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

making a sound.
    One minute I was ambling along enjoying the scenery and sea air, and the next I was stone-still, looking at a bird I’d only ever seen in a book. I’d seen it a thousand times in two dimensions in our Audubon guide to the birds of Western North America — another one of our favourites — young Yeats on my lap, the names of birds rolling off my tongue. I found that I’d memorized its shape, especially the shape and colour of its beak, which is bright red. This bird on the beach looked just like the one in the photo, but I probably wouldn’t have been able to come up with the name “ black oystercatcher .” I looked around. The beach was covered with rocks and driftwood, and the place smelled of piles of washed-up seaweed. The wind blew the scent of salt water to shore, and waves rhythmically swept the beach. Who wouldn’t like to spend their time catching oysters and finding their fine-spun pearls, or just hanging out on a deserted beach where the next stop across the water was Japan?
    George scanned the horizon with his binoculars and said, “There’s lots more of them out there.”
    Oystercatchers were flying in a flock not too far out from shore, perhaps twenty individuals. Now we saw them standing on the rocky shore beyond the cove, pecking. Contrary to what their name suggests, their preferred foods are mussels and limpets.
    I contemplated the bird nearest to us; I looked at my son, whose face was open and radiant. George was mercifully silent.
    After the oystercatcher sighting George drove us back to our lodge where we packed up and checked out. Yeats and I drove back across the island to Nanaimo and stopped for lunch at a small campground. One bird we’d actively looked for in Tofino was the Stellar’s jay. We wanted to see it because it is so much like our blue jay from home, only bigger, and it is the only other jay in North America to sport a crest. The blue jay is gradually expanding its range west, and where the two birds overlap, they are interbreeding and creating hybrids. This hadn’t happened on Vancouver Island, yet, so we were looking for the pure Steller, with its azure body and black head and crest.
    The picnic tables at this rest stop were practically infested with Steller’s jays. They scattered when we sat down but hopped on over as soon as we opened our lunch bags. They were gorgeous and saucy, just like our jays from Ontario, but we were a little shocked by how tame they were, and I was wary of their boldness. I shooed them away throughout our lunch and Yeats laughed at me. We’d finally found them and now I was trying to get rid of them.
    THERE’S A BIG DIFFERENCE between watching birds and becoming a birdwatcher. The latter step involves binoculars, a birding destination, sometimes a guide, and at least one guidebook to birds, of which we’d always several, including the Audubons and the Royal Ontario Museum ( ROM ) and Sibley guides, though not the Petersons (sorry, George). It also involves keeping a list of the birds you’ve seen. Birders can be compulsive list-makers. Maybe most birders were always compulsive list-makers, even before they took up birding. Maybe birding is a good excuse for making lists. I don’t know because I’m not compulsive that way, but Yeats is.
    As a youngster, Yeats played complicated games with his toy cars and kept lists of the outcomes. He exasperated me with lists of dinosaur names; he made me play the dinosaur-alphabet game, where you had to name a dinosaur that started with each letter. He’d say Apatosaurus, I’d say Brachiosaurus, he’d say Corythosaurus, and so on. If I became stuck on M he refused to give me a clue, but made me sit there and think until I remembered Mamenchisaurus. He had deep faith that I’d get it eventually because of his own flawless memory, and I suppose it was that faith in me that kept me playing those games when I could have just walked away to make dinner. It was fun, in a strange kind of