Woman, Watching

Description

' Woman, Watching is an entrancing blend of biography, memoir, history, research, and homage that is unlike anything I ve ever read. It s radical, it s ravishing. Kyo Maclear, author of Birds Art Life From award-winning author Merilyn Simonds, a remarkable biography of an extraordinary woman a Swedish aristocrat who survived the Russian Revolution to become an internationally renowned naturalist, one of the first to track the mid-century decline of songbirds. Referred to as a Canadian Rachel Carson, Louise de Kiriline Lawrence lived and worked in an isolated log cabin near North Bay. After her husband was murdered by Bolsheviks, she refused her Swedish privilege and joined the Canadian Red Cross, visiting her northern Ontario patients by dogsled. When Elzire Dionne gave birth to five babies, Louise became nurse to the Dionne Quintuplets. Repulsed by the media circus, she retreated to her wilderness cabin, where she devoted herself to

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Memoir

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 24 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781773059617
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 5 Mo

Extrait

Woman, Watching Louise de Kiriline Lawrence and the Songbirds of Pimisi Bay
Merilyn Simonds





Contents Praise for Woman, Watching Also by Merilyn Simonds Dedication Epigraph 1: The Golden Bird 2: The View from the Terrace 3: Hungry for Something 4: Untrammelled Landscapes 5: Hold Fast to This 6: This Gentle Art 7: Like the White Wings of Angels 8: Nothing Happens Haphazardly 9: A Strong Wall around Me 10: Ennobling Influence 11: The Eyes of the Heart 12: A Limitless Capacity to Rebound 13: Visions of Woodpeckers 14: With High Heart 15: A Fine and Baffling Interplay 16: Lest Living Lose Its Zest 17: As Long as It Lasts 18: Never a Day Alike to the Other Source Note Author’s Note Acknowledgements Credits Photo Credits Bibliography of Works by Louise de Kiriline Lawrence Index About the Author Copyright


Praise for Woman, Watching
“Woman, Watching is an irresistible account of an extraordinary life. Louise de Kiriline Lawrence was a woman powered by passion, intellectual curiosity, and independence of mind; she paid attention during her time on the planet and left the world a richer, more storied place as a result. Merilyn Simonds returns the favour by honouring her subject in crystalline prose, applying an unfailing instinct for those details that allow meaningful ingress into another’s experience. This book is a gift. Get one for yourself and another for somebody you love.”
— Alissa York, author of The Naturalist
“No ordinary biography, but an observational study as compassionate and clear-eyed as those undertaken by its subject — famed amateur ornithologist Louise de Kiriline Lawrence. Beautiful and powerful. Merilyn Simonds has written a remarkable book about a remarkable woman.”
— Helen Humphreys, author of Field Study and The Evening Chorus
“Woman, Watching is an entrancing blend of biography, memoir, history, research, and homage that is unlike anything I’ve ever read. It’s radical, it’s ravishing. This portrait of a world rich with diversity, and the subsequent thinning of that fullness, moved me deeply.”
— Kyo Maclear, author of Birds Art Life
“Louise de Kiriline lived several lives, and this stirring biography brings all of them vividly to the page. In sharing de Kiriline’s passion for birds and concern for their survival, Simonds has created a life history that is a lens upon an entire network of women ornithologists.”
— Trevor Herriot, naturalist, activist, and author of Grass, Sky, Song
“What a life! Louise deKiriline Lawrence escaped the Russian Revolution, was nurse to the Dionne Quints, moved to a log cabin and became an iconic birder, and friend of Merilyn Simonds who’s written this lyrical, passionate, and deeply researched portrait.”
— Margaret Atwood/twitter
“The accounts of Louise de Kiriline Lawrence’s unfathomable journey across war-torn Russia and hardships faced in pursuit of someone she loved is a story unto itself, but combined with her migration to a sparsely settled area north of Algonquin Park, and the challenges she encountered on the road to becoming one of Canada’s most respected ornithologists, make this an epic story. In Simonds’s hands, the passion, the struggle, the celebration, and the sheer beauty of Louise’s story leaps off the page.”
— Ian Davidson, Director (Americas), BirdLife International





Also by Merilyn Simonds
Fiction
Refuge
The Paradise Project
The Holding
The Lion in the Room Next Door
Nonfiction
The Convict Lover (reprint)
Gutenberg’s Fingerprint
A New Leaf
Breakfast at the Exit Café
The Convict Lover





Dedication
For those who watch


Epigraph
“Looking,” said the ant, “is a very important business. He who looks long enough sees much.”
—Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, Jimmy Joe and the Jay
Because you see a bird, you do not know it.
—Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, personal correspondence


