by Gene Walz
Not all of his humor was so “refined.” Once while driving to check out winter birds east of Winnipeg, we heard an ad for Viagra on the car radio. It warned about calling your doctor if you had an erection lasting for more than four hours. Bob announced, “I know a lot more people I’d phone before I called my doctor.”
Bob was quick-witted but he also had some well-honed jokes that he was unafraid to insert into a conversation if given the opportunity. Sitting at a dinner table with a beer in front of him, he’d say, “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.” On another occasion, he said that he once had a trained cat that would eat cheese and sit next to a mouse hole “with baited breath.” After an unsuccessful search for lions that could climb trees in Tanzania, he told us we’d been on the first truthful day of the trip: “No lyin!’”
The safaris he led to Tanzania and Kenya were extraordinarily well-planned, the game drives producing close-ups with all of the “charismatic megafauna” (elephants, rhinos, hippos, lions, leopards, etc.) and exotic native birds, but also wonderful tent camps and lodges for his groups to settle into. But he also knew how to handle people and emergencies. When one of our group contracted food poisoning, Bob arranged to have him flown to a hospital in Nairobi in less than an hour. (The guy recovered.) And when a lodge summarily cancelled all of our reservations in favour of a higher-paying group, he found a much better lodge nearby.
At lunch or dinner at these camps, when talk turned invariably to flying, he’d confess, “I’m a nervous flyer. You arrive at a ‘terminal,’ and you’re constantly reminded of ‘departures.’” When one couple announced that they were stopping in Egypt on the way back from his Kenyan safari, Bob asked whether they were going on one of those tours where everyone is forced to eat beans all day. “So they can toot in common.”
Bob also led birding and polar bear tours to Churchill, Manitoba. In fact, he was one of the first to do so. My wife and I went there one Halloween, unaware that Bob was there leading a tundra buggy tour. When we got back, he didn’t castigate us for choosing the tour’s assigned guide instead of him, he simply asked us whether we’d seen any “pa-tarmigans in the pa-tamaracks.” I had to force my eyes from rolling.
Bob was so genial and comfortable around people, you could forget that he’d spent hours and hours alone studying and photographing birds and animals. He was not reluctant to share his knowledge about birds or anecdotes about his experiences. He once told me about watching woodpeckers in the rain and discovering that they could lock their talons into a tree trunk right under a thick branch and fall asleep for the night protected and perfectly dry.
Bob had the perfect temperament to be a birder and naturalist. He was carefully observant, imaginative, empathetic, and, above all, patient. These are the qualities that made him such a wonderful photographer, wood carver, and birding companion. He didn’t just observe birds to build a list of life-sightings or firsts. He watched them carefully and at length until he understood them. In a way, he seemed to relate to them—especially the solitariness of his two iconic figures: the Great Grey Owl and the Polar Bear.
He translated this understanding of wildlife into stunning photographs for numerous national and international magazines, including such familiar ones as LIFE, Canadian Geographic, Reader’s Digest, Equinox, International Wildlife, and Outdoor Photography Canada, among others. His books have central positions on many bookshelves and coffee tables. The Edge of the Arctic: Churchill and the Hudson Bay Lowlands; The Manitoba Landscape: A Visual Symphony; The Great Gray Owl on Silent Wings; and Manitoba: Seasons of Beauty. His photography earned him an impressive list of accolades. He is one of the few photographers, for instance, to be accepted into the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. But he was a kind of Renaissance Man: photographer, sculptor, filmmaker, painter, lecturer, curator, raconteur, and good friend to many.
After a long hike with Bob one day, watching birds and sharing stories, I complained that my knees were killing me. Bob said he had the same problem and that doctors had diagnosed it as knee-monia. On another outing he complained about his weight. “Look at this belly,” he complained. “I must be anorexic.” Gullible me: “Anorexic!? Why?” Bob: “Because the definition of an anorexic is a person who looks in a mirror and thinks they’re fat.”
Ironically it was his belly that betrayed him. Bowel cancer. Or as he told me, “Cancer will always get you in the end.”
Wooly Bears, Not Birds
A clear, blue sky. The landscape softened by leaves and grasses turning from green to yellow and brown. The pleasant rustle of downed leaves underfoot. A perfect fall day to head to Oak Hammock Marsh in the Interlake just north of Winnipeg.
