Birding with Yeats: A Mother's Memoir (17 page)

“I spoke to Martha and we’re planning on seeing them, maybe staying a night.” Martha, one of Marnie’s daughters, had been a friend of mine since Grade
9
, the year we’d lived in Vancouver after we took that family trip across the country. “I guess Yeats is about the age now that Martha and I were when we met.”

“You girls were inseparable.”

“For a year, and then we moved again.”

“But you came back and went to Simon Fraser. Maybe Yeats will follow in your footsteps.”

“That’s part of why we’re here, to see about universities. I just want him to stay in school and if he decides to come here, I’m sure he’ll love it as much as I did.”

“If he moves out here, we’ll take care of him!”

Yeats saw four new birds that evening on the beach:
bushtits
,
violet-green swallows
,
glaucous-winged gulls
, and
Brandt’s cormorants
. All four of these birds are found only in the West.

Bushtits are tiny and completely grey. Unlike most birds, bushtit family members all sleep together during nesting season. Vancouver is the northernmost part of their range in North America, and we were fortunate enough to see a large group of them (I was there for that) hanging upside-down in low trees. Eating, perhaps: bushtits forage for insects and spiders while hanging upside down by one foot and using the other to push leaves aside.

The violet-green swallow is similar to our tree swallow in appearance and behaviour, but, like the bushtit, it is found only in the West. These birds are a joy to watch as they swoop and soar, catching insects in flight and gleaming green and blue in the sunshine.

“Glaucous,” according to some sources, means “light bluish-green.” I think you have to see these glaucous-winged gulls up close to believe their wings aren’t just grey, like those of most of our gulls. Or maybe the name just doesn’t fit. In French, actually, they’re called
goélands à ailes grises
— grey-winged gulls.

Gulls are among the most difficult birds to identify. We own a huge bird guide that is devoted to gulls of the Americas, and I go practically blind flipping the pages and trying to get them straight. I never will. These glaucous-winged gulls are quite large — around
55
centimetres compared with the
45
centimetres of the very common ring-billed gull that most Torontonians are familiar with — and their wingtips are not black or white, but of the same grey as their wings. Most gulls have black or white wingtips. That’s just one of the little facts I might never have known before I started reading bird books.

The Brandt’s cormorant, too, is found only on the West Coast, from Alaska to southern California, and exclusively in ocean environments, breeding where the California Current brings its favourite foods to the surface. The name “cormorant” comes from the Latin
Corvus Marinus
, meaning “marine crow.” Its scientific name,
Phalacrocorax
, is from the Greek for “bald crow.” Clearly, whoever named this bird was seriously reminded of crows, perhaps because of their black feathers and habit of perching in high places after a meal. They don’t sound like crows, though. The Brandt’s cormorant makes almost no sound at all, just a low quacking, audible at only a short distance.

THE NEXT MORNING, YEATS
and I took the bus up to
UBC
and went on our campus tour. It was raining, which was too bad because I wanted Yeats to see the view of the mountains and the harbour from the university. A well-informed undergrad showed a group of us around, pointing out engineering and chemistry buildings and taking us to see a typical residence room. She told us they had regular maid service, something I sure didn’t have when I lived in residence! She took us to see Nitobe Memorial Garden, a traditional Japanese garden right on the campus. It was stunning, lush and serene. The tour took us only a few steps inside it, so we could get the general idea. We saw an arched bridge over a pond, stone statues, and pathways winding off into the trees.

I said to Yeats, “Let’s come back here once the tour is finished and have a proper look around. Maybe have lunch in the tearoom.”

He said, “No. This place is incredible. If I tour it, I want to be alone. Sorry, Mom.”

There it was again. I had to accept that there were places he really didn’t want to go with me.

I said, “But we may never come back here. Let’s just take this opportunity.”

“If we never come back, we never come back. This is a place I’d want to be by myself in.”

I couldn’t change his stubborn old mind.

