Monthly Archives: January 2013

A MAGNIFICENT BUCK DEER PHOTOGRAPH (January 21/13)

Over 30,000 Nova Scotians hunt deer annually; arguably, all of those hunters would’ve liked to have been in Bob Cote’s blind the day a magnificent buck deer approached it.

Cote had built a ground blind just off the side of a well used deer trail and was in it about 15 minutes when the buck walked up.  Cote saw right away it was a splendid deer and he shot it …. with his digital Nikon SLR …. capturing an image that might be the culmination of 10 years of wildlife photography.

As Cotes tells it, this was quite an adventure.  The deer got close and stopped, perhaps instinctively realising something was awry.  Before it was aware Cote was in the blind, he was able to take close up photographs, one of them the beautiful head on shot accompanying this column.

It was a feisty animal, Cotes says, and it wasn’t the typical situation where a deer realises humans are nearby and take off in a panic.  “I took nearly 40 photos before he actually pinpointed me,” Cote says.  “Then he stomped the ground and charged towards me.  After he got within 30 feet or so he stopped and stomped the ground again.  At that point he turned, jumped over a huge brush pile and was gone.”

The image of that belligerent buck deer, noble and so full of life, has been captured forever; and when I look at this wonderful photograph, I realise its image wouldn’t be preserved today if someone had been in the blind with a rifle instead of a camera.  It would then have become a meat animal, its head mounted, a few hunter-with-dead-deer photographs snapped, shown around, and eventually forgotten.

Sad isn’t it, that it’s much easier to go out and kill a deer than capture its image with a camera.  But that’s the way it is.

As for Bob Cote, he tells me he’s been capturing wildlife and outdoor scenery with a camera for some 10 years, preserving images he’s proud to have displayed at various venues in the Annapolis Valley.  “I found this was my destiny, photographing wildlife,” he says.  “I started out photographing anything that caught my eye but soon found taking pictures of people wasn’t for me.  I like shooting pictures of animals, flowers and beautiful scenery.”

In his early days Cote learned how to run newspaper presses at The Advertiser in Kentville and at its sister paper in Port Hawkesbury.  He returned to Kentville circa 1980 and worked at a local feed mill for 21 years until it closed.  It was around this period that he began to dabble with photography, a hobby he later turned into a full time occupation.  Today he carries his camera almost everywhere he goes.  “You never know when that special shot will appear,” he says.

A variety of Bob Cote’s photographs can be viewed at www.bobcotesgallery.ca.

“HISTORY” IN OLDTIME NEWSPAPER CLIPPINGS (January 14/13)

The clippings came from attics, basements and closets; and some, I was told, came from the walls of houses being renovated or torn down.

All the clippings, given to me by readers, are from newspapers published over the years in Kentville – The Western Chronicle, The Orchardist and The Advertiser – and the earliest is dated March 12, 1890.  I suppose in the truest sense of the word “history,” there‘s little that’s historical about these clippings.  They’re simply interesting records of the times, and mundane evidence of what life was like when our great grandparents and grandparents were in their prime.

Keeping that in mind, I’ll tell you what I found interesting as well as mundane in those clippings.   All the clippings, which came from late 19th century to early 20th century editions of the three papers, seem to indicate an obsession with bile, bowels, boils and bibles (but perhaps not in that order).

I reached this conclusion from the numerous patent medicine advertisements and the temperance sermons I found in the papers.  In the October 24th, 1911, issue of The Orchardist, for example, almost a third of a news page was given over to medicinal ads and write-ups about cures for common ailments. Prominent in the two line medicinal ads was our own Minards Liniment. That same issue announced the commencement of Acadia University with the boast that “in 1891 Acadia graduated 43 (!) and this year promises to surpass that.”  In comparison, Acadia awarded 700 degrees at last year’s convocation.

We must have been on the verge of the electronic age around 1911.  In the October 24th issue the Nova Scotia Telephone Company advised the public that the telephone is “no longer a luxury, it is a necessity.”

Now, on to more of the mundane, the all-revealing news clips and announcements:

Travelling dentist – In the Western Chronicle, March 12, 1890, Dentist J. E. Mulloney advised the public he would be in Kentville every Monday and in Wolfville every Saturday.  Over a decade later, in 1906, Mulloney had given up travelling and is now established on Webster Street in Kentville.  Mulloney announced in a February issue of the Western Chronicle that “teeth that fit” was his specialty.  In the same issue, mention is made of a proposal to establish a Canada-wide “messenger pigeon system.”

It appears that the popular community bean and strawberry suppers are far from being a modern day social event.  In the February, 1906, Western Chronicle the Coldbrook Mutual Improvement Society announced that a “bean supper and musical and literary entertainment” given by its members the previous week was very successful.  Beans and music!  Now that’s a good combination, if you’ll pardon the inference.

In a September, 1903, issue of The Advertiser, editor R. G. Harris laments that  mail has been going astray, causing “confusion and inconvenience” due to many “town and communities” in Kings and Hants County having the same place names.   In the same issue, is an announcement in the Hantsport news that Capt.  T. W. McKinley will launch his schooner Bluenose there the following week.  In this issue, McDougall’s Pharmacy in Kentville offers Kodak’s Brownie Cameras for $1 and $2.

