Long-tailed ducks

Long-tailed ducks, known in the book as scolders, are migratory seabirds whose calls mark the changing season and whose presence brings a stark encounter with death into an early-spring walk. Their chattering song reaches Sophia and Grandmother across a fogbound island, but the morning also presents them with a dead duck: a discovery that unsettles Sophia’s expectation that newly arrived spring life cannot already be lost.

Name, Call, and Seasonal Setting

The ducks’ name comes from their cry, described as a steady, chiding chatter that carries farther and farther away. Grandmother hears that call before dawn in early May, when cold still gathers in the guest room, the oil stove has gone out, and the island is covered in fog. Snow remains in sheltered places; the trees drip audibly in the unusual silence, and nothing has yet begun to grow. Against this landscape of suspension, the distant voices make the season’s change audible before it is visible.

The account sets the scolders apart from birds that hide singly in a meadow: the long-tailed ducks are secretive too, but gather beyond the farthest islands in enormous wedding flocks and sing through the spring night. Their remoteness is part of their effect. They are rarely seen, so their chatter reaches the characters as a sound from beyond the shore rather than as a clear view of the birds themselves. Grandmother associates them with anticipation and renewal, and their call lends the cold, misty dawn a sense of life gathering out of sight.

The Dawn Walk

Grandmother gets up in the night to listen and crosses the bare granite with her walking stick. She knocks on Sophia’s window; Sophia wakes, dresses, and joins her. On the east side, small borders of ice still cling to the rocks. The shore is cluttered with storm-carried material—planks, seaweed, reeds, posts, and fragile wooden boxes twisted around their steel frames—with a heavy log blackened by oil spill lying on top. Beyond the ice rim, bark and splinters rock gently in the water. The ducks’ distant, melodious calling accompanies the approach of sunrise through the fog.

Sophia interprets the calls as evidence that the ducks are breeding. The landscape seems to promise new life, but when the sun rises the fog glows briefly and disappears, exposing a scolder lying dead on a flat rock in the water. The bird is wet and limp, resembling a wrung-out plastic bag. Sophia insists it is an old crow, while Grandmother does not accept that identification. The difference between the audible flock and the single visible body is decisive: the living birds remain distant, while one dead bird has been brought close enough to demand an explanation.

Sophia and Grandmother Explain the Death

Sophia objects that the duck cannot have died in spring, when the birds are newly arrived and, as she understands it, newly paired. Grandmother first gives her a deliberately fantastical account: the male sang and scolded all night for his mate, another bird took the hen, and he drowned himself in grief. Sophia rejects the story angrily and cries, demanding that Grandmother tell it properly. Grandmother then changes the explanation, saying that the bird struck its head on a rock while singing so intensely that it failed to watch where it was going. In this version, death comes by accident at the very moment the bird was happiest.

The exchange does not establish either account as a verified cause; it shows Grandmother trying different explanations in response to Sophia’s distress. The first turns the scolder’s persistent call into a tale of unrequited love, while the second keeps the bird’s death accidental but binds it to the same exuberant singing. Sophia accepts the revised story as better, then asks whether they should bury the bird. Grandmother says there is no need: the incoming tide will bury it, as seabirds are buried at sea like sailors. Their talk shifts from the individual bird to burial at sea, while the surviving ducks continue calling in pairs and groups of three, farther and farther away.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

The scolders connect a seasonal sound to the book’s unsentimental attention to change. For Grandmother, their spring-night calls signify anticipation and renewal; the dead bird complicates that meaning without cancelling it. Breeding and death occupy the same shore and the same dawn. Sophia’s anger arises from the collision between what she has been told about spring and what she can see, while Grandmother’s changing explanations expose how little certainty the scene offers about an animal’s death.

The birds also belong to Grandmother’s broader reflection on how birds seem to underscore changes in weather, seasons, and human lives. Here that function is made concrete: their call accompanies the fog lifting, the first sunlight, and the discovery that renewal does not make the world safe from loss. The scene does not resolve the tension by giving the dead duck a formal burial. Instead, the tide will take it, and the living flock’s voices recede beyond the islands. On the same walk, Grandmother observes that winter storms have transformed a rocky neck of land into a sandy shore and warns that sea and wind may wash the sand away again. The birds’ spring return, the tide’s future work, and the unstable coast place life and loss within a landscape that keeps changing.