Not much later, when we were standing beside an outdoor sculpture, Yeats leaned in to me and whispered, “See this tree?” He patted an enormous trunk beside us. I nodded. “It’s a cedar. Like those scraggly ones by the beach at the cottage.” I laughed out loud and the tour leader looked over at me. Yeats left his hand on the tree and mouthed at me, “Fantastic tree!”

Marnie drove us to the station to catch the bus that would take us to Tsawwassen and the ferry to Victoria. When she dropped us off she said, “You two are welcome back here any time. And Yeats, if you decide to come west to university, I’ll take care of you the way I took care of your mother, all those years ago.” She laughed.

“‘The circles of our lives,’” I said, as Marnie hugged me. “Thank you.”

The crossing to Victoria was beautiful: misty and rain-soaked. Yeats stayed out on deck for the duration of the ferry ride, not dancing away as he did that time we went to Nanaimo, but standing solitary, looking out to sea. He saw his first
pigeon guillemot
, a black-and-white member of the puffin family. And he got to stand in the freezing-cold rain.

“Mom, it was the best thing ever!” he said to me later.

I, on the other hand, didn’t feel my usual joy to be on the ferry. In fact, I wondered if I was capable of feeling that joy at all anymore. After that moment at Fish Point on Pelee Island, that openness had been buried again under anxieties and practicalities, responsibilities and day-to-day life. I wanted to feel carefree, even for a moment. I asked the universe for some carefree.

I rented a car in Victoria and we decided to take the scenic route up to the university from our inn near the harbour. It was a sunny morning and we stopped at oceanside parks along the way to look for birds. Something smelled amazing, heady, as though a million flowers had opened all at once and spilled their scent over everything. We saw lots of birds, but no new species.

I was impressed with the campus at
UV
ic. It was small compared to
UBC
’s, and maybe because of its size, it felt more comfortable to me. There were a lot of trees on campus — even, at one end, a forest — as well as lovely lawns covered in rabbits, something
UV
ic is apparently famous for. But I was surprised we couldn’t see the mountains from the campus. Here we were, in one of the most scenic places in the world, with no surrounding scenery. Everywhere we went I looked for a glimpse of ocean or mountain. Maybe we weren’t taken to the right places, but I found this lack of view disappointing.

Yeats said, “It’s too far from everything.”

“There are loads of buses into town.” I gestured at the parking lot, full of city buses. “Or maybe that’s not what you mean. Is it too far from home?”

He nodded. “Maybe that’s what it is. It’s pretty far from home.”

We’d come a long way for a short tour of this university, but that’s how it was sometimes and I wasn’t sorry. We drove back downtown and met my friends Kate and Marc and some of their five children and went on a boat tour of Victoria Harbour. The sun was out, the breeze gentle and smelling of the sea. Back on shore, crowds gathered to watch magicians and acrobats on the quayside.

Kate said, “Are you sure you don’t want to move here?” Then she laughed, because she knew I was torn. “If Yeats comes to school here, we’ll take care of him, or at least have him for dinner every once in a while.”

Take care of him —
those words again. I remembered how Marnie used to have me to dinner when I was at
SFU
and how I sometimes even spent the weekend. Her home was a haven for me, a place where I felt welcomed and loved, and I knew that if Yeats chose to move west, he’d find that kind of refuge with my old friends.

NOW THAT THE CAMPUS
tours were done, we headed back to Tofino for some quiet time together in nature. This is where our birding would really begin, and we were looking forward to resuming our West Coast adventure. I had booked two tours with George: a morning walking tour and a day-long Paddle with the Eagles.

George picked us up at
7
:
30
on our first morning in Tofino, at Middle Beach Lodge, the same place we’d stayed the last time. He didn’t remember us. It
had
been two years, and I figured he saw a lot of people passing through, but how many long-haired teenaged boys named Yeats had he met? People usually remembered Yeats. It didn’t matter, though, and I knew that if I mentioned it, Yeats would rightly scowl.

We returned to the path along the shore where we’d walked with George before, and this time we saw masses of hummingbirds. At the cottage in Muskoka we often saw
ruby-throated hummingbirds
, though usually only one, sometimes two, at a time. But here there were dozens of them buzzing around. These were
rufous hummingbirds
. George told us he’d had an
Anna’s hummingbird
at his feeder lately, but there weren’t any here.

