Over the weekend my father-in-law was awarded the Ian McTaggart-Cowan Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian Section of The Wildlife Society. The award recognizes “individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the understanding, conservation, and/or management of wildlife in Canada over their career.”
During his career as a wildlife biologist with the Province of Alberta, Bill specialized in bighorn sheep, but as we learned at the awards banquet, his influence went far beyond ungulates. Among the achievements mentioned in the tribute to him was his work to ensure that Alberta has a healthy population of Canada geese, something he did by designing nests that they could return to every year.
“And that’s why there are so many Canada geese in Alberta,” explained the colleague who delivered the tribute, adding that not everybody was happy about this particular contribution of Bill’s.
The Canada geese story was a lightbulb moment for me. Among the many bizarre adventures I’ve had since marrying into the Wishart family on September 20, 1992, one of the most memorably weird was the day in April 2005 that Bill and Pat, my mother-in-law, took our family to Hastings Lake outside of Edmonton to refurbish goose nests.
I thought it was just another wacko family outing, like the outdoor weiner roast Pat hosted during my first visit to Edmonton in December of 1988, an event I’m convinced she organized to scare me out of marrying her son.
I thought it was just another wacko family outing, like the outdoor weiner roast Pat hosted during my first visit to Edmonton in December of 1988, an event I’m convinced that she organized to scare me out of marrying her son. I had no idea that the Hastings Lake outing was the sort of thing that would someday lead to Bill winning a prestigious national award. Still, I must have sensed there was something portentous in it, because I made it the subject of one of the family/humor columns I wrote for the Edmonton Journal back then.
I’m reprinting it here. I hope you’ll enjoy it.
Habitat for Humanity: The Goose Version
Originally published in the Edmonton Journal on April 16, 2005
In early April my in-laws took us to an ice-covered lake east of Edmonton, to refurbish goose nests. I'd always thought geese could do these things on their own, but apparently the ones that summer near Ardrossan are lazy, clueless, and antisocial. They don’t want to settle too close to the neighbors, and if they can't find an isolated spot with a human-made nest, they'll continue to fly further north where, instead of laying eggs, they will molt.
There are some goose-haters who will say that's fine. In fact, we met one at lunch after our adventure. But my father-in-law is a wildlife biologist and my mother-in-law is the type of person who will lovingly capture a raging wasp and set it free rather than beat it with a rolled-up newspaper, so I wasn't shocked at all when they invited us to spend the morning playing Habitat for Humanity: The Goose Version.
Actually, I believe they were more shocked that I, the American daughter-in-law who grew up spending her weekends at museums and Broadway shows, was willing to join them. My husband, Dave, who had taken this trip every year as a youngster, told me his parents used him and his two younger and equally scrawny siblings as human hazard detectors. "They sent us ahead. If one of us fell through, they knew the ice was thin."
I was sure he was making it up. Clearly he was still bitter about being forced to miss his Saturday morning cartoons to play housekeeper for wild fowl.
Then his mother left a message on our answering machine: "Bring rubber boots," she advised. "It might get wet out there."
Was this a sign I should back out? Well, forget it. I would show them I was no effete snob from south of the border. I did her one better – I brought extra socks and shoes.
True to tradition, my son, the youngest, was sent out first. My father-in-law stayed several bus lengths back. He and my daughter were the only ones who didn't get wet.
My husband plunged through first. I heard the cracking sound in front of me and when I looked, I saw brackish black water bubbling up from the hole out of which he was pulling his soaking rubber boot. "It's not very deep, but you should walk on the parts where there's still snow," he called back to me as my daughter dug her nails into my hand.
Meanwhile, my mother-in-law was chattering away about a book that claimed youngsters who spend time outdoors have lower rates of obesity than their couch potato cronies. Not only that, she added, pulling her foot from the hole it had just gone through, the sense of peace and tranquility offered by nature has measurable benefits on children who are stressed out or suffering from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
I wondered what the studies said about the stress levels of parents who are trying to keep themselves and their dependent offspring from falling into a semi-frozen prairie lake, but before I could get the words out, our sense of peace and tranquility was shattered by thousands of gulls shrieking overhead. They swarmed so thickly they obscured the sky.
"This makes me think of 'The Birds'" I yelled as my mother-in-law slipped and landed on the ice in front of me.
"Alfred Hitchcock did more to scare people away from birds than anyone," she said as she got to her feet. She seemed irritated. At Hitchcock? At the ice? The only thing of which I could be certain was that this was turning into a real-life horror movie and we were too far from shore to get out of it any time soon.
The gulls eventually flew off to pester other nature-lovers, but then our peace and tranquility was disturbed by the painful yowls of a soaking wet seven-year-old.
I turned in time to see my husband carrying our son, like a log, across the ice to the car. Somehow he'd managed to plunge through the one clearly thawed part of the lake. It was less than 30 cm deep, but he still got soaked past his knees. "I didn't see it," he sobbed. "I wasn't looking."
We left shortly after, my son dressed in his dry socks and shoes. We hung his pants out the car window, where they dried in the breeze as we drove to a nearby eatery for fried fish and bison burgers.
The owner joined us in the dining room. First he lectured us about contributing to the goose infestation. Then he regaled us with tales of his outdoorsy childhood in Ontario. Apparently the highlight was summer afternoons spent pulling the back legs off live frogs. His mother cooked the legs for dinner.
I was horrified. "What happened to the frogs?" I asked. "Did you just leave them there to hop on two legs?"
"Oh, there were snapping turtles," he said happily. "They went after 'em. They loved 'em. We were just doing our part to help along the natural cycle."
Kind of like us, I thought to myself, kind of like us.
enjoyed this piece, thank you!
Congratulations to your fil on his award. If you're experiencing reduced numbers of geese we have gaggles of them we could send north. They seem to be able to build their own nests so perhaps they can teach the ones in Alberta. This would replenish your geese population and reduce the need for human hazard checkers. Thanks for sharing the good news and the article.