Woman, Watching

Louise de Kiriline Lawrence and the Songbirds of Pimisi Bay

Merilyn Simonds

• Verlag: ECW Press
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781773059617
• Thema: Technology & Engineering
• Thema: Science & Technology Biographies

" 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 studying the birds that nested in her forest. Author of six books and scores of magazine stories, de Kiriline Lawrence and her "loghouse nest" became a Mecca for international ornithologists.

Lawrence was an old woman when Merilyn Simonds moved into the woods not far away. Their paths crossed, sparking Simonds's lifelong interest. A dedicated birder, Simonds brings her own songbird experiences from Canadian nesting grounds and Mexican wintering grounds to this deeply researched, engaging portrait of a uniquely fascinating woman.

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.

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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.

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“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.

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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 flight of bird behaviour?

As a self-trained amateur ornithologist, Louise de Kiriline Lawrence set a record for counting birdsong that has never been broken. She wrote life histories of wilderness birds whose daily existence were a mystery at the time. She parsed the meaning of bird behaviours that scientists are only now proving to be true. She wrote six books about birds, including a comparative life history of four species of woodpeckers that explored the age and stage patterns—birth, growth, reproduction, death—and the interactions with their environment that make up the life of every living creature. She was interested not only in songbirds—passerines—but also in the tree-dwelling near-passerines such as woodpeckers and merlins that shared her forest. She published almost a hundred articles in scientific journals and popular magazines, pounding away at her typewriter in a log house isolated in the middle of the boreal forest, remote from the privileged world of the Swedish gentry she had been born into and far from other scientists and scientific libraries. Far from anyone at all, yet for fifty years the top ornithologists on the continent beat a path to her door.

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I met Louise de Kiriline Lawrence in 1980, just a few years before the golden bird landed on both our feeding trays. She was an imposing woman—tall, square-jawed, and high-cheeked with plain Scandinavian features, her hair clipped sensibly short though still elegant, her clothes finely made and artfully chosen. A handsome, no-nonsense woman with penetrating eyes. I was barely thirty, living in the bush with my artist husband and two young boys scarcely in school. I had just written my first book; Louise had just published her last, although neither of us knew that then. I had brought my copy of To Whom the Wilderness Speaks to her signing at the library in North Bay. I arrived late, hoping the crowd would have thinned, but the room was still jammed with people pressing to be close to Louise. I held out the book and she briskly asked my name, as she’d asked almost a hundred others before me, then she signed her own name with a flourish, and flashing me a smile, said, “Tack så mycket!” as I melted silently into the crowd.

We met occasionally after that. The few times we were together, we talked birds and writing and how the Northwoods inspired us and at the same time threw up its obstacles. In 1989, when she was ninety-five and I was forty, I wrote a profile of Louise for Harrowsmith magazine. I moved and she died, but the idea of this woman, alone in the woods, watching, stayed with me. What drove her particular brand of curiosity? What fuelled her passion for birds, a devotion that never faltered for half a century? What in her background or her character or her situation conspired to shape this immigrant woman, isolated in a log cabin in the northern Ontario bush, into one of Canada’s first and finest amateur ornithologists and nature writers?

I ponder this today as I watch a gang of violet-crowned and broad-billed hummingbirds frantically licking up the nectar from the feeders outside my window in the mountains of central Mexico. Idly, I wonder what feeding schedule these birds are on. How much do they drink at each visit to the feeder? How often do they pause to check for interlopers and threats? If I were Louise, I would get out my stopwatch and my notebook to record the timing and length of each visit, each sideways glance. I’d set up a live trap and band the flitting birds to determine if one particular violet-crowned visited many times or if a shimmer of hummingbirds was feeding outside my window.

But I am not Louise. I lack the patience for scientific study. Besides, it is Louise, not hummingbirds, I have in my sights. She is gone, but still I watch her—through her vast correspondence, her speeches, her books and articles, her drawings and photographs, the birds and nests she salvaged for museums, the neatly typed records sequestered in archives across the continent.

A life history is what I’m after—not of a species, but of a watcher named Louise.

2
The View from the Terrace

Your wills grow in the forest, Louise’s mother said to her two little girls, both of them headstrong, intent on having their way. Especially Louise. Red-headed and stubborn, her tantrums flared like sheet lightning, then vanished. Ebba, two years younger than Louise, was her opposite: dark-haired and dark-eyed, physically frail but with a defiance that could smoulder for days.

What do you mean? they both clamoured. Show us!

