Birding with Special Ed

Every July for the past three years we have babysat our friend's dog that I will call Special Ed, to give you a hint of the joys and the troubles we have consequently experienced. Ed doesn't travel well so when our friend, Donna, heads south for a well-earned break from school teaching, she takes her older dog, Toby, as a well behaved travel companion but delivers Ed to us. Our house becomes Ed's summer camp. Along with Ed comes cans and bags of his special diet, though if Ed had his way, he would eat almost anything including, we've discovered, grapes, lettuce, apricots, carpet fluff, all carbohydrates, the odd coffee bean, jujubes, dental floss, and Q-tips.

Donna also delivers his toys - one small plushy flying saucer that squeaks when you press it, and a tug toy my wife braided out of soft but tough felt. Rarely does he play with his toys. Sometimes during a long nap he might rest his outsized muzzle on the tug toy as a sort of nose pillow; otherwise he ignores the items. Unless I happen to pick one up to visually suggest a game of fetch. That's when Special Ed exhibits his predominant personality trait - insecurity. When there's something Ed can't figure out, like having a toy tossed to him, or some other event that happening quickly or loudly or both, Ed reacts by barking nervously. Tail and head down, he scuttles out of the room as if I had yelled at him and raised my hand in anger. Weird.

In many other situations, Ed knows pretty much what is going on. Like all dogs, the Shetland Sheepdog, even a slightly defective one like Ed, knows that good things especially food come from human beings. And so Ed studies me as I enter the kitchen and approach the cupboards.  Ed may be a tad ackwards-bay in certain areas but in the subject of the location of food he's top dog.  It took him one short visit to the kitchen to learn that the dog treats are stored in the lower right cupboard. Ed also knows that if I am going to prepare a meal on the counter, the odd tidbit might fall onto the floor. And so he waits, patiently, for gravity to bring him a chance gift. As far as food goes, Ed is a perfectly normal dog.

What Ed abhores above all else is surprise. He understands that humans eat, cook, give him a treat, talk, sit, walk, sleep, and eat but he's always surprised, shocked even, when one of us coughs or sneezes. A cough comes from nowhere and he just doesn't understand it. He leaps up and barks loudly. A sudden sneeze sends Ed into a frenzy. Tail up, ears up, he involuntarliy dances, his barks overlapping into a roar. Other surprises that Ed should be prepared for but never is are the arrival of visitors, the shutting of doors, thunder, the turning on of any noisy appliance, and the forementioned tossing of toys. Ed also barks at things undetectable to human beings, sounds we cannot hear, smells we cannot detect and perhaps vapours caught in the passages of his narrow skull.

No matter how frustrated I become by Ed's sudden loud outraged outbursts, which prompt similar outbursts from me, I still like him a lot and find him a good companion. As a Shetland Sheepdog, though hardly a visual paragon of the breed - his narrow head is too big, his legs are too short, his body is too lumpy - he does like to herd Sonja and I into close proximity to him and he happily watches over us, which I guess is the other important part of shepherding. If Sonja goes to the basement and I go to the second floor Ed will sit miserably on the main floor and howl to bring us back to him.

Birding with Ed is slightly challenging. It's not that he chases, or even notices, birds. Honestly I can't remember a single instance of Ed reacting to a bird. It's as if he doesn't see them. In this regard he is much like your non-birding human friends, except Ed never complains that the damned birds wake him up spring mornings and that something should be done about all the "noise" they make.

Birding with Ed means walking with Ed, because he cannot abide riding in vehicles. There's no arguing about where he's going to sit, fussing with seatbelts, complaining about the funny smell in your car, or nattering about the birds we didn't see the ways your friends will so often do. So once again, Ed comes out as a better companion, mostly silent and mostly content to be on the end of a leash.

Ed does not tug on his leash to go faster. Unlike some human friends he is content to stay within a small radius with me as the centre of his attention, mostly, except when he finds something that smells intriguing on the ground. I wish I could say the same about my human birding companions. They wander, they chatter, and at times they apparently don't hear a thing I have said. OK, so they don't spend much time sniffing at dead things on the ground, but in comparison with Ed that's about all human birding companions have over my canine friend.

I know that some birders keep life lists for their dogs. I don't keep one for Ed for reasons I have already stated. I have a fantasy that one day some largish loud bird, say a Ring-necked Pheasant or a California Quail will bellow in Ed's ears and he will acknowledge that yes something disturbed him, but I know he will never ask me if we can get a better look at the bird, or ask me when are we going to see a Chukar. Again, Ed comes out on top of the dog versus human comparison.

But let me turn the idea of a list for Ed on its head. Let's face it, many of our lists are just a little frivolous. I know birders who keep lists of wild birds seen on TV, birds seen from the office, birds the lister has photographed, and birds copulating. I could start a list of Birds I have Seen but Ed has Ignored while on walks with him. Let's see ... he failed to acknowledge the Violet-green Swallows and White-throated Swifts that flew just above the rim of Cougar Canyon between Coldstream and Oyama a couple of springs ago. He was not impressed by the Canyon Wren that paid us a visit during that same walk or the several Townsend's Solitares that sang around the snags on the trail into the canyon. Once, atop Silver Star Mountain, his dog buddy, Toby, was startled when we flushed some young Dusky Grouse just a few metres in front of us but good old oblivious Ed was looking the other way and missed these chicken-sized birds entirely as they rocketed out of the fireweed.  Ed has missed the everyday and the rare. He has walked by the late summer flutter of goldfinches in the thistles and unknowingly passed into the shadow of a soaring Golden Eagle riding out a sudden spring storm. It would be fun to dig back into my fieldbooks and see what I could come up with for such a list.  Meanwhile, Ed, spending the final day of his summer vacation with us, is standing in the hallways barking at nothing in particular. Yes, I'll miss Ed when he goes home, but there's always next summer.

Ed at Cougar Canyon 2013. Photo by the author.

Maybe next summer he will be quieter. Maybe next summer he will find peace in the contemplation of nature. Why just this morning while Sonja and I were having coffee on the patio, I saw Ed notice, WITH INTEREST, a furry beige caterpillar rippling by on the cement. Hey, it wasn't a bird but it was a start.