Birding with Yeats: A Mother's Memoir (25 page)

We tired of the crowds and took the next bus back to our car. We saw two wild turkeys on the bus ride back. People pointed. Turkeys are like swans; they’re so big that on first sight, they’re startling. Can they really be birds? And why do people eat turkey and not swan? Someone who has eaten swan can let me know.

Our next stop along the point was the DeLaurier Homestead area. We circumnavigated the old farmhouse, looking for birds as we went. Some people were having a picnic. Others were standing around waiting for their tour to start. We headed off down one of the trails into the woods and finally started to see some birds.

We saw the gorgeous male indigo bunting. It’s as blue as the cardinal is red, a spectacular sight. Like other blue birds, this bunting’s feathers lack blue pigment. Instead, its colour comes from microscopic structures in the makeup of its feathers, which reflect and refract blue light. It seems like a trick, a bit of sorcery, since these birds do look so blue.

We saw several groups of various warblers: Wilson’s,
magnolia
, Blackburnian, yellow, bay-breasted. Warblers spend their time on the go, flitting from branch to branch eating bugs. No sooner did I get one in my binocular-sight than it was gone. You had to know your warblers ahead of time in order to identify them in the field. You had to know, for example, that the
Wilson’s warbler
has no streaking on its breast, while the
Canada warbler
has a lovely necklace of jet stripes; otherwise, you might not be able to tell them apart. Among some of the warblers, the variations are small, especially among some of the females. Some of the female warblers even look like other species, such as the female house finch, except that the finch is smaller and has a different beak.

The point is, you had to be ready. You needed to be someone like Yeats, who spent hours and hours with the bird books, absorbing the minute differences, memorizing the similarities.

I remember one day asking him what he was doing as he lounged on his bed at home. “Memorizing the flycatchers.” Which, by the way, is impossible to do since two of them — the
alder
and the willow — are exactly alike except for their song. Until the
1970
s, these two birds were considered one species and so, in order to decide which one you’re looking at in the field, you have to hear it sing.

I was not like Yeats, who memorized the birds, but I was with Yeats. Ben and I both had the benefit of our son’s encyclopaedic knowledge and ability to identify birds. Without him, we would not have been in the woods on Point Pelee on a beautiful spring morning. We would have been in the city selling books.

We came upon a group of about twenty-five people clustered together. All of them were looking up. We figured they must have spotted something good up in those trees so we joined them.

I asked the woman in front of me what they were looking at, and she said it was an
eastern screech owl, red morph. Eastern screech owls come in two colours — red and grey — which scientists call “morphs.” Another owl! Two different owl species in one weekend! I asked her where it was and she pointed up at a tall tree not too far away.

“It’s impossible to see, it’s so well camouflaged,” she said. “But if you watch where those warblers are dive-bombing, then look through your binoculars, you’ll get it.”

Yeats was standing behind me and said, “Yes! There it is!”

I did as the woman suggested. There were five or six warblers acting crazy, repeatedly flying right at the tree and then swerving sharply away. They obviously wanted the owl gone. I found it through the binoculars quite easily once I knew where to look.

I’d seen these small owls while kayaking around Fairylands, and one night there were two of them on our island — but I could see them only in silhouette, high in the pines.

This was a clear sighting. This owl was less than half the size of the great horned. It had tucked itself into a V in the tree and blended right in, colours exact. None of these people would have seen it if it hadn’t been for the aggravated warblers.

I offered Ben my binoculars but he shrugged them off as usual. He found them awkward with his glasses. He didn’t seem to have the same need as we did to see every single bird.

We kept walking and followed a path that took us alongside some canals that led out to the lake. We sat on a bench on a flat little bridge over one of these canals and watched a beaver swim towards us and right under the bridge. The canal stretched as far as we could see, woodland thick on either side like walls, birdsong the only sound. We could have been the last three people on Earth.

