Birding with Yeats: A Mother's Memoir (8 page)

But the scope on its tripod was heavy and clumsy to carry. It was difficult to set up on uneven ground and, I imagined, grew heavier and heavier as the morning wore on. But I guess that was part of what we paid George for.

So far we had seen no other people on our tour, suiting us all just fine. As we moved along the beach to a little cove, George continued to tell us about his birding exploits, the tours he led in Peru and Ecuador during the winter, and all the places he’d been up and down the BC coast. George and I were stepping carefully over the sun-bleached logs, he with his heavy scope, binoculars around his neck, and pack on his back; I with my chronically unstable sacrum. (There were times when all I had to do was pick a sock up off the floor and my back would go out, and I didn’t want to have to find a chiropractor on holiday.) Yeats was way ahead, striding over logs and rocks, long hair swinging. When we got to the cove, he was already standing there, a finger to his lips. That was for George, because I wasn’t saying anything anyway.

“An oystercatcher,” Yeats whispered, as loudly as he dared.

I looked to where he was pointing. The bird had lifted its head and was looking at us. George ceased his monologue and put the scope down without making a sound.

One minute I was ambling along enjoying the scenery and sea air, and the next I was stone-still, looking at a bird I’d only ever seen in a book. I’d seen it a thousand times in two dimensions in our Audubon guide to the birds of Western North America — another one of our favourites — young Yeats on my lap, the names of birds rolling off my tongue. I found that I’d memorized its shape, especially the shape and colour of its beak, which is bright red. This bird on the beach looked just like the one in the photo, but I probably wouldn’t have been able to come up with the name “
black oystercatcher
.” I looked around. The beach was covered with rocks and driftwood, and the place smelled of piles of washed-up seaweed. The wind blew the scent of salt water to shore, and waves rhythmically swept the beach. Who wouldn’t like to spend their time catching oysters and finding their fine-spun pearls, or just hanging out on a deserted beach where the next stop across the water was Japan?

George scanned the horizon with his binoculars and said, “There’s lots more of them out there.”

Oystercatchers were flying in a flock not too far out from shore, perhaps twenty individuals. Now we saw them standing on the rocky shore beyond the cove, pecking. Contrary to what their name suggests, their preferred foods are mussels and limpets.

I contemplated the bird nearest to us; I looked at my son, whose face was open and radiant. George was mercifully silent.

After the oystercatcher sighting George drove us back to our lodge where we packed up and checked out. Yeats and I drove back across the island to Nanaimo and stopped for lunch at a small campground. One bird we’d actively looked for in Tofino was the Stellar’s jay. We wanted to see it because it is so much like our blue jay from home, only bigger, and it is the only other jay in North America to sport a crest. The blue jay is gradually expanding its range west, and where the two birds overlap, they are interbreeding and creating hybrids. This hadn’t happened on Vancouver Island, yet, so we were looking for the pure Steller, with its azure body and black head and crest.

The picnic tables at this rest stop were practically infested with Steller’s jays. They scattered when we sat down but hopped on over as soon as we opened our lunch bags. They were gorgeous and saucy, just like our jays from Ontario, but we were a little shocked by how tame they were, and I was wary of their boldness. I shooed them away throughout our lunch and Yeats laughed at me. We’d finally found them and now I was trying to get rid of them.

THERE’S A BIG DIFFERENCE
between watching birds and becoming a birdwatcher. The latter step involves binoculars, a birding destination, sometimes a guide, and at least one guidebook to birds, of which we’d always several, including the Audubons and the Royal Ontario Museum (
ROM
) and Sibley guides, though not the Petersons (sorry, George). It also involves keeping a list of the birds you’ve seen. Birders can be compulsive list-makers. Maybe most birders were always compulsive list-makers, even before they took up birding. Maybe birding is a good excuse for making lists. I don’t know because I’m not compulsive that way, but Yeats is.