At this time of the year, The Marsh proves why it’s an IBA (Important Bird Area). Hundreds of shore birds, thousands of ducks, and tens of thousands of geese stop here in southward migration every day.
As I walked a path to get the sun behind me and get more than just a silhouette of some ducks, I almost stepped on a woolly bear (Pyrrharctic isabella). It caused an intense flashback.
Thirty years ago, I strapped my two young daughters into their car seats and took them to The Marsh to show them the wonders of a fall Manitoba waterfowl migration.
The sky then was dark with geese, and their plaintive honking could be heard almost a kilometre away. I instructed my girls on the differences between the varieties of ducks and geese. I pointed out how some geese wiffle down onto the water. I showed them the dabbling ducks and the diving grebes, and I asked them to count the seconds the grebes were underwater. The girls couldn’t have been less interested.
What caught their attention were the woolly bears. While I was gazing up, the girls were staring down at the little black and copper caterpillars (also known as woolly worms, fuzzy bears, and hedgehog caterpillars). They nodded as I preached, but I could see that they were fascinated by the soft feel of the woolly bears, by their funny, rolling way of walking, and the way they curled up into little balls when they were picked up. They liked the tickle of little feet as the caterpillars walked across the palms of their hands.
I didn’t know much about caterpillars then, but I decided to make it a teaching moment anyway—even though what I told them was dead wrong.
The woolly bears, I said, were larvae that would turn into wondrous butterflies in the spring. (In fact, they become orangey-yellow tiger moths.) And I indicated that you could tell from their colours whether the winter would be warm or cold; the blacker they are, the longer and colder the winter will be. (In fact, the colouration of the thirteen segments of the woolly bears is the result of their age and feeding habits.)
For the rest of our time there I looked at birds to see if I could find a Ross’s or a White-fronted Goose among all the Canadas or any lingering shorebirds (or beachies as some Brits call them). Meanwhile, my daughters searched for more caterpillars.
I didn’t realize until we got home that they were not just searching, they were collecting. They were hoping to hide the woolly bears so that in spring their bedrooms would be full of “flutterflies.” They were not just collectors, they were dreamers.
Sadly, their seatbelts had mashed most of the larvae (at least a dozen each) in their jacket pockets. Not many woolly bears survived the ride home and icky, greenish goo stained their jackets.
We only saved a few, putting them outside in the grass and hoping that their natural cryoprotectant (anti-freeze) would help them survive until spring.
By the next spring my daughters had forgotten their precious woolly bears.
Thirty years later they’ve forgotten the entire incident. I hope this chapter reminds them of the innocent and sometimes messy dreams of youth.
For my two daughters way back then, hope was a roomful of things with wings—beautiful, fragile butterfly wings. For me, along with poet Emily Dickinson, “Hope is the thing with feathers.” Since I first read that poem, I’ve alw
ays had a special connection to it. That connection became even stronger when I moved to Winnipeg. As the poem goes on to say, “I’ve heard it in the chilliest land,” and Winnipeg is the “chilliest” place I’ve ever lived.
I suppose I’m more of a literalist than the metaphorical Emily Dickinson. I read that first line of the poem backwards rather than forwards. The thing with feathers for me represents hope. Birds have kept me active and warm in Winnipeg. They’ve kept me from declining into pessimism and doubt. When I need a boost, there are always the birds.
I hope the essays in this book have conveyed some of the sense of possibility and wonder, some of the camaraderie and comfort that birds have provided. Through birding, I’ve had some great adventures, met some wonderful people, seen some memorable places, animals, and birds. A life touched by birds is a better life.
Acknowledgements
The following essays have appeared in slightly different forms and with different titles in the following publications:
“My Birding Bruises.” Reprinted with permission of Birdwatching Digest.
“The Passenger Pigeon Apocalypse.” Revised from The Birds of Manitoba and reprinted with permission of Manitoba Avian Research Committee and Nature Manitoba.
