|
|
|
||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Click to return to my Home Page
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
HOW I GOT STARTED
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Dedicated To The Memory of Billy Sloane
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Veery
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Roger Tory Peterson starts out “Birds Over America”, by relating an incident in his youth, during which he is being berated by his father for being “‘after the birds again’”, and coming home soaked in the rain. He comments that “I could never explain to him why I did these things;I never quite knew myself.”
In many cases it is not a rational decision to become a birder (or birdwatcher). It is more like a contagious disease to which we succumb. I have often wondered about it myself, but never questioned it. Billy Sloane, my neighbourhood buddy, was the unlikely source of my indoctrination (infection?) in birding. He was about 9 years old and I was about 8. We and our group of friends roamed the east end of Toronto. During these outings, Billy often became the teacher and we the students....the topic was birds and names like Baltimore Orioles, Goldfinches, Red-winged Blackbirds became commonplace. Where he obtained his knowledge, I have no idea, even to this
day.
It was during one of these jaunts to the local “claypits” (brickyard) that I was “bitten”. We had never had binoculars before, but Billy had a pair this day. It must have been spring, because the bird that Billy pointed out to us, on a nearby bush, was a Chestnut-sided Warbler, and he gave each of us a look. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The colours were dazzling and the bird was so close. I marvelled and lined up for another look, and I can still see it now. That one single event developed gradually but surely into my present-day obsession with the birds, and it is something that I have trouble (as did Peterson) explaining to people, or making sense of myself sometimes.
Our group was no organized bird club, but I can remember going on a birding trip sponsored by the Toronto Star newspaper, where one person commented that we looked like we were coming to scare away the birds. We also regularly signed out bird books from the local library.
The year was 1954, and I was 9 years old. I went on to bird sticker colouring books, and then my first field guide, the Audubon guide by Richard K. Pough. Then on my 11th or 12th birthday, I got my own pair of binoculars, which are still quite functional today. I was now an official “birdwatcher”, although as an adolescent it was often a covert activity.
One day Billy Sloane and his family moved a few miles away and we drifted apart. We learned, a few years later , that at the age of 16, Billy had died suddenly while playing in the field behind his house, ironically enough, just steps from the brickyard where he had pointed out that Chestnut-sided Warbler to us, only a few years before.
I thank Billy, wherever he is, for introducing me to the birds.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Blackburnian Warbler
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
White-crowned Sparrow
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Great Blue Heron (white morph)
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| page created with Easy Designer |