We found a segment of road in the forest. It bisected a trail and had been left to tell a story. There were benches and some information boards, some with flora and fauna, others with old photographs of the road. This road used to stretch from farm to farm. This whole area, now a forest, was farmland. Most of the road, as well as the farms and all the buildings, had been dismantled and taken away. Nature, and nature tourism, had claimed it.

While we sat and rested on the benches, we saw a northern parula, a black-throated blue warbler, a blue-grey gnatcatcher, and an eastern towhee — all birds we’d seen before. We waited a while longer to see if anything else would come and then set out again. As we were winding our way back to the car, Ben spotted something racing across the forest floor.

“Look! What is it? A mink?” It was a small, brown mammal, very low to the ground and running like heck. In its mouth flopped a dead rabbit.

Yeats said, “Yes, I think it’s a mink. Look at it go!” The animal zigged and zagged, running back and forth across a creek, dragging its prey, which was just about as big as it was. Finally, it made a dash in a straight line and dived into an old tree stump.

“That was fantastic,” Ben said. “Just as exciting as seeing birds.”

In all, we saw about sixty-eight species of birds that day. We were happy with that, but decided to drive back to the boardwalk at the Blue Heron area to see the black terns again. Maybe we’d see something else. We’d given up on seeing as many as we had the year before.

We parked at the Blue Heron area again and Yeats went into the woods first, as usual. Not five steps from the car he said, “Look! A snake!”

He gestured up with his eyes, and then raised his binoculars. Ben and I looked up to the top of a dead tree where a very large snake was slithering slowly into a hole. And then it was gone.

“It’s a fox snake,” said Yeats. “That was great!” Then he bounded down the path.

Ben looked at me and said, “How did he see that?”

I smiled. “He’s good.”

Ben shook his head. “If we’d been ten seconds later, we would have missed it. That was amazing!”

I think that snake was the highlight of Ben’s day. It was an eastern fox snake, the second-largest snake in Ontario (after the eastern rat snake). The eastern fox snake usually grows to about one metre long. We didn’t know how long this one was since we didn’t see it enter the tree, but we saw over half a metre disappear into that hole, which made it the biggest wild snake I’d ever seen. The eastern fox snake is listed as “threatened” both in Ontario and nationally. It is a protected species.

We saw the black terns again, only two of them, sweeping and swooping over the marsh. We walked out onto the boardwalk and no matter how far we went, those terns stayed a good distance away. We saw another fox snake, about half the girth of the first. This one was slowly uncoiling and slithering into the reeds, off to find dinner. We saw three different kinds of turtles, and Yeats was sorry he didn’t have our reptile and amphibian book because we could only identify one for sure, the painted turtle. He jotted down notes so he could look up the others later.

I said, “Would this be a good reason to get an iPhone or some other internet device?”

Yeats glared at me even though he knew I was kidding. If he wrote down the description, made mental notes, and spent half an hour sorting out which turtles we saw, he’d remember them forever. The next time, he’d know which turtle it was. If he looked them up on the Internet, he wouldn’t remember them and he’d always be dependent on the device. Some people might say, “But he’d always have the device so why does it matter?” But having the knowledge is always better than having the ability to look it up. Or is it the same?

For people like Yeats, who have steel-trap memories, it’s not the same at all.

THAT NIGHT BEN AND
I went out for a nice Italian dinner, while Yeats stayed in to update his lists. We usually ate food we brought from home on our birding jaunts, so this was a treat. I had a glass of wine, also something I never usually did when birding.

I thanked Ben for bringing us down here. He reached across the table for my hand and said, “I love you, Lynn. Thanks for letting me come.”

We smiled inanely at one another for a while. Then we started talking about our usual subject: the bookstore. We had a couple of great events coming up and Ben wanted to know if I’d work them.

We had Andrew Motion, who used to be the poet laureate of the UK, coming for a special dinner event.

Ben said, “It’s for his novel, but everyone coming to the dinner is a poetry fan. I think we’re all hoping he’ll recite something.”

