Birding with Yeats: A Mother's Memoir

by Lynn Thomson

  I said, “I don’t see how you can tell from this distance through all that foliage.”

  I felt Yeats’s and George’s eyes boring into me.

  George said, “I won’t call it in because other birders don’t believe me when I call in accidentals from Kennedy Lake. I’m the only one who tours in here, so they’d have to come with me, and if they never found it, they’d think I was making the whole thing up.”

  I was a bit surprised that other birders didn’t believe George when he called in accidentals, but I was too polite to press him about it. I didn’t understand the first thing about the politics of birding, anyway.

  Later, Yeats said to me, “I wanted it to be an ash-throated because I’ve never seen one before and he wanted it to be a great crested because there’s never been a sighting of one on Vancouver Island. People have seen ash-throateds here before. Either way, it’s an awesome sighting. Neither of those birds is supposed to come here.”

  “Maybe it was neither. Maybe it was something else.” I was just bugging him.

  He shrugged and looked away, annoyed.

  As we were motoring our way back to land, I was remembering when Yeats was small, three or four years old, and we were alone on the island in Muskoka. We were inside and out of the corner of my eye I saw something move from the garden into the forest.

  “Look, Yeats, what’s that? It’s huge.”

  “Where?” Yeats stood on the couch and peered past me. “A turkey! It’s a turkey! It’s running away!”

  I grabbed my camera from the table and snapped a couple of pictures as it ran into the forest. This was in the days before digital photography, so we had to wait until I finished the roll of film to take it in to be developed.

  In the meantime, we looked up turkeys in one of our guidebooks.

  “Did you know that in the wild, turkeys can grow to be eight kilograms, sometimes even more? That’s nearly ten times the size of a sparrow.”

  “Well,” said Yeats, “we get to see how big they are at Thanksgiving when Uncle Greg carves them up. They’re huge.”

  “Right. And did you know that by 1900, wild turkeys were almost completely gone? Wiped out.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “Hunters. First hunters killed them all and because of development, houses and stuff, their habitat was ruined. Then, hunters saved them. The hunters wanted to keep hunting them so they began issuing licences. Only a certain number could be killed every year in certain places. Also, they started conserving their habitat. People started breeding wild turkeys in captivity and reintroducing them to the wild.”

  “So there are lots now? Still being hunted?”

  “Yes. Millions now, up from nearly gone. I guess that’s a success story for conservation. An example of how the Endangered Species List can work.”

  Not long after that little nature lesson, everyone came back to the island and we told them our story.

  “We saw a turkey!” Yeats was jumping up and down. “It was running into the forest!” He imitated the turkey and everyone laughed. They didn’t believe us.

  My brother said, “I’ve never seen a turkey in Muskoka. Are you sure we get them?”

  My sister said, “You guys were seeing things.” No one believed us, or maybe they thought we’d seen something other than a turkey.

  Whenever the topic came up, which it did quite a bit, Greg started singing the Partridge Family song (somewhat bastardized), “Point me . . . in the direction of Al the Turkey . . .” Yeats was indignant and insulted at first but eventually decided to laugh it off. If he’d ever seen The Partridge Family, he might have been less forgiving.

  When I got the photos back, we could see something disappearing into the trees. To Yeats and me it looked just like a scrawny turkey neck with a turkey-shaped head on top. Although the body was hidden in bushes and trees, it was unmistakable to us. To everyone else it was a total figment of our imagination.

  But over the next few summers we started getting turkeys on the island, or at least on Fairylands Island, next to us. We took the canoe into the little bay and heard them deep in the forest, gobble, gobble, gobble, like demented ogres from a fairy tale.

  And then, one summer, we had a female with six chicks right on our property. She paraded them around the perimeter of our field, and we watched as they ate bugs and scraped the ground with their oversized feet. A week later there were only four chicks, confirming what we all knew about predator and prey.

  The next summer we saw a female turkey calling from our island to its chicks over on Fairylands. One by one they flew over, low to the water. The mother gobbled and gobbled until all her chicks were safely with her.

