In the early 1930s, well after he left office as Prime Minister, Sir Robert Borden began the habit of writing private notes to file about the events of the day. They public did not become aware of these memorandums until Borden’s family chose to publish a collection of them in the book Letters to Limbo. The title was chosen because Borden created a fictious newspaper, the Limbo Times, to write his letters to and memos for.
On this date in 1933 the past PM had his bird-watching activities on his mind. His memo on the birds in his life is below.
Sir Robert Borden: About four years ago we erected a bird-house with twenty-four apartments designed as an abode for purple martens which, however, have never seen fit to occupy it. But tree swallows have occasionally made their home therein. We very seldom saw them, as the male seems to bring food to the sitting female only twice a day — about ten or eleven in the morning and about five in the afternoon. We never saw the young birds, as by some mysterious method they always succeeded in departing without coming under our observation.
In this respect their practice is in exact antithesis to that of the robins who’s young are very much in evidence after leaving the nest and whose insistent demands for food continue several days thereafter. Until the occasion I am about to mention I never saw a tree swallow alight on the ground…
One Sunday afternoon I was conducting some friends along Pleasance Walk when one of them observed the bird which proved to be a black-crowned night heron. The same evening as I went to shut the south gates of the avenue, the same bird, or its mate, flew out of the shrubbery within three yards of where I was standing.
I have identified at least twenty-five different species of birds, most of which nest on our property. A person with more knowledge than I possess probably might identify at least forty species...
During my visit to Echo Beach in August 1932…to which I have already alluded in a previous letter, I was accompanied by my nephew Henry Borden and his wife and by J. Philip Bill who has a great knowledge of birds. During our sojourn there Bill identified some thirty species…I had an excellent view of the oven bird and the winter wren which I had never seen before.
On a previous occasion at Echo Beach, Bill and I went far into the woods for the purpose of sighting a pileated woodpecker. We heard his notes and could almost locate his habitat but we failed to see him. A year or two afterwards, while fishing on Pickwick Lake, I heard a sound as of someone using an axe or a hatchet in the bush. Upon inquiry of the guide I was told it was a woodchuck. I asked what a woodchuck was like and I was told 'just a woodchuck.'
As the guide spoke, out flashed a pileated woodpecker which I recognized. Our bird colony at Glensmere (Robert and Lady Borden’s Ottawa home) has been much disrupted and sometimes decimated by the presence and attacks of crows and bronze grackles who devour the eggs and sometimes the young of other birds, while the grackles themselves suffer from the crows. It is interesting to see a group of grackles pressing to attack a thieving and cowardly crow; in like manner the robins attack the grackles. I have never seen the flickers do this; but perhaps the grackles may dread their sharp and powerful bills.
This year the flickers have become wonderfully tame; and they approach as close to one as do the robins. They seem to have no fear but five or six years ago they were extremely shy. But the most confiding of all is the hummingbird. We have an urn filled with flowers on our verandah; and very frequently, while sitting within a foot of this urn, I have seen a hummingbird, motionless in the air, supported by wings moving so rapidly that the eye cannot detect the motion, gathering honey within two feet of where I was sitting.
Sometimes birds are killed by flying against a window opposite another on the other side of the house. One day when I was sitting on the verandah some object struck the window within a yard of me and fell upon the tiles. I picked it up and discovered it was a robin apparently dead. However, after I had held it in my hand for about two minutes it suddenly revived and flew away.
Many years ago, while I was arranging a pile of branches for burning, a wren, seated on the other side of the pile, discoursed to me for about half an hour, evidently dwelling upon his domestic affairs, upon the fine family that he had raised and his hope that another family would be in existence before the summer was over. It was most amusing and one would have said that he was really talking to me.
This spring at Echo Beach while I was sitting at the boathouse near Home Lake, no less than seven wrens alighted in the sand within two feet of where I was sitting, one of them not more than two inches away. After a little they flew away and then returned.
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.