Field Notes from an Unintentional Birder Read online

  Field Notes from an Unintentional Birder

  Copyright © 2020 Julia Zarankin

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca, 1-800-893-5777, [email protected].

  Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd.

  P.O. Box 219, Madeira Park, BC, V0N 2H0

  www.douglas-mcintyre.com

  Edited by Caroline Skelton

  Cover design by Setareh Ashrafologhalai

  Text design by Brianna Cerkiewicz

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Printed on acid-free paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council

  Douglas and McIntyre acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Field notes from an unintentional birder : a memoir / by Julia Zarankin.

  Names: Zarankin, Julia, 1974- author.

  Description: Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200192221 | Canadiana (ebook) 2020019223X | ISBN 9781771622486 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771622493 (HTML)

  Subjects: LCSH: Zarankin, Julia, 1974- | LCSH: Bird watchers—Biography. | LCSH: Bird watching. | LCGFT: Autobiographies.

  Classification: LCC QL677.5 .Z37 2020 | DDC 598.072/34—dc23

  To Leon, for becoming an almost-birder,

  and

  in memory of Bronwyn Dalziel (1991–2016)

  Contents

  Interior Decorating 9

  A Semi-Retired Hen 12

  Spark Bird 18

  The Wrong Kind of Science 24

  And Then What? 32

  Deerkill and Other Beginnings 38

  Intraspecific Variability 49

  The Migratory Urge 57

  LBJs 71

  The Glamour of Birding 79

  Hope 86

  Life Lessons 91

  Nemesis Birds 100

  Bravery School 106

  The Wanderer 116

  The Big Hummingbird 125

  Not Even a Rock Pigeon 133

  Zen Birder 143

  The More You See, the More You Want to See 150

  The Little Bee-Eater and the Steppe Buzzard 154

  Snowy Owl 160

  What’s Your Favourite Bird? 171

  Headache 176

  My Wild Side 184

  A Mistake Won’t Kill You 198

  The Twitch 206

  Celebrity Bird 212

  Birdsplainer in Training 218

  For the Nuances of Waterfowl 225

  Going Solo 232

  The Tufted Wood Thrush 239

  Coda: My Birding CV 247

  Acknowledgements 250

  Birding Resources 254

  Interior Decorating

  When I was growing up, December was the month of the year when my parents received classical music kitsch as gifts. So many items appeared in our house, given in earnest by their piano students, that we didn’t know what to do with them all. Plastic busts of Schubert and Beethoven hardly qualified as easy re-gift items, and there were only so many mugs with eighth-note handles and images of the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony that fit into our cupboards. Most of our notepads were of the “Chopin Liszt” variety, tea towels had treble clefs, and numerous miniature crystal grand pianos adorned the real pianos in our home; some clever friends of my parents’ even gave them pillowcases with Encore! written in fiery cursive script and nestled into a musical staff. We displayed the gifts at Christmas, since they added a layer of festivity to our secular household, and then, shortly after the holidays, we sent them into hiding until the following year.

  I swore that when I grew up and had a place of my own, mine would be a home without tchotchkes, and sans treble clefs and composers. For a while, life proceeded according to plan. As a graduate student and junior faculty member, I kept my apartment spartan, my walls bare. When I moved in with my husband, things began to slip. Initially, I mocked his Texas longhorn, threw away his glow-in-the-dark sparkly Eiffel Tower wall hangings and relegated the romantic candelabras with scented candles to our storage locker, but as an act of compromise I had to accept the imposing unicorn poster that hung over my computer. My husband also came with a non-negotiable collection of some three hundred stone elephants of varying sizes, a semi–life-sized plush tiger-and-leopard pair, and tiger tea towels.

  And then something even stranger happened. I discovered birds. Within a year, the barometric pressure in our apartment shifted. Stuffed-animal squeaky hooded warblers learned to coexist with tigers; bird-shaped vases stood next to the elephant-shaped salt shaker; sculpted owls flirted with the faux-malachite elephant’s plastic tusks.

  And in my study, the unicorn gave way to something more frightening: a pile of bird-themed stationery of every persuasion and a shelf dedicated to field guides, from the general Birds of North America to the specific—books dedicated to sparrows, shorebirds, warblers, bird behaviour and the like. Not to mention the nondescript felt bird, handcrafted by my sister, the two paintings of birds by David Morrisseau, and the stained-glass owl made by my grandmother when she was ninety-three years old.

  Some days, I walk into my own study and wonder how I ended up here, with parrot notebooks, a collection of bird-themed T-shirts, subscriptions to Living Bird, Birding, Bird Studies Canada, Bird Watcher’s Digest and BirdWatching, and memberships in more conservation organizations than I can count. There was a time when I subscribed to the Slavic and East European Journal, The Russian Review and Canadian Slavic Studies. But a decade ago, the tectonic plates of my world started to shift.

  “I think your decor has surpassed our treble clefs and eighth-note mugs,” my father said. Little did he know that my closet held a dozen bird T-shirts, an owl skirt and a hummingbird earring-and-necklace set, and that I constantly scoured the Internet for more.