“House Sparrows: Basic, Economy-sized Birds,” “Black-capped Chickadees: Cheerful, Little Fluffballs,” “Mallards and Other Tippy Ducks,” “Nuthatches and Woodpeckers: Birds with Sticky Feet,” “A Great Blue Heron Returns Before Ice-out,” “American White Pelicans: Ghost Riders in the Sky,” “Eyeball to Eyeball with a Short-eared Owl,” “Merlins and Other Bird Brains,” “Corvids: The Smartest Birds in the World,” “Kathy and the Pileated Woodpeckers,” “Atlantic Puffins: Clowns of the Sea,” “Mississippi Kites: Alien Visitors,” “A Greylag and Other Wild Goose Chases,” “Apapanes and Other Hawaiian Birds,” “Fast and Furious Falcons,” “A Fall-out of Spring Warblers,” “Larks Larking,” “Churchill, Manitoba: A Birder’s Chilly Paradise,” “The Big Spit: At a Birding Festival,” “Looking for Pootoos: A Deadly Encounter,” “Scary Surprise on an Amazonian Birding Tower,” “Common Grackles: Unloved and Unwanted,” “Wrynecks and Other Jinx Birds,” “What’s in a Name?,” “Bird Feeder Freeloaders,” “The Old Man and the Lek,” “Old Jack and the Crow with One Leg,” “Woolly Bears, Not Birds,” Revised and Expanded from Green Mountain Digital Blogs. Printed with permission of National Audubon Society.
Special thanks to all those who helped make me a better birder and this a better book: Jamis, Sharon and Sarah at Turnstone Press, Charlie Rattigan, Dennis Cooley, Michelle and Leah Walz, John Weier, Rudolf Koes, Peter Taylor, Brad Carey, Andy Courcelles, Richard Staniforth, George Holland, Robert Taylor, Bob Nero, Christian Artuso, Ward Christianson, Marlene Waldron, Rob Parsons, Bob Talbot, and Liz Morash.
Table of Contents
1st Half Title Page
Happiness is a Rare Bird
copyright © Gene Walz 2016
Dedication
Contents
Preface
2nd Half Title page
Even Common Birds Can Be Special House Sparrows: Basic, Economy Sized Birds
Black-capped Chickadees: Cheerful, Little Fluffballs
Mallards and Other Tippy Ducks
Nuthatches and Woodpeckers: Birds with Sticky Feet
A Great Blue Heron Returns Before Ice-out
American White Pelicans: Ghost Riders in the Sky
Eyeball to Eyeball with a Short-eared Owl
Merlins and Other Bird Brains
Corvids: The Smartest Birds in the World
Kathy and the Pileated Woodpeckers
What Is So Rare As Atlantic Puffins: Clowns of the Sea
A Gray-crowned Rosy-Finch: Truculent Vagabond
Mississippi Kites: Alien Visitors
Northern Cardinal: Rare Bird Alert
Indigo Bunting or Lazuli: What the Heck Is It?
A Greylag and Other Wild Goose Chases
Burrowing Owls: A Trip to Fort Whyte Alive
Apapanes and Other Hawaiian Birds
Andean Cock of the Rock: The Bird Gods Smile on Us
Antpittas: Teh Bird Gods Spurn Us
Forty-spotted Pardalotes: Rare Australian Endemic
The Resplendent Quetzal: My Favourite Bird
Hummingbirds: A Divine Pash
Once in a Lifetime Birding Experiences Broad-winged Hawks: An Unexpected Spectacle
Fast and Furious Falcons
A Fall-out of Spring Warblers
Eight Things I've Seen with My Own Two Eyes
Bob Nero and the Great Grey Owl
Churchill, Manitoba: A Birder's Chilly Paradise
The Big Spit: At a Birding Festival
Vietnam North to South
My Birding Bruises
Looking for Potoos: A Deadly Encounter
Scary Surprise on an Amazonian Birding Tower
Big Jags and Bad Drivers
Terrible Trees and Few Birds: A Christmas Story
Things That Don’t Make Me Happy, People Who Do Common Grackles: Unloved and Unwanted
Wrynecks and Other Jinx Birds
What’s in a Name?
The Passenger Pigeon Apocalypse
Bird Feeder Freeloaders
Bird-Guiding: Not as Tempting as It Seems
Nerdy? No Way!
The Old Man and the Lek
Old Jack and the Crow with One Leg
Bob Taylor: The Funniset Birder Ever
Wooly Bears, Not Birds
Acknowledgements
Landmarks
Cover