“Aren’t we lucky to be in a business filled with poetry lovers? People who aren’t afraid to
say
they read poetry?” I said. “Don’t worry, I’ll be at that one. And the May Brunch, of course, but I thought the kids were doing most of the events coming up.” Ben hosts a monthly “Authors’ Brunch” event and has done so since his days at Nicholas Hoare bookstore.

“There are so many of them,” Ben sighed. “I have Yeats on a lot. He says he wants to work mostly nights, so that’s what he’s getting. Rupert is working a lot of nights, too.”

“Yeah, Yeats wants to bird-watch during the day, for the migration,” I said. “Some mornings all he has to do is lie in bed and watch the tree outside his window. The other morning he counted thirty species in that tree. Not all at once, obviously.”

Ben and I laughed. He said, “Rupert’s taking that philosophy course in June and then he’s off to England in August, and Titus is taking a full course load all summer long. At least Danielle will work. She wants as many shifts as she can get.” Rupert had decided to take a Shakespeare course at Oxford, an intensive program that allowed him to get a full credit for one month of classes. He’d go to London and see a play at the Globe Theatre, he’d hang out in libraries and pubs that were hundreds of years old, and he’d meet some new people, too. I was pleased that Rupert was stepping outside his usual circle, getting out of town on his own.

“It’s so great having Danielle back. She’s a star,” I said.

We didn’t have to worry about Danielle — she seemed to be grounded and hardworking and managed to stay cheerful on top of that. The boys were always less sure of their next steps and seemed more conflicted. Sometimes I felt like I was holding my breath, waiting for the boys to . . . what? Be satisfied? Settled? There was no such thing as “settled” as far as I could see. You couldn’t predict what would throw you off your path or when. And who was I to demand something of these young men that I pushed back against myself? I still didn’t have a vision of myself ten years from now. I really only had now.

THE NEXT DAY WE
took our own multi-grain bagels down to the breakfast room to toast and then covered them in almond butter, which we’d also brought with us.

Like the year before, we decided to spend Sunday at Hillman’s Marsh in the morning and then the rest of the day driving home. Also like last year, there were very few people at the marsh and most of them had congregated at the side closest to the parking lot. They had scopes, which allowed them to see birds from quite a distance. We needed to get closer to the birds, so we walked.

The day was bright but gusty. There was less marsh this year, probably due to the lack of rain we’d experienced that spring, combined with a dearth of snow all winter. Still, there were loads of birds out there: flocks of dunlins and short-billed dowitchers,
blue-winged teals
and black-bellied plovers. We also saw a
green-winged teal
for the first time, and a common moor hen.

The green-winged teal is a small duck with distinct colour patterns — iridescent green patches on the wings and a white stripe down the front and, for the males, a green-and-reddish head.

The common moor hen was skulking in some low shrubbery growing along the edge of the marsh. We’d seen something moving in there and we followed it for a couple of minutes. We stood still and then we tried moving quickly, but it stayed in the shrubs. Finally it showed itself and we were rewarded with a new bird. I recognized it immediately from the old bird book, unlike most of the passerines, which are just too similar for me to be able to differentiate between the species. This one was an adult breeding male, with its brilliant red face-shield. That made three brand new birds within five minutes of being at Hillman’s Marsh, and our shoes weren’t one bit muddy.

As we continued around the marsh we saw various warblers and sparrows and then, finally, we saw
and
heard one of those twin-like flycatchers. Yeats made a positive ID: it was a willow flycatcher. He seemed a bit nonchalant about this sighting, after two years of failing to do it.

He shrugged and said, “I knew I’d get one eventually.” My Zen son.

We walked a bit farther along the eastern end of the pond and stopped when we saw a flock flying in the distance. The birds were way up high but coming closer.

Yeats and I raised our binoculars and when they were nearly overhead he said, “
Bonaparte’s gulls
.”

There were perhaps two hundred of them, flying in a couple of separate groups. They dropped in altitude and began to circle. They flew around and around in a great, giant circle in the sky, white wings flapping, calls of
kew
kew
coming from the flock. We guessed they were feeding up there, and before we had time to wonder aloud at this particular winged waltz, they finished and resumed flying north.