As a youngster, Yeats played complicated games with his toy cars and kept lists of the outcomes. He exasperated me with lists of dinosaur names; he made me play the dinosaur-alphabet game, where you had to name a dinosaur that started with each letter. He’d say Apatosaurus, I’d say Brachiosaurus, he’d say Corythosaurus, and so on. If I became stuck on M he refused to give me a clue, but made me sit there and think until I remembered Mamenchisaurus. He had deep faith that I’d get it eventually because of his own flawless memory, and I suppose it was that faith in me that kept me playing those games when I could have just walked away to make dinner. It was fun, in a strange kind of way.

As Yeats grew older he kept more and more lists. He started keeping lists of all the music he listened to, all the songs and albums, all the artists and where they were from. When he was in Grade
7
my brother taught him how to make an Excel spreadsheet of all these music lists, complete with graphs and charts, and he updated them weekly, something he did for about a year.

When we arrived home from our trip to BC, Yeats started writing down the birds he saw on his walks around the city. He walked to and from home, across the Don Valley and through Riverdale Farm, stopping to look for birds. He kept the lists simple at first — just a notebook with the date on each page.

March
30
: house finch, dark-eyed junco, black-capped chickadee, American robin, blue jay.

If it were me, I would have written
finch, junco, chickadee, robin
: the opening descriptor would have gone by the wayside in the name of convenience. But for Yeats, that wasn’t accurate enough. There were too many kinds of chickadees and juncos to take such a cavalier attitude towards the lists. Eventually, he developed shortcuts:
A. robin
, for example, or
A. crow
.

After a while, too, he stopped writing down the five birds he saw every day no matter what: house sparrow,
European starling
,
rock dove
(pigeon to most of us),
ring-billed gull
, and American robin. They became the assumed birds.

Yeats reminded me of my mom’s father, the geologist, who we called Bop. Bop made lists and charts and kept meticulous accounts of the world around him. He had an air of being grounded in time and space that Yeats carried, too. This quality is hard to define. I think it has something to do with being unhurried, and connected to the rhythms of the natural world.

Every once in a while Yeats would say, “Okay, Mom. Let’s name all the birds we’ve ever seen.” And he’d take out a piece of pristine white paper, his pencil, and his incredibly expectant look. I’d try really hard not to sigh and roll my eyes. Still, I was happy to encourage the birding after that successful trip to Tofino. I never once thought to myself,
Here is a good
mother-son hobby
; it just naturally evolved into something that we did together. We developed our birding habits, our way of walking slowly through the forest, Yeats going first to set the pace. We didn’t talk much — either in the car, where we listened to our favourite music, or in the field — and this companionable silence was part of what I loved about our trips.

BEN DID MANAGE TO
take more holidays later that summer, August of
2008
, when the stock market crashed. Economics has never been my strong point, but even I could tell this stock market problem was worse than the usual August downturn. Laurie’s husband, Andy, gave us all a little lesson in bundled mortgages which I promptly forgot, and the daily paper was full of dire predictions for Canada and the world. People in the U.S. were losing their homes and giant brokerage houses were going under. It wouldn’t be long before people on Bay Street started losing their jobs, something that would slow our fledgling business right down.

Ben lay on a lounger on the cottage deck and read books, a book a day for the most part. He was famous for this. Once, when Lauren was three years old, she came around the corner of the deck to find her uncle reclining on the chaise with a book.

She spread her arms and said, “But why are you always lying there reading?”

He looked at her and replied, “But why are you always dressed in pink?” Some things just can’t be questioned.

While Ben read his books, Yeats and I went to Wye Marsh for the first time. An old friend of my mother’s had told us it was a great place to see birds. We ended up going there every summer, sometimes more than once.

Of all the places we went regularly to bird-watch, it was my favourite. At least once every trip, I’d stand on a little bridge over a stream and say, “I
love
it here.” Yeats had the presence of mind not to say anything, and I’d follow as he stepped quietly off the bridge and back into the forest or out onto the marsh again.

The Wye Marsh Wildlife Centre inhabits
3
,
000
acres of land just outside Midland, Ontario. It’s wetland, fen, and forest, operated as a non-profit society but in association with various environmental protection groups. They have an interpretive and education centre, boardwalks, an observation tower, canoe and kayak tours, bee-keeping, and a trumpeter swan restoration program.