  One night at the dinner table Mom said, “I guess Lynn and Yeats were right all those years ago, when they said they saw a turkey running into the forest.”

  Everyone nodded and looked at us. Yeats raised his eyebrows at me and shrugged, as if to say, “Too late now.” We knew what we’d seen. No one in the family has ever doubted our bird sightings since.

  I thought of this episode every time I saw Yeats name a new bird in the field. If he wasn’t sure, he’d consult the books. He was methodical and thorough. He’d trained his eye.

  So, even though George was the expert here on Kennedy River, I decided to believe Yeats where this flycatcher was concerned. As he said, it was exciting either way. And I’d had an amusing time watching these two passionate people discuss a little bird as it went about its innocuous business in the bushes.

  GEORGE CALLED LATER THAT day to see if we wanted to go on a pelagic tour the next morning. He’d be taking a small group of people way out onto the ocean to see seafaring birds, birds that don’t come in to shore. We’d see Leach’s storm petrels and tufted puffins, as well as pigeon guillemots, marbled murrelets, Cassin’s auklets, and maybe even fork-tailed storm petrels. It sounded exciting: four new birds for our list. I consulted with Yeats, my hand over the telephone’s receiver.

  He shook his head, rolled his eyes, and said, “Two tours with George in one week is enough.”

  I left it at that. Part of me loved the idea of being out on the ocean, those rolling waves, the smell of salt and all those unworldly birds. Another part of me never wanted to be at sea again.

  By the time we left Tofino and crossed the island, Yeats was ready to spend some more time with people his age. He was a great travelling companion, but he needed some time away from his mom. Our last week in BC was spent with friends, but we were both conscious of a yearning to be home.

  Yeats said, “This has been a long trip. I get why you love it here, even though it almost never rains.” (We’d had hot, dry weather for the past two weeks.) “But I can’t wait to get back to the cottage.”

  On the flight to Toronto I asked Yeats about the universities.

  He said, “I liked UVic okay, and the tour of UBC made me think maybe university isn’t that scary after all, but I don’t want to go come all the way to BC. It’s too far from home. I don’t like the idea of being so far away.”

  “Should we visit some Ontario universities, then?”

  Even though he was talking quite willingly about applying for schools now that we’d seen a couple, I was still wary. I didn’t want to push and push only to be rebuffed at the last minute.

  “We don’t need to. If I go to university, I’ll go to U of T.”

  “U of T? Are you sure?”

  “Yup. And I’ll live at home.”

  That was what Ben had done. I sighed out loud and Yeats looked at me.

  “What?” he said. “What’s wrong with that? Don’t you want me to go to university?”

  “Yes, you know I do. And I’d be happy to have you living at home, too, but don’t you think it’d be fun to go away somewhere? Even to Trent? Peterborough isn’t very far, and there’s loads of great birding around there.” I thought it would be good for Yeats to be away from family expectations and obligations, to be freer to explore. Living in residence at university wou
ld be a great opportunity for meeting new people, and I didn’t want him to flat-out discount the idea. It never seemed to occur to him to ask if he could live at home. I guess he just knew we wouldn’t kick him out.

  He didn’t reply and I decided to stop bugging him for the time being.

  Ben was at the airport to pick us up and enveloped me in a long hug in the arrivals hall.

  “Thanks for coming back, Lynn,” he whispered into my ear. “I missed you. When you go out West, I never know if you’ll come back again.”

  I sighed. “You nut,” I said. “Of course I’ll always come back.”

  Yeats was grinning at us, pleased to be home.

  That summer we had West Coast weather — real West Coast weather — at the cottage: cold and wet. Yeats said, “This is more like it. This is proper weather.”

  Every once in a while we’d have a sunny day. I went down to the dock early one clear morning and the sky nearly took my breath away. Its long streaks of pink clouds and tiny slice of new moon filled me with awe and lightened my heart. As much as the West Coast pulled at me, this lake and these rocks, this particular Muskoka sky in the morning, was my elixir.

