Birds Art Life. A Year of Observation Kyo Maclear

OMN Book Review by Becky Emerson Carlberg

The book sat on my bedside stand for months before I opened it. The chapters were divided into prologue and epilogue with the 12 months between. Bird sightings, meetings, organized birding trips and so on would probably be highlighted. Instead, during the year, Kyo Maclear learned about birds from the different perspective of being a daughter, wife, mother and friend.

Kyo Maclear is a self-employed writer with a singer/composer husband and two sons. Her background is amazing. Her father was a London born foreign war correspondent and mother a Tokyo sumi-e artist who worked in black ink painting on paper. Her parents met in Tokyo. Her father understood large issues while her mother, who had no fondness for nature, regularly set up Japanese rock gardens wherever the family lived. Kyo has spent most her life in Toronto, Canada.

Kyo’s earliest bird memories were the pigeons at Trafalgar Square with she was four years old. She spent her childhood summers in Tokyo at her grandmother’s house, but the aggressive “jungle crows” that lived in the area terrified her.

The story starts with her father who had experienced two strokes. As she copes with the impact on her father, herself and family, Kyo links up with a musician caught up in creative depression who had found peace by birding in the city. They met at a pond. She looks down to see a dying pigeon with a severed tail. Was she supposed to learn about birds? Could she follow the musician? Yes, he said.

The musician’s story. His father cared for many species of finches in his aviary. The musician fed them several times a week and soon became a bird lover himself. He enjoyed the small spots of nature in city parks and local lakes instead of traveling long distances to more popular bird designations. Kyo and the musician met for several birding episodes during the year of observation.

One day Kyo and the musician were standing at the edge of a Toronto lake. People soon lined the opposite shore with cameras, spotting scopes and binoculars to have a look at the Western Grebe. This bird was common in the western US, not the province of Ontario. Waiting. Waiting. They kept waiting for a glimpse. Starr Saphir, a NY City birder who led Central Park walks which lasted 5 to 6 hours 4 times a week for 40 years would say “Time has a different meaning for birders.” Keep awake and wait. The musician, Kyo, and lots of patient folks were rewarded when the grebe appeared, spreading its wings.

Kyo began to collect bird books. She loved the poets but appreciated the science-oriented literature over inspirational prose. She wondered what bird was her “Spark Bird”, a bird that turns someone into a serious birder. For John J Audubon it was the Eastern Phoebe. Roger Tory Peterson was taken by the Northern Flicker. David Allen Sibley loved the Magnolia Warbler.

‘Die Knowing Something’ Kyo would tell herself. Birds migrate at great cost. Cities, weather, vanishing habitats. The Fatal Light Awareness Program, FLAP, brings awareness to glass buildings and night lighting that annually presents a host of problems to migrating birds. Over 25 million fatal bird strikes a year occur in Canada.

Another issue Kyo notes is Shifting Baselines, coined by Daniel Pauly in 1995. Ecological standards have been lowered to such a degree that humans tolerate things they never would have. Call it collective forgetfulness. Short life spans and malleable memories have rendered us unable “to realize how much nature has been altered and destroyed”. Kyo speaks of the demise of the passenger pigeon. Millions lived in Canada in the 1860’s. Last one died in a Cincinnati Zoo Sept. 1st 1914.

The epilogue finishes with Kyo reflecting about the serious decline of her father, a gentle man who chose to write about war. He taught her to expect the worst, yet made her unafraid to face the unknown. Her year with the musician opened her world to birds. She discovered birders come from many occupations and eras.

Leonardo da Vinci watched birds to understand flight, but he was an animal rights activist who bought caged birds and released them from Florence, Italy markets. Charles Dickens had a pet raven named Grip.

Her secret is simple. If you listen to birds, every day will have a song in it.