The Summer I Discovered Birds

by Rick Book
 An article for The Nature Conservancy of Canada

I’m sitting on a mossy hummock watching a bird I’ve never seen before. It’s an American golden plover and it’s feeding in the grass beside this shimmering Arctic pond. The crown of its head and back are spattered with flecks of gold that gleam in the spring sun. A white scarf crosses above its eyes and drapes down along its neck and chest, startling against the black of its face and belly, as regal as an Arab sheik. Around us, the tundra stretches away flat as Saskatchewan to the horizon. The dull brown landscape lies awash in blue melt-water ponds and lakes still white with ice. The plover is only five metres away, but my binoculars bring him even closer. I watch him peck into the grass for little black spiders and bugs. He squawks at me from time to time - a high, nasal kwee-ee - and keeps me in his wary sight.  The minutes flow by.  It has taken a trip to the Arctic for me to finally discover birds.

This comes as a bit of a surprise. I grew up on a prairie farm where meadowlarks on telephone poles belted out the signature song of summer, and the liquid notes of red-winged blackbirds always meant water was near. On many canoe and camping trips I’ve been accompanied by the soulful call of loons and the transporting notes of white-throated sparrows. But still, when I think of it, I’ve never actually looked for birds, never really looked at them, never wondered much about them: how they live, where they’d been, the distances they’d travelled. Sitting here, I realize that birds have been little more than a pleasant low-level soundtrack to my life.

Now, as the result of a chance meeting with a biologist at an airport, I’m volunteering with a joint American-Canadian Arctic shorebird monitoring program here on Baffin Island. It’s mid-June. We’re tenting for a month on a gravel esker just shy of the Arctic Circle, 70-kilometres from the ocean. There are three of us in this camp: a retired park ranger from Michigan, a 19-year old Inuit youth from Cape Dorset, and me. We have marked our plots in the boot-sucking tundra of this Arctic plain and our job, simply put, is to watch the shorebirds that come here to breed and nest, and write down everything we see.

  The plot today is strangely quiet; the only sound is the occasional distant croaking of snow geese flying.  “In order to see birds,” said the Irish essayist Robert Lynd, “it is necessary to become part of the silence.”  

The plover seems to accept my presence and keeps on feeding. Slowly, I pull out my bird book and learn that this male has probably just arrived from the grassy pampas of Argentina, perhaps from as far south as Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America. This 26-centimetre long bird weighs just .22 kilograms, yet it makes an annual migration of 33,000 kilometres - the longest of any shorebird. In his thoughtful and enchanting book, Arctic Dreams, (which I’ve brought with me to read again by the light of the midnight sun), the naturalist Barry Lopez describes encountering a horned lark in the Arctic and how he felt compelled to bow low before it, in awe of its migratory accomplishment. Now I finally understand his deep sense of humility.

I look around for the plover’s mate. Perhaps she’s on a grassy scrape of a nest hidden behind a hummock. Maybe she hasn’t arrived yet. Or never will. I wonder what this plover thinks of me sitting here in my rubber boots and green rain gear. Of course he sees a predator. At one time golden plovers blackened the skies, before they were hunted to near extinction in the 1800’s and early 1900’s. The species has never recovered. There are maybe 150,000 left, their bodies laced with toxic chemicals. That’s why we are here.

More than eighty per cent of Arctic nesting shorebird species are in decline, most likely due to pollution and loss of habitat on wintering grounds and along migration routes. Our job is part of a long-term study to get a more accurate population count. What difference will those numbers on paper make? I think depressing thoughts: of the beleaguered Kyoto Accord, the black tide of asphalt smothering farmland and wetland, roaring highways filled with gluttonous SUV’s, the killing smog blanketing the world’s cities, ancient glaciers cracking and melting, and this pale blue dot we call home growing hotter by the minute. If we can’t summon the will to save ourselves, how does this radiant plover stand a chance?

A biologist told me these shorebirds are our canaries in the coalmine, and that their decline is sounding the environmental alarm. That sounds wildly optimistic; I hope I’m wrong. But who is listening? I sure wasn’t. My own small, dutiful earth-friendly acts – reduce, reuse, recycle, and use of public transit and energy efficient light bulbs - seem so puny, perhaps even deluded.

Now that I’ve looked into this plover’s sharp black eyes I ask myself: what will I do? I’m still not sure, other than tell this story. But I make a silent promise to myself and to this beautiful creature. I’ll pay attention to birds from now on. I’ll admire their graceful arcing flight, the sheen of their feathers. I’ll appreciate their courage, their miraculous abilities and, yes, their songs.

But there is something else I need to learn from this plover, and that is hope. “Teach me half the gladness that thy brain must know,” wrote Shelley. “Such harmonious madness from my lips would flow, the world should listen then, as I am listening now.” 

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