  TEN

  IT WAS WINTER AND my heart felt heavy. Each morning when I woke up I had a drop in spirits, wondering if anyone would notice if I stayed in bed all day, if I pulled another blanket up over me and tucked a book into the corner between my arm and all these heavy covers. But of course they’d notice and they would worry as well as protest, so in mid-winter I set aside the heavy-heartedness and hauled myself up.

  This was the time of year when the store was most quiet. The fall, with all the launches, events, and readings, and Christmas, with its frenzy of shopping and visiting and family gatherings, had passed. Ben and I had more time to spend together. I helped him to pull returns at the store and he packed up boxes of books to send back to the publishers. This part of bookselling was like cleaning house: not very exciting, but it had to be done.

  Then a day came when I woke to lightness instead. It happened every year, unpredictably, sneaking under the door at night, in through the windows. Was it the lengthening days? Was it the promise of spring? Was it something internal, a switch that flicked because something inside me was sick of the heaviness?

  My urge to tuck in dissipated. This spring, 2011, I was more conscious than usual of my renewed cheer. That persistent shadow which had dogged me since the Galapagos trip was fading away.

  One morning Yeats said to me, “I need to get out of the city. What about you?”

  “We could have a little getaway during March Break, go somewhere for a day.”

  “Let’s go back to Amherst Island. Maybe we’ll see some more owls.”

  THE ROAD THAT LEADS to Owl Woods has never been paved. I wasn’t even sure if it was regularly graded, since it was full of potholes and ruts. It was a dirt country road, washboard in places, and in mid-March, parts of it were covered with drifts of thick, sodden snow. We were nearly stuck a couple of times. I had to back up the car, shift into lower gear, and take a run at a little rise in the slushy road, but not too fast for fear of digging deeper ruts into the soft snow.

  Yeats said, “No matter what happens, Mom, it won’t be worse than last year.”

  I thought, We didn’t have any trouble on Amherst last year, but I was concentrating on getting the car unstuck, so all I said was, “What?”

  He said, “The shipwreck. It can’t get worse than that.”

  I laughed and drove over the hump of snow onto a drier bit of road. I relaxed my hands and shoulders. We did not get stuck on the dirt road in the middle of nowhere with no one around and no cell phone. Next time I would remember to put a shovel in the trunk.

  One other car was parked at the trailhead and we met its occupant coming back from the woods. The man was about my age, and he was wearing sensible winter attire and carrying a camera with a two-foot lens.

  He said, “Good luck in those woods,” and pointed with his camera. “It’s dead today. Nothing but dead.”

  I said, “Dead owls?”

  Yeats snorted and the man said, “No. No owls. Nothing. Dead.” He gave me a weird look.

  I said, “Right.”

  “There was a barred owl this morning. Only one. I got him pretty good,” he said, briefly holding up the camera. “But there’s nothing now. Only these.” He waved his hand around his head.

  “Chickadees,” I said, and he nodded.

  “They’re stalking me. I need owls. I need the boreal owl. In Algonquin last winter I got the snowy and great grey. Also the long-eared. At home we get the northern hawk owl and the barred. I have lots of photos of them, feeding, flying, everything.”

  He continued listing his lifetime owl sightings and after a while I thought I should participate so I said, “In Muskoka we get the eastern screech.”

  “Hmph.” He practically rolled his eyes and Yeats laughed. I guess the eastern screech owl wasn’t very exciting to real birders. I wasn’t very good at this game but I tried again.

  “We came here last year and saw three long-eared owls and a snowy.”

  This time the man nodded in appreciation and Yeats started pawing the crusty snow, impatient to get moving. I didn’t understand the etiquette of the birder in the field. How long were we meant to chitchat with this guy?

  After another minute we went our separate ways. Yeats and I stepped out of the bush into a meadow and immediately two white-tailed deer came bounding from nowhere, crossed the meadow, and disappeared into the trees on the other side. If we’d come two seconds later, we would have missed them. We stood for a moment and breathed. Yeats spied a hawk circling in the sky and took a look through his binoculars.

