Portrait of the artist as a young bird-watcher
Even before I reached my teens, I knew for certain that two passions would rule my life: wildlife and art. My two best childhood friends, Alan Gordon and Don Smith, who both grew up to be professional biologists, shared my love of nature. Our boyhood excursions together were always voyages of exploration and discovery.
In those days, the early 1940s, the unspoiled countryside was only a short distance away from our North Toronto neighborhood. If we hiked a quarter-mile to the west of nearby Bathurst Street, now an urban thoroughfare in the heart of the city, we entered a magical realm of open fields, marshes and woodlots. There we saw our first meadowlarks and bobolinks, our first owls. If we hopped on our bikes, we could venture even farther, exploring an incredible variety of habitats, from lakeshore cliffs to deep forest glades, all within range of a short ride. We climbed trees to peer into nests; we lay patiently beside the burrows of meadow voles to observe their passing.
We would track a bird call to its source, hoping for a glimpse of something rare or wonderful. Unlike so many kids today, we were never bored.
Our primary passion was bird-watching, which combined our love of nature with the widespread human propensity for collecting. The beauty of bird-watching, a pastime I still enjoy, is that you don’t need to physically gather anything. You simply keep a list. Alan and Don and I were inveterate bird listers almost from the day we met. During one two-year period when I was in my teens, I managed to record over 100 different bird species—including some migrating white pelicans I spotted flying overhead one morning as I delivered newspapers—all observed in my immediate neighborhood.
Our passion took on a considerably more scientific bent after my mother sent Alan and me to join the Junior Field Naturalists Club at the Royal Ontario Museum. We were both about 12 and already veteran field naturalists of a sort, who’d made detailed notes about our most interesting discoveries and kept careful lists of what we’d seen. Now we began to acquire a more systematic way of looking at nature and an idea of how each individual related to the whole. But we didn’t lose our passion or our sense of wonder.
It is this amazement at the complexity of nature that has fed my life and my art. It is this joy that I want to pass on to our children, so that they, too, will become lifelong observers, who appreciate their natural inheritance.
This essay is from Bateman’s book, “Thinking Like a Mountain,” published by Viking, and is reprinted with permission of the author.
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