Birding with Yeats: A Mother's Memoir (20 page)

He surprised me by saying yes, he wanted to spend the day in the forest with us, outside, away from his usual life. I was happy, knowing how hard he’d been working and that some time in nature would do him good. I guess he knew that, too. The shop might be an oasis on Bay Street, but it was right downtown, among towers of concrete and glass.

The Arboretum was part of the Royal Botanical Gardens and included a forest sanctuary called Cootes Paradise. It was full of walking trails and went down to an arm of Hamilton Harbour that, since
1985
, had been subject to one of the largest wetland rehabilitation projects in North America. Yeats and I had been there before. We’d seen a lot of birds there and loved the place — a park big enough to feel like a real forest.

We walked from the parking circle through the lilac dell (its over
600
species of lilac not yet in flower, of course) and down a grassy slope to the forest.

I said, “What’s that sound?” It was like a thousand tiny buzzers.

We all craned our necks to see up to the tops of the tall maples. Yeats said, “It’s waxwings.
Cedar waxwings
.”

Ben said, “There are billions of them. We used to see this in the city.” Meaning Toronto.

“You still can, down at Ashbridges, near dusk,” Yeats said. “They come in huge flocks to the trees down there.”

We walked down to Cootes Paradise Marsh and onto the boardwalk. We were in time to see a
red-bellied woodpecker
crawl up a dead tree and into a hole. We waited there for a while to see if it would come out again. We stood in the spring sunshine in companionable quiet, just breathing and being. Ben was just as good at this waiting around as Yeats and I were, just as good as he’d been at it all those years before when he took me birding at Riverdale Farm.

Ben fell only once in the forest. He slipped when we saw a deer, a big white-tailed deer that spotted us first and bounded off through the trees. He didn’t have appropriate hiking shoes, having never replaced his running shoes after the shipwreck, and with all the rain we’d had the trails were muddy. Ben wiped the mud from his hands onto his jeans and we stood still as stone. The deer doubled back until it was twenty metres away, in a clearing. It nibbled at the grass but was too jumpy to eat.

We saw thirty-four bird species that day. So many birds! The deciduous trees were still bare, so it was easier to make sightings. We saw our first warbler of the season, a yellow-rumped. We saw three barn swallows frolicking in the air, dipping and dancing, and two bald eagles riding the thermals way up high.

We saw a small flock of Caspian terns from a viewing platform in the marsh. A binocular-toting father was up on the platform with his young son, who was maybe nine years old and had binoculars too. The father said to Yeats, “Do you know what those are?” pointing at the terns which were now standing on the muddy bank facing into the wind.

“They’re Caspian terns,” Yeats said, and the boy looked up at him. “They’re our biggest tern, but they’re rare in Ontario. Usually you’d see the common tern or, more likely, gulls. The gulls are taking over the terns’ habitat.”

The boy nodded. He’d probably learned about habitat problems in school.

“See,” said Yeats, “here come some gulls, probably ring-billed.”

The gulls landed on the mud not far from the terns, who shifted together. The father said to Yeats, “You know a lot about birds.”

“He’s a birdwatcher,” Ben said, with more merriment in his voice than I’d heard in a while.

Later, I saw my first ever
wood ducks
. We were walking carefully down a steep, muddy path. Between the marsh and us was a wooded area but because the trees were leafless, we could see through to the shore.

Yeats said, “Mom! Wood ducks! Look through your binoculars.”

He knew I’d never seen them before and they were beauties. There were two pairs. The females were quite plain, like female mallards, except wood ducks are grey and have a white eye patch. The males, however, were spectacular. They looked painted, with red eyes, burgundy neck and breast, and clearly delineated facial patches of green, purple, and white — everything shining iridescent in the sun.

On our way back to the car we stopped and fed chickadees from our hands, something that, I hope, will never fail to give me a small shiver of delight.

“Maybe next time,” I said to Ben and Yeats, “you guys will wear sunscreen.” Their faces were beet red.

“No way,” Ben said. “Sunburn in April is a dream come true.”

Yeats laughed and took one last look through his binoculars at the eagles soaring in the sky.

ELEVEN

IT WAS MID-MAY, AND
Yeats’s final high school exams were in a month, but we’d promised one another we’d spend the weekend of the annual spring migration at Point Pelee. It seemed cruel to us that the best time for birding happened at such a busy time of year. Exams were looming, but Yeats also had essays and projects due. It may have seemed reckless to make a conscious decision to step outside these responsibilities and take a long weekend to bird-watch. But Yeats was doing well at school and it was spring — we longed to be outside for days on end. And the little taste of Point Pelee we’d had the previous year, before going over to Pelee Island, had made us eager.

Point Pelee is a triangular spit of land that juts seven kilometres out into Lake Erie. It’s the farthest south you can go on the Canadian mainland (Pelee Island is farther south, close to the U.S. border), and it’s famous as a stopping-off point for birds during their spring migration. Thousands upon thousands of birds fly over the Great Lakes every spring on their trip north to breed, and many of them stop at Point Pelee for a rest and something to eat.