The rufous hummingbird is gorgeous but, as with all hummingbirds, it’s impossible to see its features unless it rests for a second on a branch. These were moving so quickly, beating their wings fifty to sixty times per second, that all their colours blurred together. Every so often, though, one would perch, and we would have a good look. The males have a throat of scarlet jewels overlaying a white breast, a brownish-red back and tail, and greenish wings. The female is similar but has fewer jewels at her throat.

We saw
orange-crowned warblers
for the first time, along with a host of other warblers and sparrows. The orange-crowned warbler is a dull grey-green. The male we saw had a fairly bright yellow chest, which was consistent with the sub-species we knew were found in BC, but we couldn’t see the tiny slash of dull orange on its crown. We took George’s word that it was there and ticked it off our list.

George brought us to a seashore lookout, where we saw
common murres
,
Pacific
and
red-throated loons
,
rhinoceros auklets
, and
black
and
surf scoters
. George took it all in stride, of course, this being his backyard, but for us all these seabirds were magnificent. Most of them were well past the range of our binoculars, so George set up his scope and we took turns looking at them while he talked.

The common murre is a black-and-white duck-like bird, a bit smaller than a mallard. It nests on cliffs and spends most of the winter at sea. Its eggs are so pointed at one end that, if set in motion, they will wobble around in a circle, a useful adaptation for eggs laid on rocky ledges.

The Pacific loon is the most abundant loon in North America. It spends its entire life at sea except for about three months of the year, when it breeds on land. Tofino is a bit far south for this bird, but there was no doubt about what we saw — grey head, black and white stripes on the side of the neck, checkerboard pattern on the wings. It was a beauty.

The red-throated loon is less out of its range in these parts and very distinctive, with its red throat and smaller size. Though this was the first time Yeats and I had seen one, it wasn’t the first time we’d
thought
we had. One late fall at the cottage, we were standing at the top of the hill, looking down on the lake. Yeats saw something he didn’t recognize and luckily (or typically, I guess) we had our binoculars. We were very excited to think we were looking at a red-throated loon on its migration down from Hudson’s Bay, but when we checked the guidebook, we realized it was a common loon in winter plumage.

The rhinoceros auklet is a stocky, puffin-like bird that also spends most of its life at sea. In breeding season, both adults have a vertical white “horn” where the bill joins the face, giving it its name. No one is sure what this horn is for — maybe just decoration? Loads of birds have decoration, after all. Maybe it’s not
for
anything. I became momentarily annoyed with my bird book for implying this horn needed a reason for being. I was happy to have a mystery here and there.

The scoters are both black, medium-sized ducks. The black scoter is all-black with an orange bill, while the surf scoter has a white patch on the back of its neck and a multi-coloured bill. They were hard to tell apart through the scope, so again, we took George’s word that we were seeing what he said we were seeing.

A couple in their early twenties climbed up to the lookout and joined us. They were wearing cut-off jeans and flip-flops. The woman was wearing a nearly see-through peasant-style top and lots of silver and turquoise jewellery. They both had long blond hair. Before I could stop myself, I’d pigeonholed them as surfing hippie wannabes. Well, I’d been there, too, except for the surfing, so I suppose I was kind of envious. I didn’t look like that anymore, though I wasn’t exactly corporate, either. I still had long hair (which used to be blonde) and I wore silver and turquoise, too. But I
felt
different. I wondered: even back when I dressed like a hippie, did I feel like one?
Could
I feel like one? Was I ever ready to drop out and turn on, or whatever it was? I don’t think so, and certainly the responsibilities of family and house took away any bit of hippie I might have had left. I’d have to remember to ask Ben how he felt about this. He still looked the part of ageing hippie, with his long grey hair and his peace-sign button, but I wondered if he, too, felt like he’d moved on.

The young man looked peeved, like he’d rather be surfing or drinking coffee on the deck. The woman, though, was full of life. She said, “What do you see? Are there any loons or scoters?”