Wild goose chase leads to success

for College writer

This month Creative Writing instructor
Mary Burns will see her fourth (and first
non-fiction) book, The Private Eye:
Observing Snow Geese, published
through UBC Press. The following
article, reprinted by permission of Alan
Twigg, is a condensed version of a feature
appearing in the Autumn 1996 edition of
BC Bookworld.

This November 2 and 3, thousands of
humans attached to binoculars and
cameras will congregate at the Reifel Bird
Sanctuary to welcome 50,000 very noisy
white birds. The humans will travel
through Ladner, down River Road, to
Westham Island Bridge to gawk
admiringly, like spectators at the halfway
point of a marathon race.

The migrating birds must take a
somewhat more arduous route.

Snow geese (Anser caerulescens)
migrate en masse from their Siberian

Photo: Daryl Walker

nesting colony on Wrangel Island on the
east coast of the Bering Sea, taking three
to four weeks to reach the Stikine River
delta in northern BC. From the Stikine
approximately half the flock will fly
inland through Alberta to Summer Lake
in Oregon before reaching Tule Lake in
central California; the other half proceeds
south to Reifel sanctuary en route to
wintering grounds in the Fraser and
Skagit River deltas.

“You can hear the calls of a large
flock about to take flight or to land a mile
or more away,” says Mary Burns, author
ot The Private Eye: Observing Snow
Geese. Their loud voices help them
migrate successfully because migrating
birds stay on course by honking, croaking
and trilling.

Mary Burns’ abiding interest in snow
geese began when she read Paul Gallico’s
novel, The Snow Goose, before coming
to British Columbia. She chose to study

 

 

snow geese because they are relatively
accessible; because she liked the poetic-
sounding name snow goose; and because
she liked the distinctive sounds they make.
Her research, originally intended for a
novel, eventually led Burns to explore
various views of snow geese, interviewing
scientists, artists, conservationists and
hunters.

The resulting book is a self-consciously
exploratory memoir, informational but not
scholarly, as much about the individuality
of perception as it is about snow geese. As
such, Burns’ ardently rendered work is in
itself a rare bird—a general interest or
trade book from a university press.

“T wanted to become more observant
about the world generally,” says Burns, a
fiction author who teaches creative writing
at Douglas College, “and to learn more
about the natural world.”

Anti-definitive, The Private Eye
merges the perceptions and experiences of
everyone from Yupik hunters in the Yukon
delta to Dr. Fred Cooke, an SFU biologist
who co-authored a major scientific
reference work in 1995. For an artist’s
perspective, Burns interviews painter
Robert Bateman, who traces his
enthusiasm for wildlife to a junior
naturalist club he attended at the Royal
Ontario Museum.

Having incorporated as many
perspectives of snow geese as possible,
Mary Burns concludes that snow geese
demonstrate how distant places and people
are tied to one another. “The challenge, 9
she says, is to broaden one’s own view so
that it takes into account the views of
others.” |