a number of signature properties with others in the offing. Beowulf ran it alone, fought his monsters alone and in the end, died alone (sniff. . . that part always makes me pause, as they raise on the headland  a monument so large sailors could see it from far at sea.)  All very heroically– Grendel is vanquished, his mother too, and the dragon to boot. But time carries all away; the era of solitary heroes has ended. More to the point, unlike Beowulf, we have allies and hundreds and hundreds of unsung spearmen from other watersheds and distant drainages. We go on. Our efforts at pushing back the darkness (which we did very effectively that night) are perhaps less martial than Beowulf’s wrestling with Grendel’s mother yet are nonetheless part of that epic we all seem so deeply invested in: making this place fit for us and our kind.  In a wonderful twist, we now struggle to preserve the very fens and dark pools that so terrified the Saxons and Danes.  If only they knew what later folks would do to this earth, they might have set up a conservation easement or two themselves.

Hweat. So.

Forts, Chesapeake Bay and Hurricanes

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Last November, my sisters, brother and I gathered in North Carolina to clean out my mother’s town house in Greensboro.  The townhouse was recently sold because my mother had moved into a senior living facility.  We spent most of three days rummaging through family history.  My mother kept all our letters, postcards, pictures and childhood writings.  A number of photos were of my father who died in 1984.  He joined the military in the 1930s, retired a full colonel in 1964 with a full parade conducted at Fort Bragg to honor his long military career.  One of his last posts was as commander of Fort Story, Virginia, a military installation that was used to train soldiers in amphibious landing warfare.  Fort Story rests on the sandy shores of the Chesapeake Bay next to Virginia Beach, near the first landing site of the long-suffering Virginia Company colonists in 1607 before they established Jamestown.   Our first year of three spent on the post was in a ramshackled ancient beach house next to the two Cape Henry Lighthouses.  The oldest dated from 1792 and was the first lighthouse authorized by the U.S. Government and the first federal construction project under the constitution.

The Pope children played among the sand dunes at the foot of the light houses and listened in some apprehension and awe to the deep foghorn from the newest lighthouse as it cast its bright beam seaward during late foggy nights.  Our second home on Fort Story was a three story brick house perched next to a seawall that protected the structure from the waves of Chesapeake Bay.  We occupied the first two floors and a weather station, with a separate entrance, filled the top third floor.  The weathermen came and went somewhat mysteriously, and I cannot remember why we shared this house with them.  My father occasionally called up to them inquiring about tomorrow’s weather.  On either side of the house, were long deserted sandy beaches.   I thought it a great honor to be the first on the beach at the beginning of the day and would often scour the shores in the early morning hours to find any interesting animals or items that washed up during nighttime high tides.  Massive aircraft carriers would steam by our house on their way to the giant naval base in Norfolk.  My brother and I would wait until they passed and then rush out to body surf the large in-coming waves they created.  A pilot ship that provided guides to cargo or naval vessels sailing to Chesapeake Bay ports was posted just off-shore.  Pilots in suits, hats and briefcases were carried on the backs of stout seaman through the surf in front of our house to a waiting longboat and then ferried to the offshore pilot ship.  One night, the longboat deposited two drunk and confused sailors near our front door.   In 1960, we were evacuated to my father’s headquarters at Fort Story during Hurricane Donna.   The front doors of the building were braced with 2X4s and I remember peering through the inset glass windows at a blurred maelstrom of wind, rain and flying debris.   When we returned to our house, the beaches were filled with seaweed, broken wood from docks, glass containers, and numerous drowned wharf rats that lived among the boulders of the seawall.   My father disliked rats having encountered giant jungle rodents while living and fighting in New Guinea during the Second World War and was pleased with the thought that now few would boldly venture into our front yard while he was grilling steaks.

