By Lisa Boice
Silver Solas Award-winner in the Love Story category
On an early Autumn Saturday morning we drove across the 7-mile causeway. Mountains reflected upside-down in the Great Salt Lake on each side of the road, and the brisk October air soothed my face.
“Slow down a little bit here,” Steve said as he scanned with his binoculars, looking for birds on the water
This was our third date. I had met him online through a dating site in Spring and for our first date, flew to Scotland where he was living at the time. That was our first date. We had spent the week touring the Scottish Highlands, and the connection and chemistry were great, so we rendezvoused again in a couple months later where we spent a week in England’s Cotswolds—our second date. In the Fall he moved back to his home in Toronto and immediately got back on a plane to see me and I was excited to show him my hometown.
After I picked him up at the airport, I brought him home, where he sank into my couch and put his socked feet on the ottoman. I curled up under his arm like a cat.
“I have some ideas for this week,” I said. “But is there anything you want to do?”
“Let’s go to Antelope Island.”
“Really?”
I’d lived in Utah for eleven years and never once visited Antelope Island State Park. Why would you want to go there? I thought.
People typically want to visit Arches or Zion or Bryce Canyon National Parks when they visit Utah, not a fifteen-mile-long island in the southern end of the Great Salt Lake. I’d flown over it countless times, but from my window seat it just looked like a small, unremarkable hilly, brown mass.
The towering Wasatch and Oquirrh Mountains surrounding the valley dwarfed the island. And the Great Salt Lake wasn’t the kind of lake for boating, water skiing, or fishing. It was too shallow, and there weren’t any fish. Sometimes the lake’s rotten-egg stink hung in the air throughout the valley. I was surprised Steve wanted to see it.
“There are great birds there,” he said. “Got a map?”
I found one and handed it to him.
“I love maps,” he said as he spread it on the floor and lay on his stomach studying it. I walked to the kitchen to make dinner, passing Steve’s suitcase. His tripod and spotting scope were propped up next to it, and I silenced the niggling question in my head that asked if he had come for the birds or for me.
At the northernmost end of the island, we stood on the side of the road next to my car as Steve pointed to some birds floating atop the water close to shore.
“Eared Grebes,” he said. “There are tens of thousands of them here right now. See?”
He pointed farther out where throngs of little dots bobbed on the water. They had come from the Canadian prairies and the Western US to feed on brine shrimp in the shallow lake. Steve called it staging—to eat and gain weight while they also grew new feathers in preparation for their migration to the west coast for winter. “Right now, they’re flightless. They’re molting,” he said.
Steve pulled his binoculars up to his eyes. He cupped his hands around the eyepieces, blocking out any light interference.
“Did you come out of the womb wearing binoculars?” I asked.
“I was eight, actually.”
He had spent summers with his cousins at his grandmother’s cottage on the Gatineau River in Quebec, he told me. Steve had worshiped his cousin Rob and tagged along on hikes. Rob shared his binoculars as they explored the maple, oak, and hemlock forests, looking for birds.
One sunny morning they canoed across the river toward an apple tree’s long branch that hung over an inlet. A pair of Eastern Kingbirds, male and female, swooped down near their heads. As their canoe slowly glided under the branch, they realized they were staring right into the kingbirds’ nest. They got the message and moved on. It was his spark bird. The Eastern Kingbird—a grey and white songbird with a white-tipped tail— filled Steve with wonderment and enchantment, igniting the spark. It turned him into a zealous convert who would forge a path in search of birds.
A spark bird is the first bird that piques your curiosity about their world. It’s as if you had never noticed them before, and then one captures your attention. You’re changed. The whole avian world is unfolded before your eyes. For one person, it might be noticing a Red-tailed Hawk perched on a tree branch as it preens its feathers. For another, the Painted Bunting, dressed in its technicolor red, green, blue, and yellow feathers. For Steve, it was the dapper Eastern Kingbirds protecting their nest.
Steve first focused on birds in Ontario, he told me. When he entered the Royal Military College of Canada he moved around the Canadian provinces and discovered more birds. His career then took him around the world to Europe, Russia, and the Middle East, where he added more bird species to his list.
When I was young, I’d camp with my family on the Oregon coast and hike trails with my sister and brother. At our home, my dad fixed a railroad tie beam high up between two giant Douglas Fir trees. He hung a tire swing from it, and I would spend afternoons in that swing, looking up into the trees. But I can’t recall any birds I saw. I wasn’t looking for them. I didn’t have the same wonder Steve had. He was an explorer, and as I stood next to him on the shore of the Great Salt Lake I wondered if he would somehow change my life.
“Do you want to see the grebes up close?” he asked me.
Before I answered, he grabbed his tripod and spotting scope from the trunk of my car. He set it up effortlessly, peered through the scope and said, “Here, look!”
I closed one eye as I pressed my other against the eyepiece. I felt like I was right next to the bird. Its head, long neck, and back feathers were black, and its side feathers the color of dark caramel. Ochre feathers splayed back from its blazing red eyes and to the side of its head with flair. If David Bowie chose to be a bird, he would want to be an Eared Grebe, I thought.
