Birding with Yeats: A Mother's Memoir Page 10

  Or Yeats would have a half-day of school, and we’d hop in the car after lunch and drive to Humber Bay Park or High Park or Sunnybrook Park or Ashbridges Bay. We were lucky to have so many places to go in Toronto. As winter turned to spring, we saw more species — a northern mockingbird at Humber, a spotted sandpiper at Ashbridges.

  Whenever he returned from one of his solitary expeditions, Yeats would list all the birds he’d seen. He listed them in his book and also out loud for me. He brought out his bird guides to show me which birds he’d seen. He talked about their migration routes and where they’d be nesting in the spring and when they’d be leaving to migrate south. He talked on and on and at some point, I tuned out. Well, I didn’t tune out completely, but I didn’t pay as much attention as I thought I should.

  The truth was, while I loved going out to see birds, to be alone with him like that, I was not too fanatical about all the details. He could tell me a hundred times where the spotted sandpiper nests in Ontario and I wouldn’t remember the next day. Such a big part of why I loved birdwatching was being in the moment, really being in the forest or on the sand spit or sitting overlooking a marsh. The actual bird details I left to the boy. That was just the truth of it.

  Later that winter, our datebook was starting to fill with spring publishing events. I had a long list of things to do before mid-March, so I couldn’t go birding as often as I would have liked. Yeats seemed to prefer going on his own, anyway, especially in the rain. And we had a trip coming up that required planning. There were a million things I needed to pick up — duffle bags from a friend, extra memory and batteries for the camera — and I had to speak to our friend Holly, who would be staying in the house to look after the cat. We were going to a place that is every birder’s dream: the Galapagos Islands.

  A few weeks into autumn, Laurie had called from Greenwich and said, “What are you guys doing for March break? Because we’re going to the Galapagos, to sail around for a week, and we have three extra spots on the boat. Wanna come?”

  It was a Sunday morning and we were having breakfast. I put my hand over the receiver and said to Ben, “It’s Laurie. They’re inviting us to go with them to the Galapagos. Let’s say yes.”

  Ben looked stunned. It isn’t every day you get an offer like this. He was caught off guard and said, “Jeepers. Okay. That would be amazing. How can we turn that down?”

  I eyed him carefully and said to my sister, “Yes. We’d love to join you. Thanks a lot.” It was decided: we were going on a big trip — Ben included.

  IN THE AIRPLANE ON the way to Ecuador, Yeats asked me which bird I most wanted to see.

  I replied, “Albatross.” Yeats glared at me because he knew that I knew we wouldn’t be seeing an albatross. It was the wrong season for albatrosses in the Galapagos Islands, something he’d been telling me for the past few months. We’d had a long time to contemplate this voyage.

  Ben said he wanted to see the booby, entirely tongue-in-cheek because he knew it was what we expected him to say. Parents are so irritating.

  “Okay, then,” I said, “I most want to see something I don’t even know about yet. Otherwise,” I continued, catching Yeats’s stony look, “I want to see the magnificent frigatebird with its red throat.”

  This was an acceptable answer and, as it turned out, we would see those frigates, lots of them, more than we could ever imagine and up so close we would swear they must be tame.

  We were accidental tourists to the Galapagos. This was not a trip we had ever dreamed we’d take. It was my brother-in-law Andy’s trip, planned by him and for his family. But they had those three extra spots on the boat and we were filling them.

  The group convened in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city, which was located on the coast: very hot, very muggy. For Ben and Yeats, who had never been to a developing country, it was magnificently exciting. The traffic alone, with five lanes accommodating eight lanes of cars, food and drink vendors wending through the vehicles, no visible means of control anywhere, not to mention the apparently life-threatening taxis we took, yielded story after story over many a dinner to come. The mix of colonial architecture with modern; the tired, run-down feeling of most of the city juxtaposed with the incredible energy of the place; the wonderful Malecón — the boardwalk — along the waterfront; the marketplace . . . our trip was off to a memorable start.