When our family returned from Austria after a posting to Salzburg, we moved to Fort Monroe, also on the Chesapeake Bay.  The fort was constructed in 1834 and was a critical military installation held by the Federals during the Civil War.    We lived within the moat walls of the old fortress in a house previously occupied by Robert E. Lee prior to the Civil War.  The original, large house during Lee’s time had been divided into three units that were residences for military officers and their families.  Our section was the former slave quarters during Lee’s occupancy.  One-hundred and fifty years ago residents of Fort Monroe could very likely hear and see the cannon fire as the ironclads CSS Virginia and USS Monitor bounced shells off of each other’s thick iron skins in the Hampton Roads off-shore of the Fort.  The fortress became known as freedom fortress because any slave from the south that reached the installation during the war would be free.  It also housed the imprisoned Confederate President Jefferson Davis in its casemates in 1865-6. My brother, sisters and I thought the damp, cramped casemate quarters were filled with the skeletons and ghosts of civil war prisoners.  In 1954, Hurricane Hazel crashed through the mid-Atlantic states including Virginia and flooded many low lying areas along Chesapeake Bay.  I cannot remember much of the storm except down trees within the moat.  The Fort is no longer a military base but has been designated a historic monument.

During the fall and winter, large storms frequently batter the Oregon and Washington coasts and occasional create high winds in the Willamette Valley.  They often recreate the shorelines, scouring sand from one beach and filling another.  They push giant tree trunks onshore and inundate estuaries during high tides.  I remember hiking near Glacier Peak with my dog, Isaac, in the early 1980s.  We repeatedly crossed and re-crossed a stream on giant ancient fir trees that had been push over during Cascade Mountain wind storms.  The ancient logs often redirected flows and created quiet pools inhabited by young fish.  Occasionally we found scat left on the center of these logs by a coyote as it made its way across the natural bridge.  For the last few weeks, while working on my computer, I occasionally would see giant trees floating down the high-flowing Willamette River.  They were likely felled during some earlier fall or winter wind storm along the shores of the river or some tributary and eventually picked up by inundating waters and carried past my window.

Darkness, Darkness

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The autumnal equinox is a distant memory, and fading fast. We wake in dark, we dine in dark and all the short day gains is rain. This is no time for feeble hearts; we’re winding down the hours toward the celestial nadir. If you’re up for a bare-knuckle version, try Donne’s “Nocturne on St. Lucy’s Day” (13 December):

TIS the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s,
Lucy’s, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks ;
The sun is spent, and now his flask
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays ;
The world’s whole sap is sunk ;

Naturally, Lucy is associated with light (lux, lucis)—and her feast is celebrated primarily among the northern Europeans for whom light at this time of year is far more precious (“scarce seven hours” of daylight, in Donne’s England) than it is among us here in lower latitudes. Even Nietzche, no cream-puff, lamented  that “Winter, a bad guest, sitteth with me at home; blue are my hands with his friendly handshaking. . . .” And he will be with us for some time—if we can’t exactly take a cold peek into this coming April, we can certainly look back to last February when the Marys River wandered through Philomath for a few days before returning to its bed.

Too much water isn’t the problem, nor is our fabled 100 days of gray. These are our birthrights as Oregonians, something to be treasured along with our disdain for umbrellas, galoshes, and whining blogs posts about the coming of winter. After all, no rain= no snow, no rivers, no skiing, no rafting, and of course, no anything else except perhaps moonlight on rocks with no one to see it. But the dimming of the day—that at least calls for a farewell. Everyone can always use a little more light. We lived for years in northern Scotland (around 56 degrees latitude); summers were pure grace—so long and so bright we had to tape black construction paper over the windows to trick our son into sleeping. There wasn’t much night at all. We took long bike rides late into the evening and came back near midnight with just a few stars showing and the west hills still glowing. Once upon a time in Orkney (59 degrees north, where you can see Viking graffiti in the walls of Maes Howe and the almost perfectly intact Neolithic village of Skara Brae) we observed the mid-summer solstice by going out in a leaking rowboat fishing for mackerel with the otherwise sane teen-aged sons of the woman who ran the B and B: the sun just skimmed the horizon, which was wonderful and satisfying enough since we caught exactly zero fish. The main joy was that we weren’t swept off towards Iceland by the prodigious tides that curl around the islands. Actually, my job (aside from not catching fish) was to watch the horizon and when the current had brought us in line with two distant rocks, we had to pull for home or we’d be gone. So I watched the rocks with particular diligence. The next day (which, of course, started at around 1am) we stuck to land; wandering around the Ring of Brodgar in the limpid light was positively enchanting. The sun seemed everywhere, and tireless.