“Wow,” I said. “Those feathers around the eye.”
“That’s its plumage,” Steve said. “It attracts a mate, and he’ll be losing it while he’s here during his molting stage.”
We left the causeway shores and drove around the island’s two-lane road amidst grasslands with tumbleweed. I inhaled the sweet scent of short, prickly mountain sage. Salt bushes burst with mustard-yellow flowers, adding cheerful color against the brown landscape.
In the distance I could see the urban sprawl of the Salt Lake valley, but I felt as if I’d traveled from another country.
Steve offered to drive home, and as I held his hand, I felt a little of the wonder he possessed.
❊
Each time Steve visited, we drove to Antelope Island. In winter it looked like a pail of white paint had spilled all over the land. Snow covered everything except the lake.
“Why doesn’t it freeze? I asked.
“It’s the high salt content. The lake is always changing.”
As temperatures dropped, he explained, shrimp were less active, and fewer flies grazed on the lake. Phytoplankton grew, turning the lake’s color green like pea soup. The smell that sometimes wafted through the valley was just the lake’s salt-loving bacteria emitting hydrogen sulfide.
Steve was a geologist and fascinated by Utah’s Wasatch Valley and the Great Salt Lake. More than 13,000 years ago, continental glaciers had formed Lake Bonneville. It covered most of Utah and parts of nearby Idaho and Nevada, but all that remained today was a tiny remnant—the Great Salt Lake.
It wasn’t just the birds or me. Utah’s geology was also a strong pull on Steve.
“Our target bird today is the Chukar,” Steve said. “It’s a year-round resident here, and it’s a pretty cool bird to find.”
We rounded the bend away from the beach and up the hill to Buffalo Point. A monstrous black buffalo lay in the snow only five meters from the road. It breathed through its nose like a locomotive, emitting plumes of steam into the air, and I expected the heat from its body to melt all the snow around it.
By the late 19th century, buffalo (American bison) were hunted to near extinction over much of their range in North America. In 1893 twelve bison from a private herd in Texas were taken to Antelope Island, not to preserve and grow populations, but to be hunted for profit. Although the privately owned buffalo had grown to over 400, a final large hunt in 1926 killed all but 50 buffalo that were left alone and allowed to recover in numbers again. Public outcry pressured the owners to stop the hunting, and thanks to the purchase of the island and the buffalo in 1960 by the state of Utah, 500-700 buffalo roamed freely at Antelope Island State Park.
Steve drove a little farther and pointed out animal tracks in the snow.
“Those are rabbits,” and “those are antelope,” and “those are coyote,” he’d say.
He knew because growing up at boarding school on the edge of the Canadian wilderness taught him those things.
Suddenly, he slammed on the brakes. “Chukars!”
Birds the size of a football scampered from boulder to boulder near the side of the road, searching for seeds from bushes sticking out of the snow. A game bird native to the Middle East and Southern Asia, Chukars were introduced on Antelope Island as well as other high desert areas in the United States. Their gray bodies, black-and-white striped wings, and red legs stood out against the snow. A bright red eye ring circled their dark eyes, and a black stripe ran across their eyes, which looked like little Zorro masks.
The birds noticed us and took cover behind the rocks. I turned to Steve. “Wow! I can’t believe it!”
My heart raced a little bit. Searching for a specific bird and finding it was intoxicating. More of this, please, I thought. Was I becoming addicted to this quest?
❊
During one of Steve’s visits, we left northern Utah’s palette of tans, browns, and sage and traveled four hours south where the earth turned red.
“It’s so different down here, right?” I said.
“The earth and rocks are red because of the iron oxide in the sandstone,” he said. “It was an ancient desert millions of years ago and the dunes were thousands of feet high. What we’re looking at are the eroded ancient dunes.” Steve always offered a geology lesson as we traveled through Utah, and I was discovering that Utah was all about layers or strata. I saw new colors, both in the birds and in the landscape. There were new layers to me, too. A year earlier I never would have found pleasure in driving to a lake to look at birds and yet it’s where we spent most of our time. I never would have flown over to Scotland to rendezvous with a man I met online and that, too, was now part of my own strata.
We stayed at a bed and breakfast I’d booked because its website showed photos of Victorian furnishings, a claw foot tub, and bed with a sheer flowing canopy. Adding to the romance, each room was named after a poet.
“Oh, I love Keats!” Steve said when he saw the poet’s name inscribed on our room door.
His hands were full, carrying our weekend bags in each hand and as I turned the key and opened the door I thought, Really? It didn’t match up to the adorable nerdy scientist I was falling for. Another layer in the strata, I thought.
The following evening, after a long day of hiking at Zion, I took a bath in the claw-foot tub. Steve sat in the bedroom in a wing-back chair, flipping through a Birds of Utah field guide. I closed my eyes and sank into the tub with foamy bubbles piled high like a meringue. Just my head poked out from the bubbles.
