Free Birding with Yeats: A Mother's Memoir by Lynn Thomson

it eats, almost exclusively, the honeydew-producing scale insect — and it will vigorously defend its dining territory from other birds.
    The Wilson’s warbler is a small bird whose underparts are all yellow. The male, which we’d found here, has a black cap, and its nearly orange face is common in the western version. They are plentiful on Vancouver Island; we would go on to see many.
    George gave a little lecture on recognizing birds by their voices, about memorizing their calls. Yeats listened to all these instructions but mostly he was watching for birds. George was too, but in a less pointed way. I had the feeling that George wanted to impart as much birding wisdom as he could to the younger generation as quickly as possible.
    We walked down a seaside path and George talked about his younger days as a birder, how he and a couple of buddies used to skip school to look for birds. He was even more of a bird fanatic than Yeats. I looked at my son, who rolled his eyes. I could tell he wished George would be quiet and just show us some birds we’d never seen before.
    We scrambled down to a beach strewn with boulders and giant logs. The sun was beginning to warm the air, but I kept my jacket zipped to my neck against the wind. Out beyond a small island, cormorants flew low to the water; two bald eagles turned in the clear sky high above us.
    George set up his tripod, wedging it between the rocks. He turned the scope onto the small island and said, “Sometimes there are shorebirds over there. They’re so perfectly camouflaged that you need a scope to see them.”
    Sure enough, he found a short-billed dowitcher , and we took turns looking at it through the scope as it pecked the ground, feeding.
    The dowitcher is a medium-sized shorebird with a bill twice the length of its head. Its feathers are mottled browns and white, so it blends in with sand and rock and sky. To me its bill didn’t look short at all, but the bird guide assured us that compared to the long-billed dowitcher’s, it was short.
    We watched the bird for a while and it seemed totally unaware of us. This was the first time we’d watched a bird through a scope. It was better than our binoculars because it was steadier and the magnification was greater. No matter how still you are, your binoculars will shake a bit, which can be annoying when you’re trying to see the details of a new bird. (Are those black and white stripes on its wings, or is it a grey patch? Can’t tell because my hands are shaking a teeny-weeny bit.) Also, the scope’s greater magnification allowed us to see more detail at a farther distance — those gradations of colour along the wings, or that subtle shading around the eyes.
    But the scope on its tripod was heavy and clumsy to carry. It was difficult to set up on uneven ground and, I imagined, grew heavier and heavier as the morning wore on. But I guess that was part of what we paid George for.
    So far we had seen no other people on our tour, suiting us all just fine. As we moved along the beach to a little cove, George continued to tell us about his birding exploits, the tours he led in Peru and Ecuador during the winter, and all the places he’d been up and down the BC coast. George and I were stepping carefully over the sun-bleached logs, he with his heavy scope, binoculars around his neck, and pack on his back; I with my chronically unstable sacrum. (There were times when all I had to do was pick a sock up off the floor and my back would go out, and I didn’t want to have to find a chiropractor on holiday.) Yeats was way ahead, striding over logs and rocks, long hair swinging. When we got to the cove, he was already standing there, a finger to his lips. That was for George, because I wasn’t saying anything anyway.
    “An oystercatcher,” Yeats whispered, as loudly as he dared.
    I looked to where he was pointing. The bird had lifted its head and was looking at us. George ceased his monologue and put the scope down without