Birding with Yeats: A Mother's Memoir (18 page)

George’s eyebrows shot up and he said to me, “Do you mind if we let her look?”

“Of course not,” I said, smiling at the woman.

“Groovy, thanks,” she said. She actually said “groovy” — I wondered if she’d picked up the word from her parents or if it was making a comeback.

Yeats stood stony-faced throughout the entire episode and later, when I asked him if he wished he were a hippie in Tofino, he said, “No.” Then he gave me a look that said,
Why are
you asking?
“I don’t belong here. And I’m not a surfer.”

I didn’t reply, but I looked at him with curiosity and wondered where he did belong. When I was a teenager I belonged with my family but wanted to get away from them, to explore other possibilities. Looking at Yeats, I wasn’t sure if he needed to get away at all.

“Where do you belong, Yeats?”

He shrugged and strode ahead of me. George brought up the rear with his scope and tripod, and I tried to remember how confusing life was as a teen.

THE NEXT DAY WE
met George in a parking lot down the highway. He was taking us on a canoe trip to see the eagles. He had a large war canoe on a trailer hitched to his truck. Two very nice Australian women who were coming with us to look for eagles were sitting in the back seat. They were not birders, but they were staying at George’s B&B and had decided to take advantage of this expedition to see some of wild Canada.

Wild it was. We drove for ages down an unpaved road to Kennedy Lake, the largest inland lake on Vancouver Island. For the entire drive there was nothing to see but forest. George told us that most of it wasn’t virgin forest. It had been logged long ago and, if it wasn’t for the activism of people like him, it would be up for logging again. The fight against logging in various watersheds has gone on forever in BC. This particular fight had been successful for the conservationists — for now — but there was a feeling, accurate or not, that if they let down their guard, the logging companies would slip right in.

It was an earthshaking experience to be at the side of the road when a logging truck barrelled past. It was a big rig piled high with trees, some of them over twelve metres long. The truck made the earth rumble; it could surely knock over anything in its path. A second truck followed it. And then, more: one truck followed after another, and pretty soon I realized that I’d just watched half a forest rush by. It was overwhelming and confusing, because what was the solution to resource extraction? Some people would say, “What is this problem that needs a solution?” It was a matter of perspective.

The argument over clear-cutting forests becomes visceral, though, when you see the deforested land from the highway or feel those trucks rumble by. A friend of mine who lives in Victoria told me that most of the clear-cutting took place far from the highways of Vancouver Island. The casual observer, even the intrepid traveller, had no idea of the extent of the cutting. It was a political issue as much as an environmental one, to say nothing of aesthetics, and the logging companies tried to keep their work out of sight.

George talked to us about the clear-cutting, and about all the jobs he’d had, until nearly an hour later we were at a campground, ready to launch our canoe. He discovered that he’d brought along one too few life jackets for the group. We looked at one another. It was way too far a drive to go back.

One of the Australian women said, “Do you think I could wear one? I’m awfully afraid of water.”

“Of course,” George said. “And you’ll get one, too, since you’re a guest in our country.” He threw life jackets to both women. He said to Yeats, “You’ll sit in the bow, so you get a jacket. And I have to wear one since I’ll be steering.”

Yeats looked at me, since it was now obvious I’d be the one going without. His look was curious, like he was waiting for me to say something, but I was waiting for George.

George said to me, “Are you a strong swimmer?”

“I can swim. I’m not afraid of the water.” I looked at the Australians and said, “We spend our summers on a lake, in boats.” I didn’t say anything about the shipwreck and neither did Yeats. To be honest, it didn’t even cross my mind.

“Okay then,” George said. “You can sit in the centre of the canoe. You won’t be paddling, so you don’t need a life jacket anyway.” Hmm. He seemed happy with his logic, which seemed to support my theory that George thought I wasn’t really there. But life was short and I didn’t argue.

The canoe had a tiny engine on it, a
6
h.p., which took us from our little beach on Kennedy Lake around the corner to Kennedy River. The idea was to paddle down the river while we were looking for birds and to use the engine when we needed to get going. I sat up straight in the middle of the long canoe, feeling like a princess. It was nice not to wear a life jacket, even if it was against the law.