But each year when December hit you could feel the sun toss in the towel. Shadows started out long and stayed long. Everyone pulled on another sweater, drew the chairs closer to the grate, and hunkered down for what we all knew would be several months of inside time. Perfect for graduate students, of course. But hard on those from warmer climes. A colleague of mine, from Guyana where no one in his gene pool had ever been cold let alone seen a day that brought only 5 hours of light, actually wept at the Spring equinox. And we all pulled off at least one layer of sweater—the world seemed light and lean again.

 But that time is not now—now we retreat into the mead-hall, by the fire, out of the rain. And sitting there on late afternoons talking to our dog as the light melts away we are drawn into thinking on other seasons, the passing of other times. Winter is a time for musing on how we ourselves, unlike the natural world around us, have but one spring, one fall.  Bede says it best:

“Thus, O king, the present life of men on earth, in comparison with that time which is unknown to us, appears to me to be as if, when you are sitting at supper with your ealdormen and thegns in the wintertime, and a fire is lighted in the midst, and the hall warmed, but everywhere outside the storms of wintry rain and snow are raging, a sparrow should come and fly rapidly through the hall, coming in at one door and immediately going out at the other.  Whilst it is inside, it is not touched by the storm of winter, but yet, that tiny space of time gone in a moment, from winter at once returning to winter– it is lost to our sight.  Thus this life of men appears for a little while; but of what is to follow, or of what went before, we are entirely ignorant.”  (Ecclesiastical History Book II, cap. XII)

We are reminded, in the midst of our warm, bright lives or even in the midst of our not-so-warm and bright lives, that we are brief. Look anywhere you chose, and the evidence points to passing. It is often a disturbing thought. We needn’t celebrate it so darkly as, say, Horace (“pulvis et umbra sumus”—we are dust and shade) who seemed to draw positive delight in pointing this out, but at least we notice. I keep thinking about those poor souls living through an Orkney winter at Skara Brae. They must have been the hardiest hunkers in Britain, or what would become Britain after Scotland grabbed in default of a dowry—tucked inside along the surfline, burning the ancient Caledonian pines. Winter must have passed slowly, for all the brevity of their lives. They would know exactly what Bede was talking about, except for the fairly major part about the hall and the windows (look at their houses—Hobbits live in palaces compared to these). But the fireside, yes; the mead (probably); and looking forward to the equinox when the storms of winter are passing, definitely. Too bad they didn’t have Christmas lights—the tiny white ones would have looked wonderful draped along their sod roofs. So off we go into the dark. As I write this, I glance outside at several cords of split and stacked oak. Bring it on.

Moose

Blog, wildlife

My friend, Pat Mathews, who worked as a wildlife biologist for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife in Enterprise, spoke with some passion about the emergence of moose in northeast Oregon.   The long-legged ungulates likely wandered into Oregon from Washington and Idaho and decided to stay.   He thought that perhaps up to 50 moose live in Oregon.  Early explorers and naturalists in Oregon don’t mention moose so it is probably a recent migrate to the state and a subspecies (Alces alces shirasi) typically found in Wyoming, Idaho and Washington.   Moose are in the cervid family in the order Artiodactyla or even-toed hoofed mammals like deer, caribou and elk, but unlike their cousins, they are generally solitary creatures that inhabit woodlands particularly those with mosaics of aspen, willows and marshes.  Moose are an old world animal that likely emigrated 70,000 or so years ago from Eurasia across the Bering land bridge during the  late Wisconsinian glaciation stage of the Pleistocene to unglaciated refugia in Alaska and then further into North America during interglacial periods.   The earliest known ancestral species for moose is Libralces gallicus, also known as the French Moose, which sounds like a delicious chocolate pudding.  The French Moose was enormous with 7 foot long antlers and a massive body.  Despite its impressive size the French Moose had a little nose compared with the wonderfully elongated snout of modern moose.  My “Wild Mammals of North America” describes the famous moose snout as a “long muzzle with a large and pendulous nose.”    Evolution has created a particularly interesting animal in the moose.  Their hefty torso rides upon four extraordinarily long-slender legs giving them a slightly disjunct appearance;  part long-limbed dancer, part  heavy-weight wrestler. Moose are browsers of shrubs and trees, particularly selecting willows in the winter and succulent marsh plants in the summer.

