Bill Kell discusses his views on the changing flora and fauna of Innisfil over the past 100 years. Interviewed by Marj Mossman and Kathryn Schoutsen on 26 June 2016. Full transcript is as follows: Bill: Just because my degree is in agriculture and my passion is nature. And how much in my eighty-one years the environment around us has changed. Now when the first white man came here the country was over crowded with passenger pigeons and that’s probably what they lived on the first while because they were pretty easy to catch and they were plentiful. I have a newspaper clipping out of one of the Toronto newspapers telling people for a Saturday outing you go down to the train in Toronto, you get off at either Gilford or Lefroy, you take the jitney out to, whatever some name hunter… the name anyway didn’t mean anything to me but it would be some place between Lefroy and Gilford and you get the jitney to take you out from the station and you go with a pillowcase and a club about this long in the Fall when the beechnuts are plentiful, in this place there were a lot of beechnuts, and the pigeons are so full they can hardly move and you club pigeons ‘til you get your pillowcase full and then you go back to the train and you go home and you got enough meat that you can preserve to keep it going all winter. Marj: No kidding. Bill: That was the Toronto newspaper. Marj: Have you ever tasted pigeon? Bill: Yeah, no, these are passenger pigeons. And this was 1907 or 1908 and by 1915 they were good as extinct. And by 1921 they were extinct. Marj: Imagine. Bill: They were so plentiful nobody cared about them. And when the early settlers came there were wild turkeys. And they disappeared out of Southern Ontario except a few right down at a turkey point in Lake Erie. And about 1990 the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources brought 500 from down in Appalachia in the States and let them loose, two places, along [?] Nottawasaga at the edge of the escarpment and down in the Kendal Hills at the east end of the Oak Ridges Marine and within about 10 years we were overrun with them. And there are still lots if you need any just put in a new order. They’re hard to kill but they’re, I think the population in the last five or ten years has levelled off, but they all of a sudden they are just all over. And they’re hungry. They like crops and they live in our bush in the winter time. And you can see lots of tracks and lots of droppings. Marj: How do you mean they’re hard to kill? Bill: Their feathers are, if you hit them with ordinary bird shells, the feathers are hard enough the pellets will bounce off. Pardon the death and pardon the spooky. And if you have a license you can only get the males. So you do your bird call and they, where you think they’re hidden in the trees and they come out and they think there is going to be some excitement and then you try and shoot them. And I think the people that sell the hunting supplies get more than the people buy it, but that’s another story. But they’ve come back that much that soon. What I was going to say most wild animals live at the edge of the forest and go out into the brush and into the meadows to eat. So there are more deer in Southern Ontario than there are when the first white men came. Because the forest was too dense and they need and not only deer, but the turkeys and a lot of the rabbits and so on have that same pattern. Now there used to be quite a few red foxes around here that lived on rabbits and the mice and whatever. And about 1950 the first coyotes came in and they had never been in Southern Ontario in human memory. And I think they came down from the prairies through Northern Ontario. The ones that are here now are bigger than the prairie ones and they probably have a little bit of dog crossbred into them. But there weren’t any here until the 1950s and then all of a sudden they were all over Southern Ontario. Just that quick and people were scared that the kids weren’t going to be safe going to school because these things were following the kids to school. And my brother was in Ottawa at that time and people were from the west that were, “well so what? Coyotes have been following kids to school as long as there’s been kids.” They’re very curious creatures. It’s been a bit of a game like cutting hay and they are out in the field with me. Any time I cut the head off a rabbit or a mouse they are there to clean it up. It’s good going. They’ll be out in the field with me for an hour or two. I don’t threaten them and they don’t threaten me. Marj: And they’re just there? Bill: They are just there. I’m helping them and I guess they’re helping me by, but I mean when they came out the foxes as good as disappeared. We used to have a lot of jack rabbits. And I haven’t seen one for forty years, maybe. Marj: They are quite big aren’t they? Bill: Yeah they are some kind of a hare rather than a little, whatever you call the, little bunny rabbits. We got one that lives in our backyard and eats the bark off our trees and whatever. But I haven’t seen them in years and that’s what happened to them. Birds. The last time I saw an eastern bluebird was 1993. There was a pair on our farm and it was a very cold spring. Bluebirds catch insects and I’m sure that they laid their eggs and the eggs hatched too soon and there weren’t enough insects and that’s what happened. But haven’t seen one in Innisfil, I don’t know, for a long time. Right now the people are worrying about nesting grounds for