Field Notes from an Unintentional Birder Read online

  “How long are you going out for?”

  “I’ll probably be back by nine. How long can people stare at birds?” That my husband didn’t question my hobby search—that he didn’t even ask if I was sure that this new birding thing was what I wanted, that he simply went along with it and accepted that he would wake up earlier on a Saturday than on a weekday, and that although I said “back by nine” and I’d likely be back by noon—were among the reasons why our relationship had survived the three-month mark, then the six-month mark, then the year-long mark, and by the time I set my alarm clock I realized that I had stopped counting the months.

  * * *

  I had no trouble recognizing the group in the parking lot. Cargo pants tucked into socks and signature off-white multipocketed vests, which I recognized from the times I’d Googled “birdwatchers,” each of the half-dozen people huddled around their cars wore at least one item of bird-themed clothing, ranging from a subtle baseball cap with a woodpecker on it to a more boisterous sweatshirt featuring a giant red bird with black wings, so bright I wondered for a minute if the bird could be real. I looked around for the leader while I tried to make sense of their optics-talk; questions of magnification and the optical quality of Vortex versus Eagle Eye passed me by completely, but I understood enough to nod in appreciation when Lucy, a petite retired high school teacher, showed off her recently purchased high-end Swarovski binoculars. She later admitted, with a mischievous smile, that she’d bought them with money she had set aside for a sofa.

  I knew the leader had arrived once a rusty Toyota pulled up, and everyone said, “There’s Brete.” A six-foot-tall high school math and science teacher, Brete wore sweatpants with a Norwegian knit sweater and a baseball cap with yet another bird on it; initially stern, his face lit up when he said, “I read a pretty good report this morning. Let’s head to Kipling Spit.”

  Though the references to a report and to Kipling Spit, the name Brete still used to refer to Colonel Samuel Smith Park, were both lost on me, I introduced myself, reminded him of the e-mail I’d sent a few days earlier, and sheepishly admitted that I was a complete beginner.

  “Not to worry—folks in our group have varying degrees of experience. I mean, there isn’t a single person here who can ID all the warblers.”

  “Uh…a warbler?” I knew ducks and pigeons and owls existed, but what were warblers?

  “Wow. You weren’t kidding when you said beginner.”

  “Nope.”

  “Do you have binoculars?”

  I shook my head.

  “That might be a good place to start,” said Brete with a chuckle, which I thought might be code for “Who is this interloper, how did she find me on the Internet and why on earth did I ever e-mail her back when she clearly said ‘she didn’t know a thing about birds?’”

  Once we got into our respective cars, our cavalcade of birders thundered down the highway until we reached a park at the foot of Kipling Avenue, where the city meets Lake Ontario, and where, according to the report Brete had read on the ONTBIRDS listserv, a western grebe had recently been seen. A kind gentleman named Benito, draped in a long-lensed camera and binoculars, and with a spotting scope casually resting on his shoulder, let me borrow his spare binoculars, which he alternately called his bins or binocs or glasses.

  The binoculars were heavy around the neck. The last time I had used binoculars seriously was when my family lived in Vancouver. As a child, I used to plant myself at the living-room window for hours, spying on our neighbour Mary through my parents’ theatre glasses. I had memorized the layout of Mary’s living room across the street and delighted in knowing the sequence of TV shows she watched: The Brady Bunch followed by Wheel of Fortune, with a break for Ovaltine in between and, after supper on Thursdays, Jeopardy! and Knight Rider.

  “I want to live with Mary,” I told my parents. My mother stared at me nervously.

  “But just the other day, you said she was boring.”

  “I like how she does the same thing every night and even eats the same food.” Mary was the only person I had ever surveyed this closely, and I associated the constancy of her everyday routine with the idea of having a real home.

  “Enough with those binoculars,” she said.

  “She’s going to watch The Love Boat at eight o’clock tonight.”

  “No more binoculars.” And the same evening, the theatre glasses disappeared.