  We checked out Iguana Park, across from the main cathedral in the centre of town. Land iguanas languished and lolled and then crawled all over one another at feeding time, each trying to out-eat the other. They looked prehistoric, somehow unreal, and I was reminded of a stuffed iguana Mom and Dad had brought home from a trip to Mexico when I was a kid. My brother kept it in his room for years until it started to rot and its claws broke off.

  We saw birds we couldn’t identify — beautiful little blue ones that Yeats thought must be some kind of tanager — and small doves like our mourning dove but with different colouring. We saw grackles and a kind of tropical kingbird and hummingbirds. There were too many kinds of hummingbirds in Ecuador for us to even begin to identify them. In fact, there were too many kinds of birds in Ecuador, period, for us to identify them. I’d looked for a bird book before the trip. The only one available came in two volumes, each one over $100 and weighing ten pounds. So we’d bought a general guidebook for the Galapagos instead.

  From the Malecón we saw three kinds of heron down at the river’s edge: black-crowned night heron, yellow-crowned night heron, and striated heron. The first two we remembered from our faithful Audubon field guide at home, and the third was in our Galapagos book. At first glance I couldn’t see any birds and wondered what Yeats and Ben were talking about. Then my eyes adjusted and I spotted them. The night herons are smaller, more compact, than the familiar great blue. They blended in with the riverbank, but as soon as I saw one, I started to see them all over the place. The birds were poking about in the mud and plant debris while the river rushed by on its way to and from the sea. I could have stood and watched that river all day, except that the weather was far too hot. We bought bottled water and found some shade in a small treed garden where hummingbirds were feeding off a flowered vine covering a rock wall.

  All told, sixteen people were on the trip: Laurie, Andy, and their children, Thomas and Lauren; Andy’s oldest brother, Stephen, and his wife Jane; Andy’s sister Barbara, her husband Tom, and their seven-year-old daughter Fiona; Andy’s younger brother David and his wife Meredith; and Andy’s parents, Ron and Barb. And us. Steve and Jane, and David and Meredith each had three children, but they were at home.

  We’d known all these Chisholms for years and felt relaxed and welcomed amongst them. The night before the departure to the islands, we went out for a celebratory dinner. All sixteen of us sat at a long, narrow table and made a toast: to Andy, to family, to tropical adventures. Yeats and his cousin Thomas were ecstatic to be travelling together, and I laughed watching them goon around at the table. Lauren and Fiona acted likewise, faces shining. The adults were more circumspect in their emotional displays, but clearly we were a happy bunch.

  We flew from sunny Guayaquil to the Galapagos Islands, where it was pouring rain. We met our guide, Jorge, who told us as soon as we were seated on the bus that our boat, the Alta, wasn’t ready. He’d take us to a different, more luxurious boat, which would ferry us to the Alta after dinner. So far we’d nearly missed our connection to Guayaquil from Bogota due to overbooking; two of our bags (one of ours and one of Jane’s) were lost and returned to us only hours before the flight to the Galapagos; and now this new glitch. Some of us looked at Andy, who just smiled and shook his head.

  We liked Jorge, though. The delay wasn’t his fault. He knew his flora and fauna, and he was a professional photographer with an eye for what was interesting. We ended up learning a lot from him.

  The Alta was a 46-metre ship with three masts. Most of the time we were under engine power, but from time to time they raised the sails and we flew across the water, dolphins leapin
g at the bow. That was a good memory.

  The sixteen of us slept two per cabin, and there were nine crew, including Jorge. The young girls bunked in together, across the narrow hall from Yeats and Thomas. Both sets of children managed to personalize their cabins within hours of being on board: stuffed animals for the girls and stuff everywhere for the boys. We all settled in pretty quickly and had a good first night on the ship.

  Over the course of the week we would cruise from island to island, stopping from time to time to hike or snorkel or play on a beach. We were there in March, so the weather was variable: a little rain every day and a lot sometimes, but only in the afternoons. The currents brought warm water at that time of year, so the swimming was lovely.

