OUR BIRDER BIDS ADIEU
Elizabeth Le Geyt’s weekly column, which has appeared without fail for 39 years, is under new management, LOUISA TAYLOR writes.
For almost her entire life, Elizabeth Le Geyt has been loving, protecting and observing birds — lately through the window of her room at a Manotick retirement home. Today, after almost 40 years as the voice of the Citizen’s Birds column, Le Geyt says goodbye.
Elizabeth Le Geyt is talking about the birders of Ottawa when she breaks off mid-sentence and stiffens slightly. The view through the window of her single room at the Manotick retirement home is suddenly a swirling frenzy of black flapping wings. Half a dozen starlings are crashing onto Le Geyt’s collection of feeders hanging above the snowy flower bed outside, driving away the cheerful chickadees who had been feasting on the seeds and suet moments before.
“Oh no. Oh Lord. Goodness gracious,” Le Geyt says under her breath. “Tsk. That’ll be the end of those fat blocks.”
Le Geyt returns to the discussion, but doesn’t take her eyes off one particular starling making short work of the last ragged chunk of yellow suet in the wire feeder. “I hear you, you noisy brute,” she says. Her tone is one of affectionate reproach, something an exasperated parent might use for a naughty toddler. “That’s last year’s baby. They’d better have the screens up or we’ll have starlings nesting in the soffits and they make a terrible racket.”
For almost her entire life, Le Geyt has been observing — and loving, and protecting, and gently chiding — birds and the people who watch them. For nearly 40 of those years, she has been the voice of the Citizen’s Birds column, cataloguing sightings from her legion of devoted contributors, sharing advice on tending to wounded specimens and educating armchair birders on habitat and behaviour. Fellow birders credit Le Geyt (rhymes with jet) with opening the eyes of countless readers to the wonders of the avian world in Ottawa and beyond. Today marks the final Birds column by Elizabeth Le Geyt — a date she chose for its neat symmetry, for her first column (headlined “It’s Now Under New Management”) appeared on March 23, 1974.
“For heaven’s sake, I’ll be 99 in June,” says Le Geyt, her eyes widening behind the translucent frames of her glasses. “I may not be here much longer.”
Arthritis has twisted her hands into knobby nests “not much good for anything,” let alone typing. Walking takes too much out of her and, as much as Le Geyt adores a good hug, it can be dangerous for her frail frame.
“I used to say everything from here down isn’t working so well anymore,” says Le Geyt, holding her hand horizontally in front of her chin. “But now my eyes are bothering me too.”
Born and raised in England, Le Geyt came to Canada with her husband and children. They made a home in Manotick but it wasn’t long before the marriage fell apart. Le Geyt was left to raise five boys on her own. She cleaned houses and waitressed to support them, and later worked for 10 years as the office manager for a local chiropractor. “That middle part of my life was pretty grim,” Le Geyt says of single parenthood. “I think what kept my sanity was my love of the outdoors.”
Hers is an old school, typically English love of nature, the kind that finds its best expression in a ramble along the river with binoculars in hand and dogs under foot, or an afternoon of puttering about in the vegetable garden. Both were beloved pastimes for Le Geyt when she lived in her little house on the banks of the Rideau River, but nothing could top the exhilaration and reward of quiet, patient observation of a bird in its natural habitat.
When Wilf Bell retired from writing the Citizen column, then known as Bird Roundup, Le Geyt began to share that passion with her readers. She faithfully listed their first sightings of red-winged blackbirds in early March, noted the appearance of a great grey owl in a farmer’s field and explained how to build a proper purple martin house or tend to a broken wing. Seasoned birders took pride in having their sightings chronicled, while armchair birders looked more closely at what was showing up at their backyard feeder.
Le Geyt’s Saturday column was a highlight of the week for many readers, “an institution and a truly bright spot in the paper,” says Citizen editor-in-chief and publisher Gerry Nott. “I’m certain Elizabeth turned readers into birders and I know that for me, like many others, her column provided a cheerful start to the weekend. She’s legendary in the community, and deserves that status.”
In the days before email, Le Geyt regularly fielded phone calls at home from readers breathlessly — and inaccurately — reporting the arrival of some nearly extinct species, or desperate to stop a cardinal from bashing itself against a picture window (her answer: put up a screen so it can’t see its reflection). Ottawa birders are known to be among the most passionate and competitive of their kind, going to great lengths to spot all the species on their lifelist of birds, a development Le Geyt laments.
“It’s so sad that more and more, they’re not really interested in the bird, in its beauty, they just want to tick it off their list and go on to the next one,” she says, noting that the prevalence of digital cameras has made everyone a wildlife photographer. “It all came to a head with the great grey owls. People were baiting them with white mice, tramping all over the place competing for the best shot.”
In recent years, Le Geyt regularly received photos of the same bird in the same spot from 10 different contributors, and had to choose just one for the column.
“I have to play God,” she says. “It’s very tiring.”
Now that job passes to Bruce Di Labio, an Ottawa naturalist and popular birding guide who grew up reading Le Geyt’s column. He be- came a devoted contributor by his early teens and eventually a personal friend to Le Geyt.
“Mrs. Le Geyt was not a hard-core birder,” says Di Labio. “She enjoyed the birds and enjoyed writing about them, and has had a major contribution to starting people into birding in the Ottawa area.”
Le Geyt was deeply involved with the Wild Bird Care Centre, so much so that they named an environmental award after her. She received the Order of Ontario in a ceremony in November 2011 at her retirement home, followed by “a bang-up party.”
It has been several years since Le Geyt has made it into the field with her binoculars, but that hasn’t dimmed her enthusiasm. A copy of Peterson’s Guide to the Birds of North America sits on a table by her window, the latest edition of Birdwatching magazine is on a footstool. Le Geyt’s friends come by to refill the numerous feeders outside her window with her custom Le Geyt Seed from Rooney Feed Ltd. It’s a strong seller for the Kemptville company, which created the special mix last December as a tribute to their longtime customer. Le Geyt’s feeders attract a daily pageant of avian beauty and eccentricity — on this grey March afternoon, there are not just starlings and chickadees but goldfinch, woodpeckers, pigeons and a pair of wild turkeys.
So if she were a bird, what bird would Elizabeth Le Geyt be?
She blinks. “Oh. That’s an odd question. Well. How could you possibly decide? First you’d have to decide if you would be a migratory bird and do these awful journeys all the way to South America, or whether you’d stay here and survive the horrible winters.”
Le Geyt closes her eyes and is quiet for a moment, then opens her eyes and smiles.
“I suppose I’d be a chickadee. Everybody likes chickadees.”
See more photos and a video report at ottawacitizen.com/city