The river was mirror-still. We were gliding on glass and all the trees and bushes on either side were reflected perfectly in the water, upside down. It was as though everything had two matching parts. That dead tree over there had an exact replica, branch for branch, twig for twig, still as stone, in the water. From this distance, the riverscape didn’t look like scenery. It was more like being in some kind of weird funhouse where your brain can’t believe what your eyes are telling it. We marvelled out loud for a while but found we didn’t have enough words to describe the wonder of our surroundings and soon fell silent. We each drank it in alone, this incredible stillness.

We motored very slowly down the river for about twenty minutes. The steady vibrations from the engine and the hard metal seat, and probably a spiritual component I can’t name, combined to gently shake my spine and shake my spine until finally I felt a little
clunk
. That misalignment in my sacrum had finally been corrected. I felt the relief instantly and wanted to shout for joy, but that might have startled everyone, so I stayed quiet. In fact, it remained corrected for the next eight months, longer than anything any chiropractor had ever been able to do. I was overcome with gratitude — to this river, to this boat, even to George — all of it had facilitated this healing.

We saw a lot of bald eagles on this trip. We saw so many that eventually we became blasé. My friend Heather, who spends summers on De Courcy Island, said that for them, seeing bald eagles was like us seeing ravens at our cottage. No big deal. They saw them every day. Kind of pesky. But when I lifted my binoculars and saw five eagles at once, I was wonderstruck. Three circling overhead and two sitting on branches, imperious, unbeholden. We were in their habitat and they cared nothing for us, or maybe they hated us and our plastic bags and the noise we brought to their river.

We floated and gazed at the eagles and didn’t say too much. My mind drifted, let go a bit. I dipped my fingers into the freezing water. I looked around at the stunning scenery. Beautiful British Columbia. Out here on this river we could see hills on one side and, in the distance, the interior mountains of Vancouver Island. Most of the rest of the view was flat: river, reeds, a few trees, low clouds, more river around the bend.

On our way to the picnic spot, the halfway mark in the tour, we saw a few other bird species: song sparrow, common yellowthroat, spotted sandpiper, lesser scaup, mallard, rufous hummingbird. It wasn’t a long or impressive list, but the point of this trip was seeing the eagles, so our expectations weren’t high for spotting other birds. The Australian women were happy with everything they saw because it was all new to them and this made the rest of us happy, too.

We passed an abandoned First Nations fishing station and continued around a bend in the river to a little island. We tied the boat to an overhanging tree and scrambled out with our packed lunches. It was hot, but there wasn’t much shade on these rocks, so we pulled our hats down farther over our brows and ate. No one said very much, not even George, and after about twenty minutes we set out back the way we’d come.

On the way back, Yeats spotted a bird from the bow. He gave a yelp and reached for his binoculars with one hand and his
guidebook
with the other.

George instantly stopped paddling and said, “What is it? Where is it?”

“In there.” Yeats gestured into the foliage in front of us. “It’s hopping around, down low. It’s some kind of flycatcher.”

This really caught George’s attention. “Some kind of flycatcher,” he mumbled, before reciting the kinds it could be. We all sort of saw the bird. It was elusive. It was shy. It seemed to be playing coy with us, although it was probably just catching its lunch.

Yeats and George saw different things. Yeats was thumbing through his Sibley and George through his Peterson.

George said, “I think it’s a great crested. It’s got to be. Look at it.”

I tried to see it through the foliage, but it was obscured.

“No, it’s an
ash-throated
,” Yeats said. “It’s too pale for a great crested. I see those all the time in Ontario.”

“But I think the wing feathers have a bit of yellow on them. The ash-throated only has yellow on its belly.”

“I don’t see the yellow on the wings. Its bill is all black. The great crested has a brown bill.” They were looking from their books to the bird, while trying to steady the canoe against the shore as the unnamed flycatcher hopped along. The Australian women looked at me and we laughed silently.

