REVIEW: WOMAN, WATCHING

As a young woman, Louise de Kiriline left her idyllic life to become a nurse in a Swedish WW1 prisoner of war camp. There she met the son of a Russian nobleman. They married but he felt compelled to go back to Bolshevik Russia to take a commission with the white army. She followed, and the horrendous story that ensued is worth a book and a movie. He disappeared in the mire of war and after months of looking for him she decided to move to Canada.

De Kiriline managed to purchase a plot of land near North Bay. The details and detours of the purchase are yet another story. When it was finally hers, she had a small cabin built by a local tradesman who, believe it or not, became her husband.

De Kiriline was a data diva. Every day for 40 years she took bird walks at dawn, collecting data on numbers of birds--where they nested, how long eggs took to hatch. She became a world expert on the yellow grosbeak, holds the record for counting bird song, wrote six books on birds, the life history of four species of woodpeckers, was a columnist for Audubon Magazine and published numerous scientific articles. For 50 years, academic ornithologists flocked (pun intended) to her cabin.

I had my own small but exciting epiphany while reading Woman, Watching. In June, I was in a chalet in the Beaver Valley. I heard a bird calling out to the world almost without a taking a breath - for hours. I thought it was a vireo but even though I had my binoculars I couldn’t locate it. Very frustrating. Then I read that Louise documented a red eyed vireo which called over 22,000 times in fourteen hours. Aha, thank you Louise!