So their mother took the girls into the forest until they could no longer see their family’s big wooden house with its many chimneys. She stopped where two saplings grew side by side near the path.

This one, she said, pointing to the smaller of the two, is you, Ebba. And this taller one is your sister, Louise. Every time you pass this way, you’ll see how much bigger and stronger your wills have grown.

Young Louise Flach was delighted that her will was alive in the forest like her imaginary friends, the Bebborna—tiny invisible dark-skinned creatures dressed in pale blue and pink frocks. The Bebborna accompanied her everywhere, into the house and into the shops of the nearby town. She communicated with them by pantomime. “They were a good influence on me,” Louise writes. “It was clearly up to me, for instance, to show them how one yields the way to grownups, how one opens the door, how one curtsies.”

Louise (“Lolo”), age two and a half, with her mother, Hillevid Neergaard, 1896

Until she was eight, Louise lived in a house on the brow of an escarpment that overlooked an elongated fjord of the Baltic Sea, three hundred kilometres south of Stockholm. Along the fjord’s western shore, the Flach family homeland of Svensksund stretched far back into the forest. In 1772, during one of the ongoing wars between Sweden and Russia, the manor house had been pillaged and burned, leaving only a wide marble staircase at the end of an avenue of ancient chestnut trees. The indomitable Flachs had taken up residence in one of the outbuildings, adding on rooms until it became the Big House, where Louise’s father was born in 1859.

Sixten Flach was landed Swedish gentry: he carried the courtesy title of Chamberlain of the Court and appeared at ceremonial occasions such as state visits, royal audiences, and official dinners. When Sixten married Hillevid Neergaard, a daughter of Danish nobility, he built Villan on a ridge a half mile above the Big House. The new house was set among the trees, the walls and roof clad in wooden shingles stained a deep earthy brown that made the house seem one with the forest. From the lawns of Villan, Louise could look down on the fjord glittering far below and watch the hooded crows circling overhead. Her first word was not mama or papa, but kraa-kraa, the raucous call of the birds.

One of the earliest photographs of Louise—or Lolo, the name she signed at the bottom of her letters until her mother died—shows her tiny two-year-old fist gripping her father’s gently curving finger as they emerge from the woods. He is a tall, thin man with reddish blond hair that matches hers perfectly, and a handlebar mustache that he trained by fitting it into a transparent harness to keep the tips turned smartly up. She is wearing a white dress, and they both stride forward with determination in their stout leather boots.

Lolo, two, with her father, Sixten Flach

It is easy to pick Louise out of photographs from Svensksund. Her features are even and strong, her hair inevitably springing out of its braid or escaping from under her hat. Her smile is wide, her teeth prominent, her gaze direct. A photo from when she was about ten is particularly telling: four little girls and a boy stand sideways, their hands resting on the shoulders of the next youngest in line—cousins, I imagine. A little boy in a miniature Cossack coat stands at one end; Lolo, the eldest, holds the beginning. The other girls squint or glare or withhold themselves from the camera, but not Louise. Even at that young age, she stands tall, smiling straight at the lens as if to say, This is me, take me as I am.

In my favourite picture, the cousins are much older, adolescent girls in gauzy white ankle-length dresses. The older ones wear their hair rolled to frame their faces, Swedish-style; the hair of the younger ones falls loose, held back with large white bows. The girls have clasped hands and are dancing in a circle in front of the Big House, a garland of muses. Louise is not the prettiest, but she is the liveliest, even fixed in this image, leading the way, her form perfect, heart and body devoted to the dance.

Louise (far right), her sister Ebba, and children visiting Villan

As much as Louise’s mother fed her imagination, it was her father who shaped her character. He had inherited self-reliance from his own mother and passed it on to Louise, along with his flaring temper. His daughters were born into the outdoor movement of the 1890s, and he insisted they be brought up hardy and fearless. They tobogganed and skied and skated through the winter, pulling on a sail or hanging onto the sharp-shod horses to slide across the frozen fjord. In summer they rode ponies their small legs could barely span. “Be never afraid!” he’d say, and Louise understood that he meant every kind of fear—of the body, of the heart, of the mind.

When Louise was nine, her grandfather died, and Svensksund passed into her father’s hands. The family moved from the splendid seclusion of Villan down to the Big House, close by the farms that earned the family income. Louise left the magical forest on the ridge, but as if in exchange, she found herself in a world where peacocks strolled the terraces and swans swam mutely in the reflecting pool, and where she had her own pony. The house was within trotting distance of the bay, where creste...