Julia Zarankin - 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, .

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) 2020019223 X | ISBN 9781771622486 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771622493 ( HTML )

Subjects: LCSH : Zarankin, Julia, 1974- | LCSH : Bird watchersBiography. | LCSH : Bird watching. | LCGFT : Autobiographies.

Classification: LCC QL 677.5 . Z 37 2020 | DDC 598.072/34dc23

To Leon, for becoming an almost-birder,
and
in memory of Bronwyn Dalziel (19912016)

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 didnt 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 Beethovens 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 semilife-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 elephants 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 specificbooks 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 Watchers 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 Sibleys 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?

In 2013, while visiting friends on Denman Island, in British Columbia, I nearly bought a half-dozen semi-retired hens. I didnt 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 wasnt 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 wouldnt 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?