A Birder of a Different Feather

Lisa and Kathleen at Bon Echo Provincial Park - photo by Chris McHardy

My daughter Kathleen never looked or acted like the birders she encountered each spring during the songbird migration. From April to June, southern Ontario abounded with bird enthusiasts, most of them able-bodied. They would stand with necks craned upward and binoculars at the ready, scanning the tree tops for a glimpse of the songsters they knew were overhead. Nearby, Kathleen would sit in her wheelchair with her shoulders hunched and head bowed, seemingly oblivious to the activity happening around her. The able-bodied would flock together and chatter about what they had heard, what they had been lucky enough to see. Kathleen was silent and made do with the company of only her dad Chris and me.

But my daughter’s appearance of disengagement was deceptive. She was a fledgling naturalist with a keen sense of hearing who was very much aware of the feathered creatures around her, very much attuned to their songs, and she was able to connect with them in a way that belied the limitations other people assumed she had.

Kathleen was born in 2009 with an ultra-rare neurodegenerative disorder – an affliction so little known it took our network of highly specialized specialists seven years to diagnose it – that left her with an intellectual disability, low vision, next to no verbal skills, frequent seizures, and full reliance on a wheelchair. Not a very promising start for a would-be birder. Nonetheless, I never lost hope that with patience and the right support, Kathleen would become as much a part of the birding community as the neurotypical folks who shared our favorite avian haunts.

Barn Swallow at Point Pelee National Park - photo by Chris McHardy

Until 2024, our family excursions to bird hot spots, such as Point Pelee and Long Point in Southwestern Ontario and Prince Edward County in the east of the province, had focused on Chris and me photographing birds which, because of her low vision, negated Kathleen’s participation beyond that of a passive companion. This year, her active participation, in whatever form it could take, became my priority.

It was no easy feat. Helping a teenager with an intellectual disability learn to identify birdsong was like orienteering without a compass and with only a vague idea of the final destination. There was no existing protocol to follow and I had to determine what success could look like within the parameters of my daughter’s abilities. Would she ever be able to say “That’s an eastern wood pewee” upon hearing the flycatcher’s unmistakable pee-a-wee during a woodland walk? Probably not. But there were non-verbal ways she could demonstrate that knowledge. I just had to learn to recognize them.

Baltimore Oriole at Point Pelee National Park - photo by Chris McHardy

As April drew to a close, a learn-to-bird blueprint for Kathleen began to take shape. Step one was to familiarize her with some of the species found in southern Ontario by playing her snippets of my Peterson Field Guides’ Birding by Ear CD. That was soon followed by weekend birding walks in Toronto and camping trips farther afield as the migration ramped up in May. The recorded birdsong grabbed her interest almost immediately. As I played her the first lesson - thrush mimics and woodpeckers – she adopted a posture that I recognized from times in the past when a new pop song captured her attention: body still, chin raised, and one ear cocked toward the sound in a manner that evoked the little dog tilting its head toward the gramophone on the logo for British record label, His Master’s Voice. Most of the birds she heard on the recording were species we had encountered on walks in previous years. Would Kathleen show similar interest upon hearing them again this year?

Photo of Dark-Eyed Junco by J. Cotten courtesy of Unsplash.

The answer was yes. When I played a recording of a dark-eyed junco a few days later, she warbled an extended version of the bird’s simple trill, tacking a descending ee ee ooh ooh onto the end of it. With its charcoal markings and white underbelly, the dark-eyed junco is one of the flashier sparrows of Toronto. Juncos were frequent visitors to our home, and I often heard them as they flitted around the yard in winter and early spring. Kathleen had clearly heard them too, either in the yard or while I wheeled her through the neighbourhood after the sidewalk snowplows had made their rounds.

Photo of Blue-Gray Gnatcatcher by Christina Brinza courtesy of Unsplash.

The blue-gray gnatcatcher’s recorded song was the next standout for her. This time Kathleen was quiet as she assumed her listening posture. She had heard a blue-gray gnatcatcher, a tiny forest dweller nicknamed the “little mockingbird” for its habit of mixing other birds’ calls into its own song, during a family walk through Taylor Creek Park in early May and again a week later during a camping trip at Long Point.

Joshua Cotten photo of a Mourning Dove courtesy of Unsplash

Then came the breakthrough that confirmed Kathleen was a born birder. It was during a Zoom meeting Chris and I had at the end of May with Kathleen’s teacher, Laura, and the speech and language pathologist at Toronto’s Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital. We were meeting to discuss Kathleen’s progress with learning to use a speech device to communicate at school. Laura gave her update on the device’s use, after which she informed us that Kathleen was also spontaneously singing melodies she made up. Just that morning, school staff heard her humming an original refrain that was interspersed with vocalizations Laura said sounded like doves. I asked her if by “doves” she meant the birds. “Yes, the birds”.

I could barely resist the urge to clap my hands. There were lots of mourning doves in our neighbourhood and they had been particularly vocal that spring. My daughter must have added the coos of the doves she heard on our weekend walks to her own song. Typical birders memorized individual bird calls so they could identify callers in the wild. Kathleen took that basic skill a step further and created a human-avian musical mash-up unique to her. Like the blue-gray gnatcatcher, Kathleen had become a little mockingbird.

Author Bio

Lisa Richardson is a former magazine editor and the mother of a daughter with multiple disabilities. She and her family are avid nature lovers. They spend as much time as they can birding and camping near Toronto, Canada where they live.