  The most exciting birds for me were the ones that followed the boat and those that landed high up in the rigging for a ride. These were the storm petrels, the frigate birds, the tropic birds. They had huge wingspans and curved beaks and lived for months at sea. In my romantic imagination they were impossibly free. I sat on the upper deck in the sunshine watching them fly around the masts.

  We saw the red-billed tropic bird once and the magnificent and great frigate birds every day. These birds accompanied us for hours at a time, sometimes flying with the boat and sometimes perched in the rigging. Both species are about 102 centimetres long, which is about the length of a large Canada goose. The tropic bird is white with a red bill and has long white streamers flying off its tail, making it look twice as long as it is. The frigate bird is black; the males have their distinguishing red throats while the females have white breasts. Jorge told us that some of the frigate birds were Greats, because they had a pale wing bar. All frigate birds, he said, spent almost their entire lives at sea, but they rarely, if ever, landed on the water.

  Yeats didn’t spend a lot of time on deck. Instead, he passed hour after hour in his cabin with Thomas, where they played cards and a game involving tossing a tissue box up into the porthole. They joined us on all the expeditions and went snorkelling, but when the boat was moving from island to island, sometimes for long stretches at a time, they were downstairs.

  I said, “What about joining us on deck? It’s beautiful up here. The breeze is amazing. There are dolphins and frigate birds. We’ve come a long way for this.” What I didn’t say was: we haven’t come all this way for you to spend so much time in a dark cave.

  He said, “It’s too hot. You know I don’t like the heat. It’s March! It’s not supposed to be hot in March! Besides, I thought you wanted me to spend more time with my cousin.”

  “You guys are down there with the air conditioning on?”

  “Yes.”

  I looked at him.

  “So?” he said.

  “I just think that sometimes it would be nice if you two joined the group. That’s all I’m saying,” I said. “And maybe get some fresh air.”

  “We do join the group. Meals. Swimming. Expeditions to the islands. All the evenings with Jorge.”

  “Okay, you’re right. You do join the group.”

  “And we come upstairs regularly to get cookies.” He grinned at me. Cheeky monkey. They’d found a bottomless bowl of Oreos in the lounge, something none of the other mothers knew about. Maybe it was invisible to people over the age of eighteen.

  Ben also spent a lot of solitary time while we were motoring at sea, but he chose the back deck of the Alta as his refuge. This was a cramped spot with two wicker armchairs, and he was usually the only person sitting there since it was extremely noisy and smelly from the diesel engine right below. He couldn’t explain to me in language I could understand why he preferred this spot.

  The Galapagos Islands is a group of over fifteen islands in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Ecuador. They are bisected by the equator, which we crossed a couple of times as we sailed. The first time, we all crowded onto the ship’s bridge and watched as the navigation instrument moved to 0000, and then were served a sticky, sweet drink, non-alcoholic for the children and the abstemious. The ritual felt a bit forced to me, contrived just for us Northerners.

  The equator is not an arbitrary geographical designation, but it is invisible. It lives in our collective mythology as a romantic destination, although an awful lot of it goes through ocean or uninhabitable terrain. The Galapagos, for example, are barely fit for people. Most of the islands have no fresh water source, nor anything indigenous for people to eat, unless you count the giant tortoises. Not surprisingly, most are uninhabited — and, as a designated UNESCO heritage site, they will remain so.

  Every day we had sun and heat and every day we had mist and rain. It was fantastically beautiful. We snorkelled at the base of a cliff and into a grotto where a Galapagos fur seal came to play. Jorge dove with the seal and they swam together in loops, the rest of us watching, legs dangling in the greeny-gloom of the cave. Thomas took over when Jorge surfaced and when the boy came up for air he was laughing. The seal nudged him and down they went again.

  The two pangas, as they called the Zodiac boats, took us over to the islands for some sightseeing. The sights were all natural: birds, iguanas, giant red crabs, and tortoises. On our first full day we went to Tower Island, where we saw the famous boobies. We saw all three kinds: blue-footed, red-footed, and Nazca. We saw baby boobies, little balls of white fluff perched in a thorny tree. We saw red-footed boobies doing a mating dance. We saw a young blue-footed booby sitting beside a signpost low to the ground. The sign was white with an arrow painted in booby-blue, pointing along the path. This was the only sign we saw on this island and I guess that baby booby found it companionable.