While it was dubbed a Kentville newspaper, The Western Chronicle made an effort to present news of nearby areas, such as Berwick and Canning.  In its October 16, 1919, issue the paper announced the opening of the “Movie Theatre of Bligh and Woodworth” in Berwick.  There’s a Canning page in many of the early 19th century Western Chronicles with community notes giving birth, deaths and visitations (of the earthly kind) plus editorial comments by the “Old Man of Canning.”

Oh, yes.  The paper had it “Old Man of Berwick” as well, and he was bluntly critical of the “unchristian goings on” in the town.

AS A NEW YEAR BEGINS: READER FEEDBACK (January 8/13)

Looking back at the past year, I see I have a lot of readers to thank for their help in writing this column.  So, thanks to everyone for your tips, for providing information on various historical topics and for letting me interview you.  Everything is much appreciated and I look forward to talking with many of you as the year rolls on.

Now, a short review of reader responses to recent columns:

In the column about two rare historical books, Clarke’s railway history and Milner’s Minas Basin essays, I wrote I was aware of only four copies in existence of the railway book.

Thanks to Louis Comeau, the author of Historic Kentville, I can up that total by two more copies.  Louis writes that he has a copy of Clarke’s book and had a second copy that he sold.  “That makes two more copies out there or around here,” Louis said.

On the column about the long gone muskrat ranch in lower Canard, I had a note from Zeke Eaton, a former resident of this area who now lives in P.E.I.  “I just read you’re your piece about muskrat farming in Canard,” he writes.  “Dewey Creek was not far from my home and Ralph Woodworth’s blacksmith shop had a brook adjacent.  There was another brook farther down Canard as well.  They all fed into the Canard River.  I never heard about any attempt at muskrat farming thereabouts. What I was aware of was Whitfield Ell’s fox farm in Sheffield mills.”

Eaton said Ells had a P.E. I. connection through marriage (P.E.I. is where fox farming started in the Maritimes) and “soon added foxes to his enterprise.  The war cut deeply into the profitability of the fox industry and by the early ‘40s Whitfield had given it up.”

Residents of Canard, where Eaton grew up, may remember Zeke.  He’s a son of the Canard historian, the late Ernest Eaton.

Are any readers familiar with a “home-grown, home manufactured piece of footwear” known as a shank?” write Reg Baird of Clementsvale.

Baird writes that shanks were standard footwear for a number of men in the Clementsvale area before, during and after the World War 11 years.  “They were made from the hide taken from the hind legs of beef cattle (or Moose).  The leg joint hide was the heel, the hide going to the hoof was cut off to foot size, and the hide going to the hind quarters was cut in accordance to how high a top the wearer preferred.”

Surely, Baird adds, this footwear wasn’t unique to Clementsvale.  Maybe a reader can tell us more about this unusual footwear.

Perhaps a reader can help with the following as well.  Valerie Brideau writes that she is researching Percy and Eulila Margeson who once operated Cedarcrest Kennels on Prospect Street in Kentville.  Anyone familiar with this shop or with the Margesons, please e-mail me at edwingcoleman@gmail.com.

ACORNS AND GAME BIRDS – A MYSTERY SOLVED (January 1/13)

“You’ll never guess in a hundred years what I found in the crops of those ducks,” said a friend when we were on the telephone planning the next day’s hunt. “It’s unusual.”

The ducks were mallards and blacks bagged that afternoon on the Minas Basin mudflats.  I figured the ducks likely were feeding on nearby dykeland fields so my first guess was soybeans.  “Wrong,” said the friend.

I think I surprised the friend with my next guess since I hit it right on.  “Acorns,” I said.

I guessed acorns because of the mallards.  Locally, people were feeding large flocks of mallards, in back yards in places only a few kilometres from salt water, and there had to be oak trees around their lawns.  Mallard feed heavily on acorns and in some of the hunting hotspots across their range, flooded oak stands are prime areas.  Acorns, in other words, are a preferred mallard food wherever the nut is available, so my guess was logical.

But logical or not, there were no acorns in the mallard crops.  To my surprise, the black ducks had been feeding on acorns, so we had a mystery on our hands.  Unlike the half tame mallards, black ducks usually aren’t backyard feeders; so where were those Minas Basin black ducks finding acorns to feed on?

After talking it over, we figured we had an answer.  Lately, the tides in Minas Basin were higher than average.  In one area where we hunt, where the friend bagged the ducks eating acorns, there are rows of oak trees strung out along the tide’s edge.  When they run high, tidal waters sweep over places where the acorns fall.  On occasion we had spotted duck up on the grassy areas around the oak trees.

So, mystery solved.  Except it wasn’t much of a mystery at all.  Like mallards, black ducks also feed on acorns.  The difference is that for the most part, black ducks have to get their acorns in the wilds.  There are exceptions, but usually you won’t find black ducks swarming the lawns and backyards where people feed mallards.

In some areas, acorns are also a food favoured by pheasants.  I was astonished the first time I found acorns in a pheasant’s crop.  These were monster size acorns, so large I didn’t think pheasants could eat them.