  This time I didn’t feel as confident. As we walked out to the lake, people started shouting words that I couldn’t process: “Northern shoveler! Red-breasted merganser, American wigeon! Bufflehead, long-tailed duck!” The binoculars wobbled in my hands. High winds accosted me and when I tried to focus the lenses, my eyes watered; the second I glimpsed a duck, it dove and left me staring at the hyperactive early-April waves on Lake Ontario. “Wait, look,” Brete shouted, “I think I got it, horned grebe, horned grebe, over there, next to the pied-billed grebe, you can’t miss it, to the right of the dozens, no, hundreds of red-necked grebes out there, oh wait, oh my god, is that a western grebe? Are you seeing the grebes, Julia? It’s not every day you get four species in one place.”

  My mind bobbed in and out of awareness amidst this sea of names. I nodded, but my binoculars were pointed at the CN Tower, the only thing I could safely identify on the horizon.

  “What’s a grebe?”

  “Start with the red-necked grebes. There are close to five hundred of them out there,” Brete replied. “Can’t miss them—gorgeous rust-coloured neck, and look at that elongated bill! It’s a textbook grebe, no doubt about it.”

  I located the mass of waterfowl, but in the dull light couldn’t detect anything remotely rust-coloured, and all the bills looked identical to my untrained eye.

  On our way back to the cars, my extremities frozen from standing still in gale-like winds, I wondered how many more hours of staring at dark blobs on the water I could withstand. Disenchanted, I was preparing my exit speech to the group, when we stopped near a bush and someone called out, “Red-winged blackbird.”

  I almost didn’t look because the thought of lifting the binoculars to my eyes brought with it a slight wave of nausea. But the bird stood still, balancing on a cattail, and I managed the trifecta of raising the binoculars, focusing them and finding the desired object magnified in my field of vision.

  “What is that?” I gasped, nearly blinded by the unexpected vermillion patches on the blackbird’s epaulets. I watched as the bird threw back its head, opened wide its beak and let out a sound so primal it left me marvelling: this was as close as I’d ever stand to dinosaurs. If this bird had been here all along, I thought, what else had I been missing?

  The Wrong Kind of Science

  When I was a child, I grew up with brown-paper-wrapped packages sent from the Soviet Union by my grandmother. My grandparents were refuseniks—Russian Jews denied visas to leave the Soviet Union. Over the course of our nine-year separation, they sent the contents of their bookshelves, kitchen cupboards and linen closet piecemeal. Every three months or so a package would arrive, decorated with dozens of stamps featuring a man named Lenin or famous cosmonauts, pioneer heroes, hydroelectric plants, Soviet athletes.

  These parcels arrived from people I knew only from photographs. I knew that I was born in a country one could no longer travel to. Even calling involved a multi-day ritual. My mother would send my grandmother a telegram in the middle of the week to suggest a time for a prearranged telephone rendezvous. A telegram would follow in return, the next day. Budu, she would respond—I’ll be there. Laconic, pronoun-less verbs in upper-case transliterated Russian showed up on our doorstep. Then, the following Sunday morning, she and my grandfather would walk the three kilometres from their apartment to the telephone post and wait for our call. Knowing how my grandmother now gets dressed up for doctor appointments and arrives an hour early (You never know, she says in the same dreamy tone she uses to remind m
e that a visit to the doctor merits my best underwear), I’m sure she and my grandfather must have left their apartment in their best clothes. It would have been an hour and a half of preparations for a telephone exchange that lasted no longer than ten minutes.

  I found the conversations nerve-racking. My mother woke me up in the middle of the night for my performance of the rehearsed lines on tiptoes—Thank you for all the presents! The sweater will fit me in a few years. I miss you! I love you! Kisses!—but I would bite my nails in fear of a potential question that I’d answer with the wrong Russian case ending or an incorrect verb form. The connection sounded like static, we had to scream into the phone, and just as my grandparents shouted back, our own echoes would accost us. I envied friends at school with grandmothers who baked them cookies and braided their hair; mine gave me a stomach ache, talked incessantly about the various ailments I’d suffered from as a toddler, inquired as to whether ballet lessons had helped correct my posture and pigeon-toed gait, and wondered how it could be that at age ten I hadn’t yet read all of Jack London.