  The astonishment was that the wildlife was so tame. Telephoto lenses were unnecessary; we could crouch down and snap a photo from a metre away. For many generations these animals had had nothing to fear from humans and were, therefore, not afraid. We approached, they remained.

  I thought of the great blue heron that liked to stand on the end of the canoe dock at the cottage. It would watch me carefully as I inched closer and closer, as slowly as I could, taking forever. I sent it clear and loving vibrations but no matter, once I came within four metres, it flew away. I wished it could see these boobies, calm as can be. Or even the great blue herons on the beach in Florida that will blithely walk a crowded beach and try to steal from a fisherman’s pail. Yeats reminded me that the great blues do come to the Galapagos, and he was right. We’d already seen some in Guayaquil, but they weren’t the ones that migrate to Muskoka and stand waiting for frogs on the end of our dock.

  On the same island we saw more magnificent frigate birds, the males with their huge red neck pouches extended in courtship. They, too, were unafraid, and were so glorious that some of us took far too many photographs.

  Yeats said, “Do we really need more than, say, two good photos of one kind of bird? Do we? Do we really, Mom?”

  “Some people obviously think so. They can do what they like.”

  “But it’s so dumb. They could be enjoying the birds.”

  “They are, in their own way. Plus, they’re enjoying taking pictures. Some people love to take pictures. It’s an art.”

  “Fifty pictures of the same bird isn’t an art form. It’s craziness.”

  I secretly agreed, but Yeats could be so adamant. I didn’t want him to grow up to be harshly judgmental, so I tried to temper his rants.

  “They’re looking for the perfect picture. That’s all.”

  “There’s no such thing. Or, every picture is perfect.”

  I stared at him for a second then went to look at another bird.

  Some of the male frigate birds looked like they were suffocating, their neck pouches were so large. They spread their long black wings out to the sides like cormorants on a perch, staying put in spite of our stares.

  When we finally tore our eyes away and looked behind us at the view, we saw a cloud of birds flying just off the island’s rocky coast. Jorge said they were two kinds of storm petrels: Galapagos and white-rumped. There must have been a couple th
ousand individuals in that flock, and we watched, enthralled, as they circled and swooped and circled again.

  Lauren said, “Why don’t they crash into each other?” and some adult began an explanation. But truly, this was one of the mysteries. To be reminded of life’s mysteries was a delicious gift and I moved away so as not to hear the scientific explanation. I glanced at Lauren, who was looking perplexed by the account, but I knew she wouldn’t have been happy with “It’s magic,” either.

  EVERY DAY JORGE TOOK us out in the pangas. One afternoon, near Isabela Island, we donned our rain jackets over our shorts and T-shirts and loaded into the two small boats. We sat up along the high rubber sides, eight to a boat, plus a driver.

  It was drizzling, misty in the distance. High cliffs of reddish-yellow stone were the main feature of this side of Isabela. Small caves were dotted here and there in the cliffs, and many ledges were full of perching birds. We saw more blue-footed boobies, gulls, and a kind of tern called the brown noddy. It was love at first sight for me. Like all terns, this one had a small, sleek body and an arrow-straight bill. Its feathers were dark brown with light brown around the head. I don’t know why these birds captured my heart; there is no logic to love. As we sat bobbing in our boats, my eyes were glued to the noddies and I had a feeling I had a silly smile on my face. I kept saying to Ben, “Will you look at those birds. Aren’t they so beautiful?”

  I also have a love of sparrows. A friend of mine once asked why I bothered looking at sparrows, saying, “Aren’t they the most boring bird ever?” I was aghast at his lack of knowledge, and then at myself for being such a birding snob. “Clearly,” I said, “you don’t know about sparrows. How about the white-crowned sparrow with the black and white stripes on its head? Or the white-throated sparrow with the yellow eye patches that sings, Sweet Canada, Canada, Canada? Or the song sparrow with its chest stripes and beautiful song?”