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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 black and yellow 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 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.
***
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 two young boys scarcely in school. I had just written my first book; she had just published her last, although neither of us knew that then.