My darling little birdwatchers

It thrills my heart to have my grandchildren share my excitement about bird watching. They were all preschoolers when we went on our first bird watching expeditions. Cameron, the eldest, was a very serious and responsible child and handled my binoculars with great care but my favorite early story about Cam was really more about our new car than about the birds. John had just bought a new Mazda and I called Cam early in the morning one chilly March day in Winfield, BC where we lived at the time, and asked if he wanted go for a "spin" with with me in the new car before school. He was in kindergarten at the time. Of course he wanted to go, and we hit all his favorite spots from the dock at Okanagan Centre where he like to fish to the fast food place where he like to eat. On the way back to the school, we stopped on Bottom Wood Lake Road where the Red Winged blackbirds were in full chorus. I hit the button to roll down his window so he could hear the "konk-la-ree" chorus. After we had had a good listen and a good view of the "soldier" birds, I attempted to shut the window. I pressed every toggle switch on my arm rest and succeeded only in opening every window in the vehicle. Nothing I tried would close the windows. Because it was such a cold day, I had to drive very slowly to the school lest I freeze my poor grandchild. Of course we were late and only later did I discover one had to lift the toggle to close the window.

His sister Megan, 3, demanded equal time bird watching. When I went to pick her up for her first solo trip, she was waiting on the front steps with her backpack filled with snacks - essential for any successful expedition. We drove into a pull out along Wood Lake where there were Common mergansers not far from the shore. I focused the binoculars and then handed them to her asking if she could see the "ducks".

"Oh Grandma," she cried. "I see one with green messy hair and one with red messy hair."

Now isn't that the perfect description of a pair of mergansers in breeding season?

She was still a preschooler when she wanted to keep her own record of birds we saw on our outings. Sometimes she asked how to spell and sometimes she improvised, which explains, for example, the elegant duck, "canvis pac." And she always asked challenging questions such as: Do dabbling ducks close their eyes when their heads are underwater and their butts in the air?

Ian would rather do something exciting with grandma like golf but still absorbed bird knowledge. I remember Kristin telling me about an outing with the Moms & Tots group to a Vernon park with a creek running through it. When one of the moms pointed out the "ducky", Ian, who was two at the time, corrected her immediately. "That's not a ducky. That's a mallard."

Today's picture is of the next group of darling grandchildren taken last May when we were on our mini-version of the Bailee Birdathon - Hannah, Adrienne and Theo. All three are great little birders. Theo has been with us twice to the bird banding station at Last Mountain Lake and finds the whole process fascinating. Before Adrienne started school, she was using my binoculars in their back yard and suddenly cried, "Grandma, I think I see a parrot in the tree." What she had spotted was in fact her first oriole, brilliant orange and black, rivaling the most colorful bird she knew, the parrot Magoo at Uncle Karl's house.

P.S. Dabbling ducks have their own built-in version of swimmer's goggles - a transparent eyelid that closes when they submerge.