Reading Comprehension

This write-up has been taken from "Winter Birds of the Niagara Gorge" at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A30081700

During the course of a severe winter, when its paths are stopped with snow and its cliffs and stones stand white with hoar, the Niagara Gorge has an Arctic mien. Leafless trees reveal its vistas on a grander scale and familiar cliffs, suddenly rooted in screes instead of leaves, rise to greater heights. Its dangers become more apparent, for now at the bare edge the eye hesitates, and instead of peering downwards into cushions of green, it discovers vertigo and a sheer fall. Far below, beyond the talus and the bare trees, the river roars like a live thing. Grown remote and hazardous and no longer inviting to the casual tourist, it becomes the lonely domain of the inveterate fisherman and ardent naturalist.

However, the river displays a vitality that belies the rigours of the season, and, despite its reputation for being chemically poisoned, remains enormously fertile. Providing nourishment in the form of insect larvae, crustaceans, molluscs and fish, it sustains a winter population of tens of thousands of birds. From its mouth at Niagara-on-the-Lake to the ice-boom across Lake Erie 33 miles to the south, ducks, geese, swans and gulls congregate in numbers not found elsewhere in the North American interior during winter.

Above the falls, amongst ice and snow and swift, green water, no man sports or plays. This frontier territory, lying between two sovereign states, is an area of rapids, shingle bars, boulder fields and rock ledges that is in dangerous proximity to the falls. This area is often the wintering ground of a little tribe of Purple sandpipers. In the very worst of Arctic days, a patient telescope may find them; tiny dots across a quarter mile of rough water, scurrying at the edge of some midstream boulder, heads dipping under as they glean crustaceans from the trailing weeds. Sometimes a handful of five or six, sometimes only one, will be the full complement on the river.

When the whirlpool is seen for the first time, one wonders why it should be of such consequence. If examined, it is seen to be energised by an increase in the velocity of the river caused by its compression through a narrow chute into a pool below. The whirlpool's seemingly slow rotation gives an impression of harmless lassitude, the full power of its circling not registering because of the birds-eye view. Given more notice and a little thought, it is soon recognised that a fisherman on the far side is so small that only the splash of colour that is his coat gives an idea of scale. As one grapples with perspective, straining perhaps to focus on the circling gulls, one finds the tin can bobbing along in the strings of debris is really a 45-gallon drum. A 16-foot log popping into the air like an ordinary fence stake gives some idea of the current seething beneath.

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