Birding with Yeats: A Mother's Memoir (2 page)

ONE

IT WAS BEN WHO
taught me the basics of birdwatching, early in our relationship. He took me across the footbridge over the Don Valley Parkway, in the east end of Toronto, to a place called Riverdale Farm. The farm was once Toronto’s first zoo, but in
1974
it became a working farm with domestic animals like Shorthorn cows, Cotswold sheep, and Nubian goats. It was a fifteen-minute walk from our apartment and a refuge from the busy city that surrounds it.

We stood by a wild patch of ground beside a chain-link fence that separated the farm from the Bayview Avenue extension. Cars roared past, hidden from view. The farm animals were up the hill in the corrals and barns. We were alone down there, near the pond, hiding behind a little patch of land all covered in bushes. We stood stock-still and waited.

On those beginner expeditions we saw
red-winged blackbirds
,
American robins
,
Black-capped Chickadee
,
dark-eyed juncos
, and various sparrows and warblers. I’d always loved sparrows and was surprised to learn that there were so many varieties. Around Toronto you can find roughly fifteen kinds if you’re lucky and patient and know where to look.

Back then, in the middle of the pond at Riverdale Farm, there was an island big enough for one small tree, some grasses, and one
Canada goose
nest. Every spring we went to the farm to watch one goose sit on her nest while the other geese swam around the pond. We stood on the little bridge and looked for giant orange carp in the water and for painted turtles basking in the sun on half-submerged logs. A great blue heron would stalk by on its long legs, eye out for frogs or fish, and we would hold our breath.

I became pregnant about a year after Ben and I moved into that apartment on Riverdale Avenue, just across the valley from the farm. We moved again, this time into a house, and six weeks later I gave birth to a beautiful baby. It took us a little while to name Yeats. I remember when he was four days old I was nursing him in bed and Ben came into the room.

He regarded us for a moment and said, “How about Yeats?”

I looked down at my bald baby and said, “That’s perfect!”

Yeats was named after the Irish poet but also after one of Ben’s oldest friends whose middle name was Yates. This friend had lived on an ashram in India for more than thirty years. Yeats’s middle name came from another one of Ben’s old friends, whose surname was Pinto. Yeats Pinto McNally — a good Irish name.

We took baby Yeats to Riverdale Farm along with my three stepchildren, Titus, Rupert, and Danielle. The kids loved going to the farm to see the baby goats and chicks, and to run up and down the unpaved pathways. Baby Yeats loved doing anything when his brothers and sister were around, but Riverdale Farm was a special place for all of us. We felt like we were out of the city as soon as we passed through its gate.

One time, when Yeats was a toddler, we visited the farm with our old friend Chris.

We were standing at a railing looking out over a boggy area, hoping to see ducks, when Chris said, “Look! A yellow-headed blackbird!”

He pointed into the scrub and we all saw it: a bird the shape and size of a red-winged blackbird but with a golden head.

I said, “Chris, are you a closet birdwatcher?”

He said, “Nah. I just know a
yellow-headed blackbird
when I see one.”

His eyes were twinkling. I scratched my head.

He said, “I don’t think those birds are supposed to come here, to Toronto.” We looked back at the bird. Yeats was jumping up and down.

“Accidentals” are birds that are far from their normal range and that have been sighted only rarely in the area. Sometimes decades or even centuries will go between sightings. Birders will call accidentals in to their local birding club or to the National Audubon Society, who will send someone to confirm the sighting. I don’t know for sure that we saw the yellow-headed blackbird that day and sometimes I question our identification. Those birds aren’t supposed to come anywhere near here, being from the West. Yeats was too young to remember, so it hasn’t been checked off his list.

THAT EARLY EXPEDITION TO
Riverdale Farm was around the time when Yeats discovered the
Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds
. We all spent hours going through that book. Yeats still spends hours poring over bird guides, the more detail the better.

Even then, as a toddler, he would clamber onto my lap (or Ben’s lap, or Uncle Greg’s lap . . . ) and slide the ever-present guide in front of me. We’d start at the beginning with the very first bird, the
snowy egret
, underneath which is the
great egret
, and beside those, the
reddish egret
and the
cattle egret
. He’d point at the birds and I’d say their names, turn the page, and continue on through
584
birds until we reached the
black-billed magpie
at the end. Sometimes we’d finish and he’d say, “Again,” and back we’d go to the egrets.

A couple of years later he wanted me to read bits from the back section of the book — habitats, nesting behaviours, and so on — but never with the same linear dedication we applied to the photographs. Yeats must have gone through that book with some willing adult or other a hundred times. Two hundred times. A thousand times.

We still have that copy of the book, and one segment — from the
prothonotary warbler
to the
Philadelphia vireo
— is threatening to disengage from the binding. We use it only rarely now, to make a quick backyard bird identification at the kitchen table.

“Is it a
house finch
or a
purple finch
?”

The females of these two birds look exactly the same and the males differ only slightly, as far as I can tell, with the purple finch being . . . more purple. I need to check the book to be sure of what I’m seeing.

WE BEGAN READING TO
Yeats when he was an infant, newly sentient. We are booksellers and our house is full of books. I read to Yeats when he wasn’t sleeping or eating or watching dust motes in the sunshine. I read to him every single day (unless I was out of town or Yeats was at a sleep-over) until he was sixteen years old. Sometimes he laments that I never read to him anymore, and sometimes I do read to him. Sometimes he now reads to me, but not very often.

I started with whatever I had at hand — a newspaper, a magazine, a book of short stories. But when he was old enough to sit in my lap and look at the books, we took up children’s picture books. We read everything, from
Sylvester and the Magic Pebble
to the Thomas the Tank Engine stories to
The Story About Ping
to Rupert Bear annuals. (I still remember the rhyming couplet from a Rupert story: “My name is Dickon of the Dell. / There waits my horse, he serves me well.”) Some days we’d spend three or four hours reading, interspersed with meals and visits to the park and playing on the floor. It was something I could do even while completely exhausted.