“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:”
It was Steve’s voice. He was in the bathroom. He had pulled up a stool and was sitting next to the bathtub in his dusty khakis, t-shirt, and wool socks he’d worn during our hike.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Ode to a Nightingale. Keats.” He continued—
“’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.”
He recited all eight stanzas almost like a whisper. His deep voice placed one word carefully after another, pausing a few times as he tried to remember the words.
The sensation of warm water all around me intersected with the feeling of floating on his every word. I couldn’t speak for a few seconds, and then I asked, “How do you know that?”
“When I was in the army, we had to stand and march for hours. I was bored. I copied poetry on index cards so I could memorize them.” He chuckled. “I didn’t want any of the others to know what I was doing, so on the other side of each card, I wrote calculus formulas. In case anyone asked, I’d show them that side.”
The moment cracked me open wide and allowed me to fall more deeply in love. We both fell. Like a pair of Bald Eagles that fly high into the sky, clasp their talons together, and spiral down in a fall, holding each other during their mating ritual.
❊
Steve continued to visit each month, and sometimes I’d visit him in Canada. But Utah, he told me, was where it felt like home.
He wasn’t coming just for the birds.
Our lives melded each time he visited. After I picked him up at the airport, we’d dine at our favorite Thai restaurant. He’d bring my favorite donut holes from Tim Hortons, the legendary Canadian donut chain. We’d eat them while we played Scrabble with sticky fingers at the kitchen table. And I was excited to visit Antelope Island to see how it had changed.
Spring brought green prairie grass to the island, and thousands of birds dotted the Great Salt Lake. The hypersaline ecosystem at the lake is the basis of the whole food chain and offered an open buffet for the millions of migrating birds. The blue-green water filled with algae and attracted brine shrimp and brine flies, creating a vast protein food factory for birds at the intersection of their migration routes. While some shorebirds were on a mad rush to nest in prairies, others were making their way to the high arctic, and they intersected at the Great Salt Lake. Birds ate as much as they could before continuing their journey.
The Eared Grebes were back from their wintering grounds on the California coast. It was as though I had just seen a friend who had been away for a while. As I witnessed the life cycle of these birds, my aperture began to widen.
At the southeast end of the island was Fielding Gar Ranch where giant Cottonwood trees shaded the historical 1840s adobe ranch house. A young boy and his parents walked through the rooms on a self-guided tour and a family of four set up their lunch on a picnic table in front of the house. A teenager wandered, holding his phone with his arm stretched out, probably looking for a cell signal.
Strong and consistent natural springs in the area produced the fresh, verdant oasis for winged travelers—sparrows, warblers, thrushes, orioles, tanagers, and flycatchers—songbirds also migrating north across the high desert.
A group of birders with binoculars pressed against their eyes craned their necks as they looked for birds flitting around the tree branches. I did not know what birds to look for, but I searched for anything that moved. Steve found birds easily and called them out to me as he pointed to their location. When the bird stood still, he shared his binoculars so I could get a closer look. He quickly identified details that differentiated them: The white stripes on the top of the head of the White-crowned Sparrow, the dark spot on the chest of the Song Sparrow and the russet color of the Fox Sparrow.
❊
We had been dating for well over a year and had been flying back and forth to see each other. Summertime in Utah exposed Great Salt Lake’s mud flats, and an overabundance of salt crystals glistened on top of the water. Though the calendar said summer, fall migration had begun, Steve explained.
Wilson’s Phalaropes came in waves. The first to arrive were a million or so female Wilson’s Phalaropes crowding the lake. The females had just finished laying their eggs at their nesting site in the prairies and had left the job of incubation and raising the young to the males. In a month, the males would arrive in the second wave with their young. Half of the world’s population of Wilson’s Phalaropes stopped by the Great Salt Lake to stage and fatten up for their journey to their wintering grounds off the coast of South America.
As we drove around the island, the flaxen prairie grass reclined over the earth as if tired of the hot summer days. Wild, golden sunflowers reached up to the sky and danced in welcome breezes. Time slowed down and expanded on Antelope Island. It forced me into a new kind of attention allowing my wonder of nature and love for Steve to grow. The topic of marriage now danced around our conversations.
At Antelope Island, I had found my Spark Bird. It was not the Chukar, the Eared Grebes, a Fox Sparrow, or Wilson’s Phalaropes that filled me with wonderment and curiosity of their avian world. It was more than that. It was life-altering. Just like any spark, it ignited something bigger.
It was through Steve that things began to open up for me. He captured my attention, and I was changed. He was my Spark Bird.
~ ~ ~
Lisa Boice is a writer who travels the world in search of birds with her husband. Her work has appeared in Geographic Expeditions, The Statesider, Wildflower, There She Goes podcast, and Deep Travel: Souvenirs from the Inner Journey. She has received a handful of Solas Travel Writing Awards from Travelers Tales and is the 2023 winner of Best Travel Essay at Book Passage Travel Writers and Photographers Conference. Stories of Lisa’s birding travels can be found at www.TheAccidentalBirder.com. She’s also writing an illustrated memoir on Substack about falling in love with a birder. Lisa lives with her husband and two cats live in Austin, Texas.