David Stirling, the walking embodiment of what the word naturalist is all about, has departed this world. David died at Victoria August 11, nine months into his 98th year.
The initial glue in my friendship with Dave was birds and
birding; in time the friendship grew to encompass much more, but birds provided
a very good start to a friendship that endured forty years. We met in the late
1970s. I was a fairly recent arrival in British Columbia and had noticed soon
enough that the birds of south Vancouver Island were in many cases very
different from the ones I’d grown used to in my native Nova Scotia. I fell for
birding, and fell hard. To the extent I could I devoted every daylight hour on
the weekend to discovering the birds of the Island. I made three great
friends—Harold Hosford, Ron Satterfield and Dave Stirling—every one of them a
serious birder of long standing, and sought to learn all I could from these
three wise men. All three would remain my friends ever after.
Before long I fell victim to a peculiar kind of madness, the
birding Big Day, an event in which three
or four otherwise sensible people embark on a crazed rush to find as many kinds
of birds as can be squeezed into a 24-hour period. It was in early May, about
1980, that Dave and I teamed up for our first-ever Big Day. We managed to list
a hundred species in the inaugural try. Dave thought a hundred was a pretty
good result. I thought we could do better.
Before the next effort I told the late Peggy Goodwill—operator of the
Rare Bird Alert at the time—that Stirling, Bruce Whittington and I would mount
another Big Day effort the next day. I also told Peggy that we would get 120
species. Dave was appalled, both at my brazenness and at the difficulty we
would have in reaching that number. We got 121.
The next time, Stirling and Hosford joined me for another
three-man effort. It was a glorious start: by about 1 p.m. in the afternoon we
were already at 126 species, with nearly nine hours of daylight left. Visions
of 135 species, 140—maybe even more—danced in my head. Then an insurrection erupted:
Dave and Harold demanded we stop for lunch. I was horrified—and resisted. To no
avail. We stopped for lunch. They each ordered a beer, then another. After the
second beer the Big Day went right off the rails. They decided that half a Big
Day was plenty enough: they quit on me. Great as my regard was for them both, I
fired them on the spot. In future years Ron Satterfield and Bruce Whittington
took their place and that trio eventually pushed the Big Day tally to the
mid-130s. But to this day I remain convinced that had Harold and Dave
persevered we would have set a south Island mark for the ages.
As time passed the parameters of my friendship with Dave
expanded greatly. We had more than birds in common: we both liked travel,
books, history and politics. Not everyone does, but Dave and I also liked to argue, especially about politics. We
would meet a few times a year—often at Swan’s pub—to talk about our favourite
things. Dave would call me a pinko, a leftie I would call him something else. I
like to think that over the years each of us forced the other to sharpen his
arguments but I doubt that any of our many political rows resulted in either of
us changing the other’s mind. Happily, we remained friends.
Dave grew up in the wilds of the Athabaska country of
northern Alberta. He lived his boyhood in a log cabin with his parents, brother
and sisters. The family survived on what they could gather, grow, trap and
hunt. Young Dave spent most of his days outdoors, summer and winter. It was in those
days in the wild of the Athabaska that he became a lifelong naturalist.
While still a teenager, in 1939, a war broke out. Dave
enlisted in the Canadian Army. With three square meals a day, a comfortable
mattress, and a roof over his head that did not leak, he decided he must be
about as lucky as anyone could possibly be. He liked his time in the Army, and
the officers liked what they saw of Private Stirling: he was offered a chance
to take officer training. He graduated from Sandhurst and earned his
lieutenant’s commission. Best of all, he survived the war and returned to
Canada unscathed.
In the mid-1950s he embarked on the adventure of a lifetime,
crossing Australia by motorcycle with his wife Ruth. After that he arrived in
Vancouver Island and played a key role in establishing B.C. Parks
interpretation programs. He gave any number of young people an opportunity to
learn about the natural world and to pass on what they’d learned to park users.
For many of these young folks, their experience under Dave Stirling was
life-altering: their summers as park interpreters would set them on a life course
in natural history and science.
Dave eventually retired but his love of nature, adventure
and travel never diminished. Even into his 90s Stirling traveled the world in
search of beautiful wild places—and new birds. He continued to build his life
list.
I made a point of seeing Dave just a day or two before
departing in June for my summer place in Cape Breton. He had failed a good deal
but I was struck that his love of nature remained as strong as ever. We spent
an hour in the shade of his front deck, looking skyward for birds and other
things that pass more slowly: clouds. Among all the other facets of nature that
fascinated and absorbed him Dave left ample time for studying and contemplating
clouds.
A core bias of mine is that whether we’re aware of it or
not, we all feel a duty to make something of our human possibilities. In my
life I have known only a few people who have done as worthy a job of meeting
that duty as did David Stirling.
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