1 The Golden Bird
The March sun wasn’t yet warm enough to slump the snow when the evening grosbeaks descended on Louise’s feeding station. She was watching out her kitchen window, as she always did, a cup of strong coffee in hand, her reward after a vigorous bird walk at dawn, a habit of forty years that she had not yet given up, even on the cusp of ninety.
The flock of black-and-yellow birds mobbing her tray of sunflower seeds was the largest she’d seen in years. For decades, she’d been collecting data on evening grosbeaks for her ornithologist friend Doris—how many came to her feeder, male or female, when and where they nested, how long it took the eggs took to hatch and the young to fledge. She made a mental note to check her records to see if the numbers this spring were truly record-breaking.
Suddenly, amidst the throng, a flash of pure gold. Louise lifted her binoculars. Obviously a grosbeak—those thick seed-cracking bills—but solidly yellow, like an oversize canary.
The other birds settled back to their feeding, edging the uncanny bird off the tray whenever it tried to snatch a seed, until finally, the gilded bird rose like a wisp of pure sunshine and disappeared among the trees.
My feeder was half an hour southwest of Louise’s, flying as a hungry bird might, along the canopy-highway of boreal forest between her log house nestled in the pines on the edge of Pimisi Bay and my R2000 prefab, tucked into hundreds of acres of forest just south of Callander in Ontario’s Near North.
Evening grosbeaks shifted across my wooden feeding tray as if by some prearranged schedule, clearly not women and children first as it was the males that were snuffling up the sunflower seeds, cracking them open and scooping out the meat with their thick, curling tongues, blackening the snow with shells.
The motorcycle gang, I called these birds, gold slashes above the eyes like cool yellow sunglasses, wings glossy as black leather jackets with a startling white blaze. My sons were at school; my husband at work. I stood alone at the sliding glass doors, counting. A hundred birds, at least.
Silvery females were jostling for seed now. Suddenly they fluttered up, a small explosion, leaving a strange golden bird alone on the tray.
“The Golden Bird” is one of the tales collected by the Grimm brothers. In the fable, when a king discovers golden apples missing from his orchard, he asks his three sons to watch for the thief. Only the youngest son stays awake to identify the culprit—a golden bird. The three sons are sent to catch the bird and bring it to the king. The two older boys ignore the advice of a fox and are distracted from their quest, but the youngest follows the animal’s wise counsel, endures the trials that beset him, and returns with the golden bird, thus winning the heart of the most beautiful woman in the kingdom and releasing her brother from the spell that had turned him into the fox.
The story is found in other collections, too, although the bird often changes species—a golden blackbird in one, and in the French-Canadian version collected by Marius Barbeau, a golden phoenix. In that story, the fox is a hare, an equally mythical helper, who counsels diligence over comfort and dedication to a quest.
Nowhere is the golden bird a grosbeak, except in Louise’s yard and mine.
If Louise had been younger, she might have set her drop traps to catch the golden bird, banding it and releasing it in the hope that someone, somewhere, might report its fate. If she could have figured out a way to feed it apart from the bullying flock, the pure yellow grosbeak might have built a nest in her patch of woods and she would have watched the eggs hatch, the young fledge and migrate south, to the Appalachians perhaps, returning to mate again, a unique gilded strain that scientists might have named for where she lived. Coccothraustes vespertinus Pimisiana . Or for her— Coccothraustes vespertinus deKirilina.
Very few women have a bird named for them. There is Mrs. Bailey’s chickadee, Parus gambeli baileyae , dedicated to the nineteenth-century ornithologist Florence Merriam Bailey. And a Mexican race of song sparrow, Melospiza melodia niceae , named for Margaret Morse Nice, a woman who devoted herself to writing the life history of this sweetly singing bird.
Like both these women, Louise was a watcher. Florence Bailey in the American Southwest. Margaret Morse Nice in Ohio. Louise de Kiriline Lawrence in northern Ontario, where for fifty years she kept meticulous daily records of the birds she saw, the nests she watched, and the individuals she banded at what was then Ontario’s most northerly banding station.
Louise was an amateur. In the late-nineteenth-century world she was born into, an amateur observed birds not for personal gain, but for the altruistic purpose of increasing human knowledge about the natural world. Until the middle of the twentieth century, it was mainly amateurs who pushed science forward, especially the natural sciences, collecting data and specimens for museums and the people who ran them. Today, despite the professionalization of scientific study, amateurs continue to make significant contributions, especially in the realm of birds. Who else would sit for days on end in forests, swamps, and meadows, observing, wondering, and recording every twitch and f