  Once, my mother called the operator and opened, as usual, with her stock phrase: “I’d like to place a person-to-person call to Russia.”

  “Prussia?” The operator asked.

  “No, not Prussia, Russia. There is no Prussia anymore,” my mother explained, as if she had historical clairvoyance and could sense that within the next ten years, the country she was calling would also cease to exist.

  * * *

  The only thing more taxing than talking to my grandparents was writing to them.

  In my letters to them, I waged a war against my mother’s red pen. Remember the accusative ending for animate nouns! “Where” takes the prepositional case. Did you not memorize the list of verbal exceptions that require an е even when it’s pronounced u? You forgot the spelling rule after sibilants!

  By the time I’d made all the requisite corrections, I’d lost track of the grandmother I was writing to in the first place. You forgot to thank them for the books!

  Grammar books, a primer of microbes, English translations of didactic Russian poetry—as if the originals weren’t bad enough. Collected works of Pushkin and Gogol for my parents. My grandmother was slowly sending the contents of her bookshelf, along with anything else she could find for me at the black market or through her connections.

  “They don’t look very interesting.”

  “Your grandmother stood in line for them for hours.”

  “For those boring books with awful pictures?”

  “Just thank her.”

  We put the books on the bookshelves, happy to receive packages from a faraway country but also disappointed that the contents of the package held so little interest. The prickly Yugoslavian sweaters and wool underwear that reached my knees (to protect my woman parts), cotton nightgowns made in China, metres of crepe de Chine, bed sheets designed for different-sized beds, comforter covers with a diamond-shaped hole in the middle that only fit Soviet wool blankets—precious products of a world whose currency was disintegrating. Coarse aluminum pots covered in an enamel glaze, which we later discovered to be highly toxic, stood in the backs of our cupboards. The grammar books terrorized me, and the children’s books—nobody read them.

  I preferred the stamps to the contents of the parcels. I cut them out, soaked them in water, peeled them from the packages and dried them carefully on our kitchen counter. My parents found Yuri Gagarin’s face, or even 1980 Moscow Olympics philatelic propaganda, a jarring sight on our countertops, but I loved coming home to the smiling faces of the toned, muscular athletes and intrepid cosmonauts. I also liked Lenin as a young, pudgy blond boy, standing in a brown militaristic uniform, a red star pinned to his breast and another embroidered on his cap; he looked like the boy I had a crush on at school.

  In one of these parcels was a flimsy paperback called Birds of Our Forests (Ptitsy nashikh lesov) that my grandmother must have sent in the early 1980s, and which I must have flipped through—or not—before setting it aside on my bookshelf. I rediscovered it a few years ago, when my parents embarked on an extensive home renovation. They tasked me with packing up my old bedroom, which still housed all my Soviet picture books. I reread the usual suspects—fairy tales with folksy illustrations, didactic verse with the requisite dreams of incessant hard work for the industrial homeland, including a peculiar story of a young woman whose mother proudly worked as a senior milkmaid on the collective farm. This all seemed in keeping with my grandmother’s unquestioning acceptance of Soviet ideology. Ever a perfectionist and a model student, she only began to question her world after emigration. And even then, reluctantly.

  But the book about nature surprised me. The primitively illustrated children’s book urged the younger generation to explore the great forests of the Soviet Union. There were woodpeckers, ravens, wood grouse, titmice, little owls, woodcocks, kingfishers, hawks—words that would have meant nothing to me as a child. It was a book I don’t remember thanking her for. Maybe it was dwarfed by the bottles of Red Moscow perfume she sent, whose scent I tried to inhale in hopes of recognizing my grandmother. When she arrived in Canada in 1987, her fur coat reeked of mothballs, and it turned out she reserved dabbing Red Moscow behind the ears for special occasions. Between the fur, the arresting bleached blonde hair, the Eastern bloc woollens, and the clothes packed in thick plastic bags that had been washed and air-dried, there was little I recognized of the person to whom I’d written so many letters.

