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

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    As Yeats grew older he kept more and more lists. He started keeping lists of all the music he listened to, all the songs and albums, all the artists and where they were from. When he was in Grade 7 my brother taught him how to make an Excel spreadsheet of all these music lists, complete with graphs and charts, and he updated them weekly, something he did for about a year.
    When we arrived home from our trip to BC, Yeats started writing down the birds he saw on his walks around the city. He walked to and from home, across the Don Valley and through Riverdale Farm, stopping to look for birds. He kept the lists simple at first — just a notebook with the date on each page.
    March 30 : house finch, dark-eyed junco, black-capped chickadee, American robin, blue jay.
    If it were me, I would have written finch, junco, chickadee, robin : the opening descriptor would have gone by the wayside in the name of convenience. But for Yeats, that wasn’t accurate enough. There were too many kinds of chickadees and juncos to take such a cavalier attitude towards the lists. Eventually, he developed shortcuts: A. robin , for example, or A. crow .
    After a while, too, he stopped writing down the five birds he saw every day no matter what: house sparrow, European starling , rock dove (pigeon to most of us), ring-billed gull , and American robin. They became the assumed birds.
    Yeats reminded me of my mom’s father, the geologist, who we called Bop. Bop made lists and charts and kept meticulous accounts of the world around him. He had an air of being grounded in time and space that Yeats carried, too. This quality is hard to define. I think it has something to do with being unhurried, and connected to the rhythms of the natural world.
    Every once in a while Yeats would say, “Okay, Mom. Let’s name all the birds we’ve ever seen.” And he’d take out a piece of pristine white paper, his pencil, and his incredibly expectant look. I’d try really hard not to sigh and roll my eyes. Still, I was happy to encourage the birding after that successful trip to Tofino. I never once thought to myself, Here is a good mother-son hobby ; it just naturally evolved into something that we did together. We developed our birding habits, our way of walking slowly through the forest, Yeats going first to set the pace. We didn’t talk much — either in the car, where we listened to our favourite music, or in the field — and this companionable silence was part of what I loved about our trips.
    BEN DID MANAGE TO take more holidays later that summer, August of 2008 , when the stock market crashed. Economics has never been my strong point, but even I could tell this stock market problem was worse than the usual August downturn. Laurie’s husband, Andy, gave us all a little lesson in bundled mortgages which I promptly forgot, and the daily paper was full of dire predictions for Canada and the world. People in the U.S. were losing their homes and giant brokerage houses were going under. It wouldn’t be long before people on Bay Street started losing their jobs, something that would slow our fledgling business right down.
    Ben lay on a lounger on the cottage deck and read books, a book a day for the most part. He was famous for this. Once, when Lauren was three years old, she came around the corner of the deck to find her uncle reclining on the chaise with a book.
    She spread her arms and said, “But why are you always lying there reading?”
    He looked at her and replied, “But why are you always dressed in pink?” Some things just can’t be questioned.
    While Ben read his books, Yeats and I went to Wye Marsh for the first time. An old friend of my mother’s had told us it was a great place to see birds. We ended up going there every summer, sometimes more than once.
    Of all the places we went regularly to bird-watch, it was my favourite. At least once every trip, I’d stand on a little bridge over a stream and say, “I love it here.” Yeats had the