  “Northern harrier.”

  Just as we started across the field, the man tramped up behind us. He said, “Maybe three of us will have better luck than one.”

  I said, “All right,” although I knew how much Yeats disliked birdwatching with other people.

  The man talked the whole way to the forest, crunch-crunching in the snow. I thought, Maybe he knows what he’s doing — maybe he’ll flush out an owl with all his noise. But I saw how stiffly Yeats held himself and I imagined his upset, his disappointment in being joined by this chatterbox of a man.

  Once we were in the woods, we split up to look around; the man was still talking, though with less enthusiasm. I responded to barely a thing he said and Yeats not at all.

  Yeats took out a handful of birdseed and held it up for the chickadees. The man came closer to watch, smiling a little, but after a very short time, he turned around and left, heading back towards the cars.

  I said to Yeats, “He didn’t even say goodbye.”

  “We weren’t very friendly to him, Mom. I wouldn’t have said goodbye either.”

  “Huh.” I felt bad then. Would it have been better to tell the guy right away that we didn’t want company, or should we have pretended to enjoy having him with us? I carried some guilt over this around with me for a while, staying even more quiet than usual.

  We didn’t see any owls so we hiked back out of the forest. I thought about Peter Matthiessen’s long trek to see snow leopards in Nepal. It was time to re-read The Snow Leopard, my most-read book, my favourite work of non-fiction. Then I chuckled to myself — how could I possibly compare these two journeys, his lasting months under difficult and sometimes life-threatening conditions, and mine a simple walk in the woods?

  For me, the climax of The Snow Leopard comes when Matthiessen, a Zen acolyte, finally talks with the abbot of Shey Monastery. The abbot is living in a mountain cave and the men meet on a ledge on a sunny afternoon. The abbot is only fifty-two years old, but walks painfully on twisted, arthritic legs, and it’s clear he’ll spend the rest of his life on this mountainside, a dubious refuge in Matthiessen’s mind. The abbot laughs out loud when Jang-bu, the translator, asks how he feels about this forced isolation. He says, “Of course I am happy here! It’s wonderful! Especially when I have no
choice!”

  Every time I read these words I’m deeply moved. They stop me. I sit still and question every bit of my own life and wonder at my small irritations as well as the bigger problems I feel beset by. The way I feel about everything, I realize, is my choice. I reconfirm that, at bottom, where it counts, I am happy, and vow to let that happiness come to the top, too, where it also counts. Making the vow is the easy part.

  YEATS HAD A LOT due at school. The university applications had gone in mid-January, two months ago, and this next set of marks would be sent in, too. His usual pattern when under this kind of pressure was to have a nervous breakdown, endure a lecture from me about how capable he was of doing the work, and then finish the assignments.

  He spent Saturday writing an English essay without the usual fuss.

  On Sunday, however, just after lunch, he called me into his room and started in on a breakdown.

  “I have too much to do. I can’t do it all. I can’t do it, Mom.”

  “What do you have?”

  “A history essay due tomorrow. I’ve started it but it isn’t done. I have to have an outline for my Lit presentation done, too, and all the research for another history project. And I have to come up with a social problem to paint in art. And I have a history test at the end of the week.”

  I could feel his rising panic and there was always a point in this process when I felt it, too — when I somehow forgot that it wasn’t my work, my classes, my expectant teachers, and I let the fearful emotions carry me away. Then I pulled back and breathed and started to talk calmly to him.

  “Well,” I said, “when is the outline due? And the research? Didn’t we already talk about that art project? Aren’t you going to do kids not spending enough time in nature or something like that?”

  This time, though, he didn’t want my help. He didn’t want me to comfort him and tell him what a good student he was or give him any of my usual lines. He didn’t need help organizing his time, either. I kept on, though, even though I saw I was making no headway.

  He covered his face in his hands. I tried not to get frustrated. I felt the anger well up and I tamped it down. What did he need from me?