Prince Edward County, Ontario, Canada
FIRST ENCOUNTERS OF THE LASTING KIND October/November, 2012 issue We no longer get to read Barry McCullagh’s great offerings in the Belleville Intelligencer. The man whose columns I always enjoyed, passed away about five years ago. The restaurant north of Brighton where we first met is also gone. I saw him watching us from a nearby table, as we carried on, lost in our excitement after the completion of another Presqu’ile Park winter bird count. In fact, the waitress had already spoken to us twice about excessive noise. It was about 1969, as I recall, and barely in my mid-twenties, I surely was being viewed as the ring leader as we shared in the impressive checklist of birds we had managed to acquire that day. After the noisy gang had departed, and I remained to finish my cup of coffee, the gentleman who had been eyeing us, came over to my table. I prepared to be raked over the coals for disturbing his meal. Instead, he spoke softly, and was curious about the strange winter activity over which we had shown such excitement, especially given that the night outside was reduced to zero visibility as a result of lake effect snow. He asked about our interest in nature, about birding in particular, and the story behind this event in which we had just participated. At some point he must have told me that he wrote for the Intelligencer. He mentally took notes as I explained the history of the winter bird count, and the following week, his encounter with us and our enthusiasm for nature, was woven into an editorial. I never forgot that. I bumped into Barry a few times after that, but never had occasion to speak to him much after our first meeting, but I always made it a point to read his contributions whenever they appeared in the Intelligencer. People do that to me, when I first meet them. I always remember first encounters, then try to follow their careers or chosen path of interest to find out more about them. I still remember the time I first met the late Trentonian nature columnist Orval Kelly in 1965. My only means of transportation then was a small Honda motorcycle, and I had just spent an hour on it in mid-March under cloudy skies and melting snow to meet this person. Shivering uncontrollably after the long ride, I arrived at his house and rang the doorbell. He startled me at the door with a strange, white kerchief tied across his chin and secured behind his neck. He quickly explained to me that it was just protection for some minor chin surgery, and that he didn’t always look like this. We were close birding friends until his untimely death a few months later from a massive heart attack. The late Helen Quilliam of Kingston was the high priest of eastern Ontario birding. She was a nature columnist, and had written a book on the birds of the Kingston region. My first meeting was not with her, but her husband, whose first words in a heavy English accent as he greeted me at the door, as he glanced about, “My God, do I smell a skunk?” I quickly identified myself and hastily added that the odour could be from the exhaust of my motorcycle that had seeped its way into my clothes. However, he quickly apologized and was actually making reference to a real skunk smell that had momentarily drifted by and assailed his nostrils from the neighbour’s property. I was then cordially invited in to meet Helen. Many of these first encounters became close friends and assisted me during my earlier years of birding. Helen and I birded together for years and she unselfishly spent time guiding me through the complexities of bird identity, as did Orval Kelly before her, in the few months that I knew him. To the best of my knowledge, Frank Tumpane who wrote in the now defunct Telegram, was not a birder. However, I enjoyed his columns because whatever the issue, he shot from the hip, with no apology. When I gave a presentation to a group in Campbellford three years ago, I randomly picked a gentleman from the audience to assist me with a prop on stage. The stranger turned out to be Frank Tumpane’s son, Michael! We did go on a birding trip together, and his greatest gift to me was a book that his dad had once owned and kept on his desk at the Telegram. In it, Michael wrote, “Dad would be pleased to know that his book ended up in the hands of a working journalist.” Birding is supposed to be a hobby, but I also learned through the years that it can be an unforgiving world out there, filled with competition and hard knocks. After one uncharitable review of my very first book on the birds of Prince Edward County, one Toronto MNR employee put his arm on my shoulder, and said, I didn’t think too much of the review he gave your book, and I think even less of the person who wrote the review.” I thought to myself, what kind words coming from a professional, who didn’t even know me, yet chose to console me in this way when even I knew that we must all be able to withstand constructive criticism. To the best of my knowledge, the late Roger Tory Peterson was not involved in the newspaper business, but he did write a lot of books, including everyone’s birding Bible, “A Field Guide To the Birds.” When I met Roger Tory Peterson at a conference in London, Ontario, he first instructed me to change my camera position, and photograph him from “his good side.” In our brief conversation while he was busily autographing field guides, I remember him referring to himself as being “the bridge between the shotgun and the binoculars in bird watching.” Before he came along, the primary way to observe birds was to shoot them and stuff them. First encounters. It’s strange how the sometimes rather innocuous quotes they make can stay with you a lifetime. A well respected ornithologist, the late Jim Baillie (after whom the Baillie Birdathon is named) grew up in the old school of thought, and was trained that in order for sightings of new birds to be confirmed, they must be “collected”. He came out with a classic one day. I had spoken to him in the mid-1960s about a rare lark bunting we had found, but no one could see the bird clearly enough to determine whether it was, in fact, a lark bunting, or a simply a leucistic red-winged blackbird with unusual patches of white on its wings. With his hand cupped to one side of his mouth, he bent over and whispered, “To settle the dispute over what the bird actually is, I think you should just go out and quietly shoot it.” For more information on birding and nature and guided hikes, check out the NatureStuff website at www.naturestuff.net Terry Sprague lives in Prince Edward County and is self-employed as a professional interpretive naturalist.