Canny gifts that keep on giving
A guide to birdsong, a dandy pair of binoculars, special camera lenses — what more could an urban birder ask for? ’Tis the season
As I look out my window this afternoon, absolutely everything is a drizzled, grizzled, gloomy grey. The sky is leaden, the bare tree branches a sludgy shade of slate. Unrelenting rain has washed away every last trace of bright white snow, leaving dark and dirty ground behind.
As for the occasional birds dropping by? My main visitors the past few days have been dark-eyed juncos (mostly grey) and some graceful khaki-coloured mourning doves. Even the squirrels are grey.
To brighten my mood, I decided to take a little mental trip and cast my mind back to happy, colourful memories of the best presents I ever received. Some were for Christmas, but not all. Some, like the 10-speed bicycle my Dad gave me when I was about 20, were for no reason at all.
Maybe that is not entirely accurate. I was going through a bit of a bad patch back then. My wonderful parents jumped in to help, wrapping me in TLC. Then, when I was feeling better, my Dad gave me a skinny Italian-made racing bike that encouraged me to get outdoors, get some exercise and feel the sun on my face. That bike opened a new world for me; it was transportation, it was adventure and, above all, it was fabulous fun. It was a present I didn’t even know I needed.
Maybe that’s always a characteristic of the best gifts. They’re things you wouldn’t buy or otherwise get for yourself, but that turn out to be indispensable, or even life-changing.
That’s certainly how I feel about a gift one of my sons gave me a half-dozen years ago. When Jake worked in a local bookstore, he used his staff discount to buy me The Backyard Birdsong Guide by Donald Kroodsma. This one-of-a-kind book is a true marvel of the digital age. At the press of a button, the songs and calls of 75 different bird species native to eastern North America can be heard. The beauty of the thing? You can listen again and again and again, until you have the music firmly fixed in your brain.
I have spent many a quiet hour with this audio field guide, which uses recordings from the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology’s Macaulay Library, going back and forth between similar species of thrush, trying to fix in my brain the difference between their songs. Or the difference in the drumming sounds made by two different woodpeckers.
It is because of this marvelous little book that I am able to quite confidently say, when out for a walk in the woods, “Listen! There’s a chestnut-sided warbler!” — even when the bird is nowhere to be seen. That’s the whole point of this book. It teaches you identify birds by sound alone. For a beginning birder, this is tremendously useful, especially in the summer when lush foliage obscures all but the boldest of birds.
It’s not just the digital files in The Backyard Birdsong Guide that make it so valuable. Kroodsma’s lively text is filled with explanations such as the difference between a bird’s song and its call, and fascinating stories about how each species learns and varies its song. Armed with this book and a recent Christmas gift from my husband, a pair of excellent binoculars, I have become a better birder. (Good luck finding this 2008 book. It doesn’t seem to be in stock online or in bookstores, and second-hand dealers are charging $170 and up for used copies.)
As I cast my mind back over these very special gifts, I realize they all fed my quest to learn more about the natural world around us. The birdfeeder my children chipped in to buy for me one Christmas brought the bright glories of the avian world right to my backyard. Daily contact with the myriad sparrows and finches, woodpeckers and nuthatches, doves, robins, cardinals and jays introduced me to the ongoing drama of their lives, filling me with awe at the raw beauty and complexity of their societies.
One year, my husband gave me a close-up lens for my camera, a gift that, without a hint of exaggeration, changed my life. With this lens on my camera, I became happily lost in the realm of the Lilliputian. I began to learn to identify beetles by their brightly coloured carapaces, dragonflies by the number of spots on their translucent wings, wildflowers by whether their stems were smooth or hairy.
Some years later, my better half surprised me at Christmas with a long lens that opened up a completely different world to me. Now I could watch and safely record —undetected — aspects of bird life that had previously been impossible to view: the mourning dove sitting on her eggs; the robin gathering string for her nest; the American kestrel sitting on a transmission wire above my head, devouring a freshly caught field mouse.
Admittedly, the lenses were expensive items I was blessed to receive. But there’s a gift we all get today, absolutely for free. At 6:03 p.m. Sunday, we officially mark the winter solstice, the shortest day — and the longest, darkest night of the calendar year. From here on, each day gets a bit longer, returning us eventually to the best free gift of all, spring. mbream@thestar.ca