And I was often completely exhausted. Yeats was born at the end of July, during a heat wave. He nursed all the time. Though the weather eventually settled, the nursing seemed to go on forever, every three hours. I had dreamed of reading while breastfeeding, but after trying two or three times, I set that dream aside. Yeats wanted to lock eyes with me while he fed and became very cranky very quickly if he couldn’t. For me, this eye contact was so rewarding that now I can’t imagine why I had wanted to read instead.

As a baby, Yeats didn’t sleep for more than three hours at a time, day or night. I’d decided on the on-demand nursing regime. I nursed him when he was hungry, not according to my own schedule. My mom thought I was crazy. She had all three of her babies on a schedule as soon as we were born, and we were “good” about it. I read some books and talked to some people and decided against the schedule, and because I was the mother this time, Mom kept quiet. She called me every day, though, to see how much sleep I’d had the night before. I wanted to scream. I was exhausted. I was cranky. I napped when Yeats napped and none of the housework got done. Ben woke with him at night, but Yeats wanted me, not his father.

Titus, Rupert, and Danielle came over every other weekend and one night every week. Danielle, three years old, cuddled her baby brother on the couch. The boys were curious but wary. Titus was twelve already, a bit old to engage with a baby brother, and besides, he preferred to be with his friends. Rupert was nearly six, and more of a homebody. He’d always wanted desperately to be friends with Titus, and though he now had another brother, this one was a baby and it wasn’t the same. We sat Yeats in his chair on the floor and the older kids played around him. He squealed and screamed and loved every minute of it. For these hours he had siblings, and for the rest of the time he was an only child.

Because of the age difference, Titus didn’t accompany us on many expeditions. He’d opt for an overnight at a friend’s house instead of an early morning jaunt to the zoo, for example. But as everyone grew older, the four children found more in common, especially a love of reading, and they became not only friends, but staunch supporters and defenders of one another.

The summer Yeats turned one, we all learned something elemental about him, something that has coloured the way I see my son, and what I read to him, to this day. We were at the cottage with my family — my sister, Laurie, and her husband, Andy; my brother, Greg (who had yet to meet Sarah, his future wife); and my mother, Nancy — taking turns reading nursery rhymes aloud around the breakfast table. Laurie read “Little Bo Peep, she lost her sheep . . .” Ben read “Little Jack Horner sat in a corner . . .” I started in with “Three little kittens, they lost their mittens . . . ” When I reached the part where the mother cat says, “Lost your mittens, you naughty kittens, then you shall have no pie,” Yeats began to howl. I stopped reading. My mother, who was sitting beside him, said, “It’s okay, Yeats. Don’t worry. The mommy cat loves her kittens.” She calmed him down.

I recited “Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle” instead, but when it came to my brother’s turn, he said the kitten one again. Everything was fine until the line about “you naughty kittens,” when Yeats burst into tears again. Greg stopped reading and Yeats stopped crying. Someone else around the table said the rhyme again, and again Yeats cried on cue. People laughed and someone made it happen again. Before this became a party trick and started making me angry, I said, “Will you all stop torturing my child? I know it’s funny, but can’t you see how upset he is?” Yeats’s face remained a study in misery until Mom rubbed his back and whispered yet again that the mother cat really did love her kittens.

He obviously couldn’t abide the thought of anyone getting into that kind of trouble — and the thing is, as he grew into an older child and eventually into a teen, he rarely got into that kind of trouble himself. If he did, he was repentant with all his heart.

For most of my family, this was their first glimpse of Yeats’s sensitivity and a small taste of the challenge he would present to us of how to live in this world.

POETRY, TOO, WAS A
way of life for Yeats. As a toddler, when Yeats was in the bath, I read him adult poetry. I read him Shakespeare; he especially liked the witches from
Macbeth
and asked that I read “Double, double toil and trouble / Fire burn and cauldron bubble” to him over and over again. I read him Rossetti and Tennyson and Michael Ondaatje. I read him whatever we had lying around the house (yes, even W. B. Yeats), and he soaked it all up.

I have an old, battered paperback edition of Robert Frost poems that has lived in our bathroom for eighteen years now. Yeats loved those poems. I read one about apple trees and birds and he sat listening. When I finished he said, “Again!” and I would go back to the beginning. I read “The Road Not Taken” and “The Sound of Trees.” He sat bug-eyed in the bath. When Yeats was five years old we memorized “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” for my aunt and uncle’s Christmas-party talent show and recited it together to wild applause.

One day, when we were playing in the front yard, a neighbour stopped by to chat. Yeats was pushing his little plastic rake back and forth across the lawn while reciting a poem, something he was making up on the spot. The neighbour said, “He sounds like Robert Frost,” and I felt a thrill in my bones.

When Yeats began reading to himself at night, continuing on alone after Ben or I had read to him, one of his early favourites was Shel Silverstein. He read poem after poem until he dropped off to sleep with the book still open on the bed.

As an adolescent, too, Yeats was an avid poetry reader. He always had two or three books of poetry lying around his bedroom. One summer he read the entire canon of W. B. Yeats. The next summer, it was Longfellow. And he wrote his own poetry, too. He wouldn’t let us read what he wrote, but we had it from a reliable source that he was good. We were not surprised to learn that a lot of it was about the natural world.

Ben thought it was partly the poet in Yeats that drew him to birdwatching. These two pursuits, for him, at least, were solitary. They required long periods of time in seeming reflection, quiet, and stillness. They asked for his patience as he waited for something to come — an image, a bird, an inspiration.