“Whatever it is, it’s an accidental,” George said. “But I won’t be calling it in.”

“Why not?” Yeats asked, while trying to see the bird through his binoculars. “I’m sure it’s an ash-throated. It looks like nothing I’ve seen and I’ve never seen an ash-throated.”

I said, “I don’t see how you can tell from this distance through all that foliage.”

I felt Yeats’s and George’s eyes boring into me.

George said, “I won’t call it in because other birders don’t believe me when I call in accidentals from Kennedy Lake. I’m the only one who tours in here, so they’d have to come with me, and if they never found it, they’d think I was making the whole thing up.”

I was a bit surprised that other birders didn’t believe George when he called in accidentals, but I was too polite to press him about it. I didn’t understand the first thing about the politics of birding, anyway.

Later, Yeats said to me, “I wanted it to be an ash-throated because I’ve never seen one before and he wanted it to be a great crested because there’s never been a sighting of one on Vancouver Island. People have seen ash-throateds here before. Either way, it’s an awesome sighting. Neither of those birds is supposed to come here.”

“Maybe it was neither. Maybe it was something else.” I was just bugging him.

He shrugged and looked away, annoyed.

As we were motoring our way back to land, I was remembering when Yeats was small, three or four years old, and we were alone on the island in Muskoka. We were inside and out of the corner of my eye I saw something move from the garden into the forest.

“Look, Yeats, what’s that? It’s huge.”

“Where?” Yeats stood on the couch and peered past me. “A turkey! It’s a turkey! It’s running away!”

I grabbed my camera from the table and snapped a couple of pictures as it ran into the forest. This was in the days before digital photography, so we had to wait until I finished the roll of film to take it in to be developed.

In the meantime, we looked up turkeys in one of our guidebooks.

“Did you know that in the wild, turkeys can grow to be eight kilograms, sometimes even more? That’s nearly ten times the size of a sparrow.”

“Well,” said Yeats, “we get to see how big they are at Thanksgiving when Uncle Greg carves them up. They’re huge.”

“Right. And did you know that by
1900
,
wild turkeys
were almost completely gone? Wiped out.”

“What happened to them?”

“Hunters. First hunters killed them all and because of development, houses and stuff, their habitat was ruined. Then, hunters saved them. The hunters wanted to keep hunting them so they began issuing licences. Only a certain number could be killed every year in certain places. Also, they started conserving their habitat. People started breeding wild turkeys in captivity and reintroducing them to the wild.”

“So there are lots now? Still being hunted?”

“Yes. Millions now, up from nearly gone. I guess that’s a success story for conservation. An example of how the Endangered Species List can work.”

Not long after that little nature lesson, everyone came back to the island and we told them our story.

“We saw a turkey!” Yeats was jumping up and down. “It was running into the forest!” He imitated the turkey and everyone laughed. They didn’t believe us.

My brother said, “I’ve never seen a turkey in Muskoka. Are you sure we get them?”

My sister said, “You guys were seeing things.” No one believed us, or maybe they thought we’d seen something other than a turkey.

Whenever the topic came up, which it did quite a bit, Greg started singing the Partridge Family song (somewhat bastardized), “Point me . . . in the direction of Al the Turkey . . .” Yeats was indignant and insulted at first but eventually decided to laugh it off. If he’d ever seen
The Partridge Family
, he might have been less forgiving.

When I got the photos back, we could see something disappearing into the trees. To Yeats and me it looked just like a scrawny turkey neck with a turkey-shaped head on top. Although the body was hidden in bushes and trees, it was unmistakable to us. To everyone else it was a total figment of our imagination.

But over the next few summers we started getting turkeys on the island, or at least on Fairylands Island, next to us. We took the canoe into the little bay and heard them deep in the forest,
gobble, gobble, gobble
, like demented ogres from a fairy tale.

And then, one summer, we had a female with six chicks right on our property. She paraded them around the perimeter of our field, and we watched as they ate bugs and scraped the ground with their oversized feet. A week later there were only four chicks, confirming what we all knew about predator and prey.