Moose are great swimmers. While living on Mount Desert Island in Maine, I occasionally would take small commuter ferries to offshore islands.  The captains of these small boats spoke of seeing moose swimming with their noses poking about the waves in the open ocean between the islands.  They also apparently dive under the water to pluck succulent vegetation from the bottom of lakes and ponds.  Moose have a long and interesting history with humans.   Pleistocene hunters obviously relished the thought of roasting large moose steaks and pursued them with great vigor.  As forests were cleared and marshes drained in Europe the moose disappeared from many countries and by the 20th century only a few populations remained in Scandinavia and Russia.   Subarctic hunters in North American who consumed mostly animals for food hunted moose whenever and wherever they could find them.   They represented an abundant source of meat for northern woodland tribes who hunted the animals with great gustatory interest.   Moose provided a dazzling array of fashion options.  Native American’s made capes, belts, gloves, dresses, hat sticks, hunting frocks, pants, shirts, tunics, jackets, hats, moccasins, hair roaches, aprons, and a host of other clothing accoutrements from moose hides.   Tlingit, Kutchin, Tanaina, Maliseet, and Eastern Abenaki tribes covered wood frame boats with moose hides.  Bones were used for knife handles, hide beamers, gaming dice, fishing awls and spears, and conjuring.  Moose hooves apparently cured or controlled epilepsy.   Moose pelts were part of the Euro-American/Native American fur trade particularly in Canada.  Interestingly, despite consuming many different animal species during their journey, the Lewis and Clark expedition did not harvest one moose during the two-years of their travels.   Moose were a highly valued hunting animal by Euro-American explorers, fur-traders and settlers for their meat and fur, and developed into a cultural and political icon when Theodore Roosevelt’s  Progressive political party became popularly known as the Bull Moose Party. Moose horns and heads graced the walls of many a grand hunting lodge hall.  Many attempts were made to domesticate moose.  Photos from the late 1800s and early 1900s show moose pulling carriages, sleighs, and timber out of forests.  Apparently males were somewhat harder to train as working animals particularly because they lost interest in everything but finding females during rutting season.

Moose and wolves have a long evolutionary connection.  Both occupy subarctic regions and occur in similar ecosystems.  If available, wolves eat lots of moose as demonstrated on Isle Royale, Michigan.  Predator (wolves) and prey (moose) dynamics on Isle Royale have been studied since 1958, when David Mech began his classic research on wolf/moose interactions.  The site offered a unique example of an ecosystem that contained only one ungulate prey species and one major predator.  If there are lots of moose, they are a favored meal for wolves.  Adult moose are not easy to kill, so most of  the mortality is among calves.   During rut, bull moose search miles for females and often signal their interest in finding a mate by display thrashing (brush beating) and hiccupping.  They may also clash with bulls of equal rank in ritualistic sparring behaviors that include; a lateral display of antlers,  intense periods of eyeballing their opponents, clinching of antlers, and perhaps, ultimately a shoving match with the vanquished bull leaving the field.

I have had two encounters with moose.  The first was near Naknek, Alaska and the second in Glacier Bay, Alaska.  While hiking one spring evening on hummocky tundra on a bluff overlooking the mouth of the Naknek River,  my attention was drawn to a thicket of shrubs  at the edge of the bluff.  Several willow branches were moving.   My first concern was that I would encounter a brown bear hungrily searching for food after a long hibernating winter.  I stopped and peered intently into the brush and noticed the silhouette of a large brown snout.  It was a moose quietly browsing on the stems of a willow. In the mid-1980s, I sailed up the inter-coastal waterways of Alaska in a 65’ ketch.  We spent a few days sailing into Glacier Bay stopping at quiet coves in this scenic Bay.  One morning as the sun was rising, I ascended into the cockpit to spend a few meditative moments by myself.  I looked across to the shoreline and noticed a moose cow and calf standing in a marsh plucking aquatic vegetation from the bottom of the wetlands.  The cow must have caught my odor because she leisurely turned her head and gazed in my direction pausing a moment to think if I was a threat.  A few minutes later she guided her calf into a nearby stand of trees.