That first visit, we drove down from the cottage early in the morning, and we were out on the boardwalk before the place officially opened for the day. We were alone in the marsh. Alone — except for thousands of creatures and countless cattails and a wisp of a wind blowing sweet, marshy smells over everything.

The marsh is a flat, grassy place. When the wind blew and we stopped to listen, we heard a soft whooshing as thousands of blades of grass rubbed gently against each other. And we smelled that incredible sweetness of fresh grass mixed with all the other things growing in the marsh — flowers, lily pads, the forest behind us.

We saw a lot of birds at the marsh. We were certain to see most of our old familiars: red-winged blackbird, great blue heron, black-capped chickadee,
common yellowthroat
. Seeing these birds over and over cannot be considered a waste of birdwatching time. Watching an American robin hopping down a path ahead of us was always a pleasure, and I never tired of seeing the yellowthroat, with its black eye mask, perching sideways on a reed and singing
witch-i-ty,
witch-i-ty
,
witch-i-ty
, witch
. Every bird at the marsh filled us with a little light. I wondered if I was just so simple that this was all it took. But then I thought,
I’m lucky that this is all it takes
, and knew that I was especially lucky that this was all it took for my teenaged son, too.

On one of the long, grassy pathways we saw a
brown thrasher
, a bird I remembered being described in one of our books as “a large, skulking bird of thickets and hedgerows.” We actually saw it in a hedgerow and it
was
skulking, making a positive identification difficult at first. We had to skulk along, too, bent over and sticking our necks out to see it from the path, trying not to scare it away. Brown thrashers are about the size of robins but have reddish-brown backs and white breasts heavily streaked with dark brown. They aggressively defend their nests and have been known to attack people and dogs forcefully enough to cause injury. It seems thrashers were well named, unlike those oystercatchers in BC.

We continued to the end of the pathway to a lookout shelter where we found a nest of young
barn swallows
. The
parents
were taking turns feeding the babies, flying out onto the marsh and then swooping back under the eaves of the shelter to fill the four open mouths. We sat for ages, mesmerized by these beautiful birds and their young.

I stood up and looked out from the shelter into the marsh, into acres of gently waving reeds and grasses. It was a scene that would never fail to fill me with tranquility, no matter how often I returned to it. Dragonflies, damselflies, butterflies: they all came to check me out. I especially liked the black-bodied damselfly, with its neon-green wings. I was looking through my binoculars, seeing nothing except the horizon, when a bird flew past.

“Yeats! A tern!” My favourite seabird. This one was a
Caspian tern
, the biggest tern in the world. I wasn’t sure what it was doing there; maybe this one had decided to breed at the marsh. Maybe it had simply flown in for the day from Georgian Bay. It was a beauty, though, and we watched it fly away over the grasses.

We walked back along the pathways and over the boardwalk that crosses the marsh, paying a visit to the little pond that houses the swans.

Wye Marsh started their
trumpeter swan
breeding program in
1989
. In
1990
, the first cygnet was born in captivity, and in
1993
, this youngster and her mate were the first nesting wild trumpeter swans in Ontario in two hundred years. Since then, they have successfully bred year in and year out. While they are free to fly away and breed elsewhere, they often return to the marsh, where they have an enclosed area safe from predators such as foxes and dogs.

Trumpeter swans are the largest North American swan, with a wingspan that can exceed two metres. The adult has a black bill, which helps to distinguish it from the mute swan, whose bill is orange. The mute swan is an introduced species, from Europe, and is not mute at all. It is even rarer than the trumpeter swan, but is usually found in ponds and bays near people, so is more commonly seen by us.

We studied the four swans in the enclosed pond, trying to see their numbered tags. We had a vague plan to visit the Scarborough Bluffs or the Toronto Islands in winter to see if the swans there were the same ones at the marsh. It wasn’t often you could say, “Hey, that’s the exact same bird we saw last summer at the marsh!”