Birds of a feather

By Paul Matthew St. Pierre

LIFE LIST: A BIRDER’S SPIRITUAL AWAKENING,

by Chris Dunford. Novalis,
paper $24.95. Orders:
tel. 1-877-702-7773,
fax 1-877-702-7775,
web site www.novalis.ca.

In my spare time, I am an artist. Mostly, I make multimedia box sculptures, several of them with bird motifs, such as "Black Bird Swinging in the Dead of White," which was awarded "Best in Show" at an exhibition at the Simon Fraser Art Gallery in 2002; "Live Birds, David Symon, Lochee"; and, recently, "Manon Hommasse, L’Observatrice d’Oiseaux, Domremy."

The reason for this motif in my work is simple enough: I love birds. I first took notice of birds in the late 1970s, when I was living in a rented cottage in Avalon Beach on the Palm Beach peninsula, 23 miles north of Sydney, Australia. At the end of my back garden were several large eucalyptus trees, in whose branches I would regularly see perched cockatoos, kookaburras, seven-coloured lorikeets, and Indian wood pigeons, all of them magnificently plumaged and, to me, exotic birds.

When I returned home to Vancouver, I began to see local birds, even common robins, sparrows, crows, pigeons, and seagulls, in a new light, now as uncommon to me as kookaburras and cockatoos, for their distinctive field marks, postures, shapes, sizes, flight patterns, movements, songs, and habitats.

Still, I am no birder; the birds I watch have to come to me, yet I feel that, in my own detached way, I must be as fascinated by birds as was St. Francis of Assisi when he was preaching to them. However my birds, in a sense, preach to me.

For all these personal reasons, Chris Dunford’s new book, Life List: A Birder’s Spiritual Awakening, held a special fascination for me. The book is a variously lyrical, meditative, and impressionist personal narrative in which Dunford, who is from northern California, recounts his birding trip to Churchill, Man., to watch some new species of birds, and the spiritual awakening he experienced in the bush.

His heightened spirituality derived partly from the meditative solitude which the tundra of Manitoba afforded him, but partly it was more practical and intellectual.

He writes: "I am attracted to churches for more than their art and architecture: not just Christian churches, but religious shrines of any culture, perhaps for the same reason I’m fascinated by the intricate patterns on ducks and sparrows. They defy utilitarian explanation, yet they are beautiful and inspiring."

This kind of writing, with its bold conceits, its yoking together of fowl and fish, truly calls attention to itself, and to an author with a kind of ornithological agenda.

He has a flair for mundane events, as when, anxious to be served at the Churchill Motel Restaurant, "I found myself studying the movements of the waitresses."

He writes like a birder and like the field biologist he is by training, notably in his sightings: "Nearby a male Willow Ptarmigan flew up with white wings to the top of a lone spruce and uttered its call. It is a beautiful bird even in mid-moult from the pure white of winter to the mottled brown of summer. I could even see the patch of bright-red bare skin, the ‘comb,’ over its eye."