  Why my grandmother, who believed in the higher gods of symphony halls and ballet performances, and who had no interest in the natural world, chose to send me a book about Russian birds remains a mystery to me. Her experiences with the Soviet natural world were limited to forced summers working on the kolkhoz, where she picked cotton or sugar beets for days on end. “That was enough nature for a lifetime,” she told me.

  “Why did you buy me this book?” For a moment, I imagined that my grandmother had been the accidental culprit, that the cheap Soviet paperback had been the driving force behind my transformation from nature novice to bona fide bird nerd, that my interest in the avian world wasn’t so much a genealogical anomaly as historically determined.

  “I bought you dozens of books—at one point, I just bought all the new children’s books I could find. Even translations.”

  “But did you imagine I’d become interested in birds?”

  “You know, I don’t think I even read the titles.” My grandmother refuses to have any involvement in my new bird life. To her it makes little sense. “Normal people go to the opera,” she tells me, “but you now go to bed at nine o’clock, set your alarm for four in the morning, and look at birds. Meshuga.” Craziness, she calls it in Yiddish. My grandmother, who can’t speak Yiddish, uses the language whenever she wants to emphasize a point; the language gives her generations’ worth of authority. My decision to choose the outdoors baffled my grandmother; hadn’t her ancestors, the Lupolover-Lupolansky clan, had their fill of the dirty outdoors in their shtetls in the Pale of Settlement, where Jews had been forced to live since the time of Catherine the Great? Wouldn’t they have run toward civilization and chosen institutions of higher learning and the glamour of opera houses and concert halls if only it had been accessible to them? I didn’t realize I was disappointing an entire lineage. The outdoors were for other people.

  “I still think you must have known,” I say.

  “I wanted you to speak Russian and love literature, so I sent you poetry by Agniya Barto and Sergei Mikhalkov. I also wanted you to become a scientist, so I sent you my favourite primer of microbes.” Poems about disciplined children of good strong Soviet workers, biology for beginners—those books still lay on my shelf, untouched.

  “Well, the birds are your fault,” I tease her.

  “Your grandfather always said the books were useless. ‘Who will read them?’ he asked me when I forced him to carry boxes to the post office. I told him that maybe you’d become a scientist.”

&n
bsp; “Birdwatching is related to science.”

  “The wrong kind of science.” She looks at me, her glasses resting on the tip of her nose. I had dashed her dreams of a granddaughter MD who helped fight cancer and replaced them with a granddaughter who went out at dawn every Saturday morning with a pair of binoculars and watched birds.

  “Do you at least take photographs?”

  “Good camera equipment is too heavy.”

  “So, what—you just look?”

  “It’s not just looking. I study the birds. I observe them carefully, and sometimes I write a blog post about what I see. But yes, basically I just look.”

  “Do people pay you for your blog posts?”

  I laugh. Not only is it the wrong kind of science, but it also fails in the realm of practicality. Yet another letdown she has had to endure in old age.

  “So, wait, you wake up so early just to look? At least with hunters, I understand. They have something to bring home. But looking?”

  I tell her that hunting is how birdwatching actually began. John James Audubon killed all of his specimens before painting them. Before the advent of optics, there was no way to study a bird without shooting it. I tell her all of this, but she’s already looking elsewhere. I’ve disappointed her, and I imagine she’s contemplating the one thing she wouldn’t dare say: so many years of education, a PhD in comparative literature from Princeton, and now all you can talk about is watching birds?

  * * *

  But a few weeks later, she called me.

  “Come over quick. I found a book for you in our library. It’s filled with many different-coloured birds—probably every single bird in the world.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “I’ll even steal it, if you want.”

  “I think you can just borrow it.”

  “Why borrow? I don’t think anybody will miss a book about birds.”