The area was settled in the
1830
s and used extensively for fishing, hunting, and logging as well as farming, before it became a national park in
1918
. This new status didn’t immediately affect much of the earlier activity, and it wasn’t until
1989
that duck hunting, the last holdout, was officially banned in the park.

A road goes down the centre of the park, with parking lots and observation areas scattered along the way. There’s a good information centre with beautiful forest walks partway down the point. There’s also the DeLaurier Homestead area with old farm buildings and more trails. The DeLauriers were among the first Europeans to farm at Pelee and their old farm is now a national museum. On the west side of the point are sand dunes and the crashing waves of Lake Erie. The only people allowed to drive past the interpretation centre and to the tip of the point are park workers. Shuttle buses take birders to the tip, and during migration the very keen will leave at
6
a.m.

In January, I’d spoken to a birdwatcher who’d warned me that the place would be crawling with competitive and sneaky birders. “They hide in the bushes, they don’t tell you where they’ve seen stuff, they aren’t nice. They look at you suspiciously, as though you’ve stolen all the good birds.”

This sounded dreadful, not the sort of birding we wanted to do at all, but I didn’t really believe him. In all the experiences we’d go on to have at Pelee, nothing would come close to what he described, and I had to wonder if he carried around his disgruntlement wherever he went.

This same birdwatcher told me to book well in advance if we wanted to stay close to the park, and in that he was right. I had started calling places in February and most were already booked for migration weekend. I finally found us a room at a motel just down the road from the park — I guess the fact that it was still available should have been a clue to its condition. I would never stay there again, even though it was only a five-minute drive to the park entrance.

The motel was built around an indoor courtyard that housed the swimming pool and party area. We had sliding glass doors that opened onto a balcony, but as soon as we stepped out we were overcome by the smell of chlorine and the sound of shouting children. The only other window was high up in the door, but it was boarded over, so if we wanted fresh air in the room at night, we were out of luck. The carpet was so grimy underfoot that I didn’t want to take off my shoes in the room, something I hadn’t experienced since backpacking in Asia on a shoestring budget in the
1
980
s. At least the bathroom and sheets seemed clean and the mini fridge was working.

We stopped at Wheatley Provincial Park on our way to Point Pelee and saw about twenty species; we saw another ten or so from the car. We added nearly forty species to the list in the three hours we spent at Point Pelee that first afternoon. Altogether, we saw sixty-eight species in one day! It was incredible. This was the most birds I’d ever seen and it left me feeling lightheaded, as though I’d won the lottery.

We didn’t have to do much work for most of these sightings. The birds were just there, in the trees or swooping through the air over the marsh. All we had to do was stand still and pay attention and then look closely to make the identification.

For some birds we didn’t have to look too closely. In Wheatley, for instance, we saw a
red-headed woodpecker
for the very first time. It was pecking at a dead tree and climbing into a hole. Then it climbed back out and flew over to the next tree. We ended up following slowly along as it made its way through the park, and since there were no other people around, we had it to ourselves.

The bird was unmistakable, with its bright red head, black wings, and white breast. It looked like someone had pulled a red cap down over its head, and the line between head and body was so clean. It was a medium-sized woodpecker, a little smaller than a robin, although the woodpecker’s wingspan is considerably larger.

The red-headed woodpecker has some unsavoury habits. It routinely attacks other birds to keep them out of its territory and will tip eggs from nests, destroy nests, and even poke holes in duck eggs if the opportunity arises. It eats just about anything and will capture grasshoppers and stuff them live into tight little corners, where they can’t get away but are stored for later.

I didn’t know any of this when I first saw the bird, but it wouldn’t have mattered. I could never bring myself to assign moral values to the bird world. All I could do was admire them for their beauty and their spectacular variety.

That afternoon at Pelee we saw the
black tern
for the first time. Yeats hadn’t told me we might see this particular bird, probably because he knew how much I loved terns. He wanted me to be surprised. I’d seen them in books, but I never imagined how beautiful they would be in real life. I stood on the boardwalk beside my grinning son, alternating between holding my breath and gasping in delight.

There were two pairs of black terns and we watched them fly gracefully, swooping around the marshy area, catching bugs. Although the breeding adults weren’t completely black — their wings were silvery-grey — they appeared all black in the sky. They were the inverse of all those snowy-white seabirds we were used to. If I was in love with white terns, these black ones turned me inside out.

I nearly said to Yeats that I’d seen enough, now. We could go home.

We continued slowly along the boardwalk, listening to the shushing of the reeds in the wind mixing with the high-pitched “pipping” of the terns. We’d noticed that the terns stopped every so often and rested on one particular part of the railing. We stopped before we reached them and waited. Within a couple of minutes, two terns came to perch. We were three metres away from them, at eye level. I could see the wind ruffling their wing feathers, and watched as they raised and lowered their feet. We took a step or two and they retreated along the railing, always keeping the same distance between us. We stopped and they stopped. No one else was nearby. It was just us and the wind and these gorgeous, joy-inducing terns.

