Are our midwinters ‘bleak’, that is, at least according to Webster, cold, dreary and depressing?  Well, my birds must think so, because there are fewer of them around my feeders. Miz Hairy Woodpecker doesn’t even seem to like the new suet I put out for her.  Or maybe there is enough natural food in the woods for them so that they don’t have to come down to my feeders and perform for me.  That must be the case, and I did watch three Red-breasted nuthatches carefully working between the drops of pitch on some Red spruce cones.  I feel better already.  However food is very important to all animals in the Quoddy region this time of year, and although I can easily go down to Tide Mill farm or Shop and Save and get all the chow I need, I usually get a stronger urge to forage.  My backyard pantry is the shore along Schooner Cove and Long Cove, and I enjoy ambling along to see what goodies (?) I can find and to see how things change.  At the low tide line the obvious change is in the number of urchins.  When we first moved to Pembroke twenty years ago Green sea urchins were cuddled up together spine to spine and one had to be careful and step where the least number would be crunched. The urchins have since been drastically depleted, but the edible seaweeds (kelp varieties, dulse and Irish moss) are much more plentiful.  Rock crabs are nowhere to be found, and even their replacements, the Green crabs, are scarce.  Wrinkles seem to be holding their own, although there seem to be a lot more wrinklers, probably because there are fewer clams.  Wrinkles this time of year are generally bunched together under rocks and seaweed.  If there are fewer clams, there are many more mussels.  Mussels from our property are unsuitable for commercial use because they have pearls in them.  Pearls are not harmful to people, unless one breaks a tooth, but are considered a major annoyance.  I find the pearls a minor nuisance, and have learned to eat around them, like I learned to avoid the seeds when I eat bunchberries.  From my studies, it still seems to be a question of what initiates the pearls in the blue mussels.  One study listed the major cause as a ‘…digenetic trematode in the genus Gymnophallus.’  The report was of the opinion that the trematode lives in a sea duck as an adult, but uses the blue mussel as the intermediate host.   The mussel finds the trematode irritating and keeps covering the irritation with its shell building nacre, thus making the pearl.  The older, larger mussels have the most  pearls.  Another theory of pearl formation is that the mussel gets a small grain of sand in the wrong place and the bit of sand initiates the irritation and starts the pearl building process. I can’t vouch for which process produces the pearls, but I can vouch for the pearls.  Mussels filter great quantities of water in their feeding process, and are very susceptible to pollution and red tide problems.  The problem with pearls is greatly reduced in commercially grown mussels on rafts or similar off shore methods.