GREAT BIRDERS IN MY LIFE

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

A former elementary school teacher I once had back in the late 1950s, used to spend endless hours, on cold, forbidding days, all bundled up, sitting on her front step. Few would notice, but those who did, likely dismissed it as normal behaviour for this senior who made no secret of the fact that she enjoyed being in company with her birds. Eventually, it would appear - a chickadee, eyeing up the sunflower seeds she had been holding in her hand for several minutes. Dangling like a trapeze artist from a tiny branch, the chickadee would eye the suspicious cache from different angles, then in a flash, dart to her hand and snatch one of the seeds.

For this retiree, her birds were special to her each winter and she would delight in touring me around her home, from window to window, and describing the feeders and the guests who came to them. She introduced me to purple finches, in March, that used to swarm her small hanging feeders. I should have appreciated them more back then when droves of them regularly descended on feeders in the area, for we seldom see these irrepressible little birds in such numbers anymore.

I was in Grade 6 when I first became fascinated by the stories of birds coming to the hand of this person who had such magical powers. Little did I know that some years later gray jays at Algonquin Park would be feeding from my hand with monotonous regularity, and anyone with a little patience can get chickadees to accept sunflower seed from their hand. Unknowingly, I was becoming lured into an interest that would eventually become not only a hobby, but my life’s work. Her gentle ways with nature, and her stories about nesting tree swallows in her backyard, and the decline of the bluebird, and the purple martin house a neighbour would erect for her each spring, introduced me to a natural world that seemed to know no bounds. To the shudders of her class, she would routinely carry wasps from the classroom on her finger and release them outside - a truly gentle human being who was passionate about the nature around her. Her name was Marie, but to us, she was always Miss Foster.

I met another such person some years later, and it was an introduction to birdwatching beyond the backyard bird bath. His name was Orval Kelly and he wrote a column, Nature Rambles, three times a week for The Trentonian. I don’t remember Orval ever having a bird feeder at his home on Division Street in Brighton, but he did have a car, and in it he would make daily trips to his beloved Presqu’ile Provincial Park to check out what had arrived during the night. I had just started to write a column for a local weekly newspaper, and so determined was I to meet a fellow columnist, I made the 30-mile trip on a small Honda motorcycle, in mid-March. He often joked about that in his column.

These memories came back to me after I received a book containing 35 of his columns a year or two ago from the publisher of the Brighton Independent. Titled, simply, Rambles, the book is a look at this birdwatcher from the late 1940s to 1966, when he passed away suddenly from a massive heart attack. His columns always carried subtle messages of conservation, even back as far as the late 1940s when such messages were not generally popular.

Like my school teacher who would generate questionable glances from passersby whenever she chose to be among the birds on her doorstep, Orval’s activities with binoculars were often similarly viewed with suspicion in earlier years when birdwatching was considered a pastime enjoyed only by elderly spinsters, retired teachers and school boys on a hike. He once told me about the time, many years ago, when he was standing along the roadside at Presqu’ile surveying new avian arrivals at the Park. Local police who were scouring the area for an escaped convict came upon Orval poised at the roadside with his binoculars. Pulling up beside him, they looked him up and down, and without saying a word, decided that, while perhaps appearing a bit odd to them, he was probably quite harmless, and carried on their way.

Today, birding is the second most popular hobby in North America, generating millions of dollars in revenue each year. If it were possible, how wonderful it would be to tell these two people, that binoculars no longer have to be carried in a brown paper bag to avoid attention.