The black tern migrates every year from the north coast of South America. Pelee is just about the southernmost part of its nesting range, so possibly, these birds we saw were headed much farther north. They nest on open water, something I find hard to imagine, and sometimes migrate in huge colonies of up to tens of thousands of individuals.

Eventually we left the boardwalk behind and drove to a place on the west side of the point, with access to the dunes. We were two minutes from the parking lot when a group of people stopped us and one said in a stage whisper, “
common nighthawk
ahead. There’s a woman with a scope who’ll let you see.” These people were smiling like they’d just caught a big fish.

We proceeded quietly, as we always did, and found the woman with her scope around the next bend. She was tiny, about the size of her tripod, and dressed like a birder, but the vibe I was getting from her was more old-hippie than Mountain Equipment Co-op. I liked her right off and she smiled at us, friendly and open. I couldn’t help but think of that Toronto birder who’d warned us against Pelee.

She wanted us to see the nighthawk and told us what to look for through the scope. Although the instrument was trained right on the bird, it was so perfectly camouflaged that she worried we still might miss it.

She said, “It’s sitting, tucked into those branches and looks just like them, except for a bar of white, which is a wing patch. Also, you can make out a tiny bit of its striped waistcoat.”

Yeats looked first and after a couple of seconds he saw it.

This was the first time he’d seen one at rest. He’d seen five or six common nighthawks flying over Alex’s house in Nanaimo the summer before. He said they flew like crazy terns and he didn’t know what they were at first.

I looked through the scope and saw a funny-looking bird, scrunched and hunkering on its branch, eyes closed. It reminded me of the cat when he didn’t want to be picked up, invoking gravity to his cause.

At the lake we saw flocks of birds way out on the water but we would have needed a scope to identify them. We waited in the hope they might come closer, but gave up after a while and headed back to the motel.

We ate a boring meal in our horrible room, but Yeats was keen to record all these birds. When we first started birdwatching, Yeats took his piece of paper and pencil stub with him, stuffed in a pocket. He stood in the forest after seeing every five species and wrote down the names. After a while, he stopped bringing the list with him. He’d store twenty, thirty, forty species names in his head and write them all down at the end of the walk. Sometimes he’d use the
ROM
guide to birds as a memory aid; sometimes he’d use me. But usually he remembered them all on his own and listed them in the exact order in which they’d appeared.

He sat on his bed with his books scattered around him and I lay on mine, reading
My Name Is Mina
by David Almond, a book for young teens about a girl who didn’t fit in. It was filled with different fonts: sometimes there were only two giant words on one page, for example. I loved that every time I was ready to turn the page, I had no idea what I would find on the other side.

THE NEXT MORNING WE
rose at
5
:
30
, ate a quick breakfast, and were in the park by six. We drove behind a long line of cars straight to the information centre. The parking lot was already half full and I thought that we’d finally see the famous crowds of Point Pelee, people hiding in bushes and scowling at one another.

We did see a lot of people milling around waiting for the shuttle to the tip, holding cups of coffee and their long-lens cameras. No one was scowling. In fact, what I sensed from this crowd was excitement and anticipation. These people, like us, were up early to do something they really wanted to do and it was a nice day, overcast but not raining. No one was talking on a cell phone, there were no laptops open anywhere, and no one was hiding in any bushes.

Yeats and I headed off into the forest south of the information centre, having decided to go to the tip later. I was conscious of that moment of stepping into the woods and leaving everything else behind. That one instant when all the sounds of people, of traffic, of doors opening and closing, were suddenly gone, swallowed up by trees and ferns. It was like a curtain falling on a stage, and I waited for that moment every time. My heart opened just a little bit wider. I looked at Yeats and saw it on his face, too. We were alone in the forest now, just us and all those creatures, all those glorious trees.

We saw
eastern bluebirds
,
eastern towhees
,
great-crested flycatchers
, and many different warblers. We kept walking and sighting, mentally ticking birds off every few minutes, hoping to see something new.

The trail through the woods wound around and we wound slowly around with it, occasionally seeing another person ahead, turning the next corner. Around one bend we scared something out of the foliage. We followed very quietly and watched as it settled again, not far away. It was a male
bobolink
, a new bird for us.

The breeding male bobolink is a distinctive bird. It’s the only American songbird that has a white back with black underparts. The back of its head is yellow and it’s a bit smaller than a robin. This bird migrates great distances every year, flying south of the equator and back again in the spring, a round trip of about
20
,
000
kilometres.

This early-morning bobolink was wary of us and hopped back into deeper foliage as we watched it, so we left it to fatten itself up for the rest of its journey north.

Around another bend the trail ran beside a shallow river, which was full of fallen logs and large stepping-stone rocks. I was wandering along happily, my brain unfocused, letting Yeats do the looking.