  I had also begun amassing catalogues of scopes and binoculars and learning all sorts of optic lore. I found myself discussing Carl Zeiss, one of the fathers of German high-end optics, with nothing short of sensual innuendo. I knew the contours of the face of David Sibley, God of the Modern Field Guide, as if he were one of my close relatives. In fact, I saw David Sibley’s face much more often than I saw my own cousins because I perused his book most evenings before bed. Peering into his eyes, I found myself wishing that he would ditch that navy turtleneck he wears in many of his photos, and perhaps don new glasses that were a bit more in vogue.

  Who had I become exactly?

  A Semi-Retired Hen

  In 2013, while visiting friends on Denman Island, in British Columbia, I nearly bought a half-dozen semi-retired hens. I didn’t wake up one morning craving chickens, but when I read the classifieds-cum-for-sale last page of the island newsletter and saw the ad for hens, the six sad, soon to be abandoned, partially useless birds beckoned to me. It wasn’t that I had any need for chickens or that I had properly entertained the logistics of transporting a flock from Denman Island back to Toronto, or that I could find a place for them in my eighth-floor condo, or that I even understood the meaning of “semi-retired hens.” But something in the wording, in their very existence, struck me as essential.

  Five years prior, I wouldn’t have paid the chickens any heed. Their existence would have passed me by entirely. And yet now, the idea of
hens in mid-life concerned me directly. Their reproductive years likely behind them, how would these six hens now behave? Would they sit around, book-club style, discussing the finer points of literature? Or would they contemplate the aging process and possibly talk about recalibrating their lives, perhaps entertain a new hobby, attempt to make sense of life now that they found themselves past their legitimate, biological prime? Or might one of them unexpectedly get a second wind, move on to wider horizons and, contrary to natural tendencies, continue to lay eggs?

  I didn’t buy them, but for half a day, all I could talk about were the hens. In the end, I bought a bantam chicken in the form of a four-by-four-inch oil painting. Not for its technical mastery, but for this peculiar animal in profile, my new talisman, looking straight ahead, venturing forth with confidence into a new chapter of her life. She now lives in my study, on my desk, next to a hawk print, a felt chickadee and not one but two bird calendars, and under an enormous Sibley’s “Backyard Birds” poster for eastern North America. I sometimes wonder if she is happy here, in this strange menagerie of avifauna.

  * * *

  I couldn’t help but see a shade of myself in these chickens. Instinctively, I wanted to be privy to their lives, to eavesdrop on their conversations and behavioural patterns to better understand my own predicament. In my mid-thirties, I had published an essay called “The Neutral Decade,” where I summed things up with the phrase “nothing hurts and nothing feels great.” In the decade since writing that, I had come to terms with the fact that I would not become a mother, and that a career I had worked toward for over a decade was not an ideal match. Now I had reached my forties and a peculiar awareness of mid-life lurked everywhere; mortality appeared on my radar full-force. On the day of my nephew’s birth, it dawned on me that when he was my age, I would be eighty-two years old, and with that I had the hauntingly banal realization that he would never know me as I knew myself right now: mostly young, mostly healthy, mostly content, but a little bit at sea and a little bit troubled by the reality of time passing and the knowledge that things might never be this good again. I had months of crippling fear when I would stare at my husband, knowing that we were fortunate for so many reasons, including the wild unicorn of having found one another, and in spite of that fortune, I still worried: Is this it? Is this what it means to live?

  Everywhere I looked, I saw chickens. As I reread Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya for an adult education class I was teaching, I noticed that as the world crumbles around the characters and they are left with nothing, their servant, Marina, keeps on, literally, feeding the chickens. What were chickens doing in Chekhov? I had always focused on the play’s larger message and hadn’t ever paid much attention to the chickens. Yet there they were. And rereading the play, I saw that the chickens—maybe Marina’s were also semi-retired?—depicted continuity, the small, mundane actions that we cannot live without, the ones that give contour to our lives.

  I wondered: What does a semi-retired—biologically speaking—woman in mid-life do? How does she fill the void she didn’t even know she had?

  * * *

  I discovered birds when many things in my life seemed disappointing: I had emerged from both a career that I’d worked extremely hard for, only to realize that it didn’t make me happy, and a marriage that had fallen apart; I had just entered into a new relationship that I wasn’t sure I had the force to sustain and second-guessed myself at every turn; and the reality that I would never have kids had finally set in.