bobolinks and meadowlarks who lay their eggs in hay fields. And if I wasn’t here I might be cutting hay today and disrupting their nests. So the province in their wisdom decided that the birds were more important than feeding the world and you weren’t allowed if you’ve seen a bobolink you weren’t allowed to cut the hay. And then they put a two-year extension on; I don’t know what will happen. Marj: Is it because their nests are on the ground? Bill: Their nests are on the ground in the long grass, yes. So do ducks. I uncovered a turkey nest in the field one day. And as it happened my wheels hadn’t crushed the eggs. And I went back the next day and they were still there. And I went back the day after and some raccoon or something had gone in and smashed every one. Something. But I was talking about the birds and the animals who, a lot of them, have to have that meadowland and when this was all virgin forest there weren’t many here anyway. Same thing with the monarch butterflies. Monarch butterflies live only on members of the milkweed family, some of the cousins, but mostly the basic. And when this was forest there weren’t any number of monarch butterflies here anyway. So, is it our fault they’ve disappeared or is it our fault they came in the first place? I mean everything is in a state of flow. When they started growing a lot soy beans around here the aphid population went way up and they brought in these Japanese ladybugs, which you have seen, that bite people - the old fashioned five spot, seven spot, nine spot ladybugs didn’t. And they ate aphids, but they didn’t reproduce fast enough. So that was brought in by science to control the aphids. And in large measure it does work. Praying mantises came in about 1950 to control grasshoppers. And we never really had a problem with grasshoppers anyway; they’re worse in the dry years because there’s some mold affects them when it’s damp. And they are still here and they came in and didn’t do much. You remember when purple loosestrife, it was going to kill all the wetlands in Ontario and people went out and picked it, and I’ve picked it. I haven’t gone along our road this year to look, but it hasn’t spread any amount. And velvet leaf was another weed that was going to come in. So everything changes and it finds a level or a new level. Our elm trees back in the late ‘60s we had a, here, a very bad ice storm one winter that, the elm bark beetle lives where there is broken bark and they carry Dutch elm disease virus and within two or three years the whole, essentially all our elm trees had died except for a few very small ones. And those ones have died since, but we still have some. And maybe there will be some resistance building up, but they’re still, the younger ones are still dying. Now a few years ago there were a lot of English chestnut trees in Ontario, especially in South Western Ontario, but by 1900 they all died and they are trying to reintroduce them. There are some left south of the Great Lakes, but not in Ontario. Some of the old houses have chestnut trim around the doors and beautiful wood. Marj: And the elm trees were beautiful; they were huge. Bill: Yeah, well they not huge anymore, but there’s a few. They aren’t quite all gone. Beech trees have some fungus in the bark. Somebody said to me about ten years ago that they were going to be gone in ten years, but they are going. We don’t know if they are all going or if they are going to start. We have this emerald ash borer that they are worried about right now. And they may decimate them. Our maple trees, I’m not sure, but the ones that are [on] the third line there all those young ones, everything, are dying. Might be fumes from the road because they are worse near the road than they are far, like at the back of the farm. So when they go something else will come, I guess. Spruce budworms were a big thing. And they sprayed acres and acres in the Maritimes with 2,4,5-T, agent orange, that they used in Vietnam to kill the trees so they could see the enemy soldiers. A lot of people died from cancer from 2,4,5-T. I used a bit. I’m here. So there’s a whole lot of things happening and changing. Oh I didn’t do barn swallows. Used to be every farm had a barn, every barn had animals, every barn’s animals had a manure pile, every manure pile had insects. Barn swallows catch insects in flight to feed themselves and their young. Fascinating if you watch them. Once on the 8th Andrew and I were watching, about every 90 seconds the same bird would come back to the nest with another insect, mother and father both, but they were doing them that fast. And barns are disappearing, manure piles are disappearing, the swallows are disappearing and the pigeons have no place. Isn’t so many years ago that every town had pigeons on the main street and they hated them. Barrie had hired however many companies to clean out and they didn’t do it, but as soon as you got rid of the feed mills and grain elevators you got rid of the pigeons in town. So there’s still some pigeons, but there aren’t near as many. And there are still barn swallows and they are getting fewer and fewer. And I have never in my career seen a barn swallow nest that wasn’t in a manmade building. The cliff swallows and the bank swallows, bank swallows go out in a bank of sand, cliff swallows might be under a barn might be out, but barn swallows go in barns. So it keeps changing. And I wouldn’t say that the total of either plants or insects or animals is lower, it’s just changing.