  At a career crossroads, I ended up back in Toronto, my hometown, which isn’t truly my hometown because I come from a country that is no longer. To call Kharkiv my hometown would be absurd, since I last saw the city in 1978, at the age of almost four, back when it was called Kharkov, when Ukraine was a republic of the Soviet Union, when I wore saggy, scratchy woollen tights and talked to imaginary friends on the telephone for hours. And to call Kharkov my hometown would have been doubly absurd because as a small child, I shuttled back and forth between Odessa, where my maternal grandparents lived; Leningrad, where my mother studied; Petrozavodsk, where my father worked; and back to Kharkov, where my paternal grandmother lived; I was already a migratory species before I knew such a thing existed. Later, I acquired other hometowns: Vienna, for a short period that I barely remember beyond our immigrant compound and trips to the market to sell our precious obsolete Soviet electronics and tool sets; Edmonton, where I learned English; Vancouver, where I might have discovered the outdoors, but instead acquired French; and finally Toronto, where we settled in 1987. I left the city for university in the United States, swore I’d never return to this provincial backwater, stayed away for graduate school at Princeton and a post-doc at Stanford, and then accepted a job in mid-Missouri, the job I had once dreamt of. When things no longer held together, I left my job and returned to the closest thing I had to a hometown.

  At loose ends, I started auditioning hobbies, from bookmaking to letterpress to cycling, hiking and pottery—waiting for something to stick. I thought back to an old housemate I’d had in graduate school, who used to set up a spotting scope and watch ducks on Lake Carnegie from our balcony, jotting down observations, counting species. Not once did I think to look through his scope, but I spent hours sitting on the sofa reading and watching him watch birds on weekend mornings.

  And then I thought back to another moment, at a youth hostel in Point Reyes, California, when my sister and I accidentally ended up in one of the birding meccas of the western United States. I’d been drawn to Point Reyes for the rugged seashore, dunes and remote lighthouse. My sister came along for the ride. We ended up exploring none of those things because of high winds that blocked the road to the lighthouse, and the mild boredom that ensued. As it grew dark, we inadvertently tumbled into a conversation with a couple from the United Kingdom, clad in multipocketed khaki vests, pants tucked into socks, who had travelled the world in search of birds. They’d been to India, South America and parts of the South Pacific, they’d been all over Africa, and now they’d come to Point Reyes in search of New World species. I wanted to hear about the Taj Mahal, about safari adventures, but they ignored my questions and told me about exquisite birds and rare plumages and remarkable additions to their life lists. My sister yawned uncontrollably, my eyes glazed over, and they kept talking at a frenetic clip, one interrupting the other to correct a misstep in genus, a wrong subspecies, while I tried, unsuccessfully, to bring the conversation back to zebras or, at the very least, Indian food—two things I could at least visualize.

  As we attempted to abort the conversation, the hardy woman stepped out onto the porch and waved us over, “If you’re very, very quiet, you just might see a bird.”

  A bird was calling, or hooting, or making some noise I didn’t yet have a word for.

  We shushed and stood there for a few minutes, behind the enthusiastic birdwatcher, before sneaking off to bed. She stayed on for over an hour, until she caught movement in the reeds beyond the hostel, satisfied with a glimpse of a nocturnal species. For the rest of our trip, my sister and I repeated the woman’s line to one another, without knowing what it meant, and without wanting to know.

  * * *

  A few months after moving back to Toronto, I admitted to my sister that my attempts to fill my hobby void hadn’t amounted to much.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Something that will exercise my patience.”

  “That’s it?”

  “And bring me peace, without having to do yoga.”

  She looked at me and, before laughing, whispered, in a monotone faux-British accent, “If you’re very, very quiet, you just might see a bird.”

  Spark Bird

  Part of me believes I was destined to discover birds, that it would have happened one way or another. I mean, what non-birder would start sporting a Tilley hat with pride at sixteen? My sister, who is eight years younger, also reminds me that I’ve been keeping lists—of trips taken, movies seen, books read, plays watched, grea
t meals consumed—for as long as she can remember, and that I started wearing sensible shoes years before I actually needed to, orthopaedically speaking: they just felt right.

  It began with a few innocuous Internet searches. First, I made the mistake of searching “Birdwatching Toronto” and was overwhelmed: dozens of options, from the professional to the amateur, including something called the Toronto Ornithological Club, which required people to have a “birding resumé” to be considered for active membership. This might be too much for me, I thought. I let a few months pass, and then tried again.

  “Birdwatching class Toronto” yielded slightly more specificity, but the classes had either already passed or they sounded too complex, and I was hardly ready for a multi-week commitment; they offered outings to places I’d never heard of, lists of birds with names that read like poetry in a foreign language: red-breasted merganser, Carolina wren, Bohemian waxwing. I tried the terms “inexperienced beginner birdwatcher hobby,” but the search presented me with cognitive research and scholarly articles; “stressed desperate mid-life crisis birdwatching class beginner Toronto” took me in a whole other direction and revealed a completely different kind of spectator sport. I quickly removed “stressed desperate mid-life crisis” and ended up with a more palatable list of options. I finally chose the group with the simplest description and the most colourful pictures, run by someone named Brete. Within a few weeks, I had committed to an outing and set my alarm clock for 6:00 a.m., the earliest I’d been awake since marching-band days in university.

  The night before I was to meet the group at dawn in a deserted parking lot, my husband asked, “Do you even know where you’re going?”

  “A parking lot at Martin Grove Collegiate Institute, and from there I’ll follow them. They said something about Kipling and Lake Ontario and something about grebes,” I said. “No, I have no idea where I’m actually going.”