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The Current Transcript for July 19, 2021

Host: Robyn Bresnahan

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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SOUNDCLIP

He's lonely and bored. Sometimes he has to remember that he's had a stroke and then he also has to remember why none of us are visiting him. And can be very heartbreaking on the phone when we have to explain to him why we're not there and we wish we were there.

ROBYN BRESNAHAN: explaining to someone you love, that you cannot be there for them in hospital is heart wrenching. And Canadians have been doing that over and over again across the country during the pandemic. We'll talk about when and how to get hospital visitation policies back to normal again and how those visits help patients get back to health. Then, later this morning.

SOUNDCLIP

Speaker 1: He gave them a bit of trouble when he was out on his front porch and the parrot was behind him. Not very visible. Girls would walk by and the parrot would go, no, no, not me, not me. They would go along a little further in the park. Go [makes squawking sound].

[Laughter]

RB: Yes, that was Margaret Atwood. We'll explain the circumstances under which Matt Galloway got the poets and novelist to squawk like a parrots. We'll also hear a bit of her late partner, Graeme Gibson, philosophising about his passion for the feathered set. But we start with hospital visits and the people desperate to get some real life face time with their loved ones. Good morning. I'm Robyn Bresnahan, sitting in for Matt Galloway and this is The Current.

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Calls to ease restrictions on hospital visits

Guests: Dr. Fahad Razak, Dr. Alex Wong

RB: A hospital visit is never easy, but if someone you know has been admitted in the past year and a half, you know firsthand how much harder it is right now, most hospitals have strictly limited visitors due to covid concerns. Parents have been separated from children, spouses kept apart. Some Canadians have had to say their final farewell to a loved one through an iPad. But case numbers are finally falling. And here and there, those policies are starting to change. In some places, essential caregivers are allowed in, those still with limits on how often and for how long. But choosing who gets that access can be complicated. Kim Gogo lives in Ottawa. She spent hours sitting in the parking lot of the hospital last month while her 22 year old son received major heart surgery. Kim, good morning.

KIM GOGO: Hi.

RB: Can you take us through that day of your son's surgery as you were sitting in the parking lot? What kinds of things were were going through your mind?

KIM GOGO: Well, I actually, Cody had the surgery when he was four years old. It was something that he was born with. And we found out a couple of months ago that he was going to have to have the surgery again. And they told us that we wouldn't be allowed to come in to the hospital to wait in a room or anything for updates. And they frequently encouraged us to stay home because it was going to be a four to five hour surgery. But there was no way that I was going to be 20 minutes from the hospital in case I got a call and there was going to be an issue. I needed to be in running distance to that front door. So we sat out front in the parking lot and unfortunately-- The surgery went well. But at about the four or five hour mark, when we didn't get a call, we started to be concerned that, well, hopefully nothing went wrong. We we called in to see if there was any updates and they said he was still in the surgery. So then we spent the next 45 minutes wondering if maybe he had gone in late and no one had told us that he had gone. And we had been under the impression he was going in at seven thirty that morning. We had to get him there 6:00 in the morning. Finally, just before five o'clock, which was about nine and a half hours later, we received a call from the surgeon to say that the surgery was just finishing up. They were stitching him up and sending him to the ICU, and they said that they had run across some issues that they weren't anticipating, but it was successful.

RB: That's a long day to be sitting in your car and waiting for four news. I mean, what was the hardest part of that day for you, Kim?

KIM GOGO: I am a big knitter, so I was able to keep my mind off of the time, passing by knitting. But my ex-husband and my my partner and his partner, we were they were just sitting there. And it was a very long process of not getting any information. We brought some water and we brought some snacks. And fortunately, the hospital let us go in to go use the washroom whenever we had to. So we were trying to minimise that as much as possible. But it was it was very you were very aware of the time. Every half hour you looked at the clock. It was very long.

RB: And you mentioned this was something that he went through kind of a similar surgery when he was four years old. Of course, we weren't going through a pandemic then. But how do you compare the two experiences?

KIM GOGO: So it was at CHEO. It was actually the same surgeon, which I thought was a nice comfort. But we had a room at CHEO that was dedicated to our family and the surgical co-ordinator came in every time, every phase of every milestone phase of the surgery to let us know where he was at in the surgery. So it was nice to be there. My my own father had a hard time with the stress of it staying at home. So he ended up actually coming in, which was a comfort to me for my dad to be there. It was just it was very comforting. It we we felt supported. I really love the Heart Institute. And I don't, I'm not saying anything against them. It's not their mandates. I know that it's the provinces mandate, but they're trying to be as supportive as possible. And he is an adult now. So I do understand that it's not necessarily my position anymore to be getting, you know, up updates all the time for him.

RB: What did you say? It was one of the last things you said to Cody as you had to to say goodbye and wait in the car.

KIM GOGO: Well, I hugged at the door. I didn't know that he doesn't want to necessarily be hugged in public anymore, not for the last 15 years. And I hugged him and and told him that it was going to be OK and that I would just be out front and it was going to be before he knows it's going to be over. And then I had a hard time after he left and then about an hour and a half later, he called me from someone's phone to let me know that they said that they wouldn't be contacting me with updates through the day because he thought we we all weren't sure if we were going to be getting updates. And he felt bad that I didn't know. So he asked the nurse if he could use her phone and he called. So I got a call at seven thirty from an unknown number and I answered it. And when it was him, it just was like a lifeline. I said, oh my gosh, he was going on. And he said, he said, everything's fine. I just wanted to let you know that they're not going to call you. And I said, OK, that's that's great. I said, Are you about to go in? And he said, yes. And I said, OK, everything's going to be great and it'll be over before we know it. And it was just good to get that last moment to to to talk to him. And that's why we thought the surgery started at that time and it did. But we just didn't know that it was going to be as long as it was.

RB: Do you understand the visitation policies or does it feel cruel?

KIM GOGO: I understand to some degree. I rushed out and got the double vaccination as quickly as I could so that if they did possibly let people in, that would strengthen my argument to come in. But I understand that, you know, just because you're vaccinated doesn't mean that you aren't carrying the virus and someone else who might not be vaccinated can catch it. So I completely understand their concerns. But when go inside, even when you're just going to the washroom, they give you a special mask with like, they hand it to you and then when you go upstairs, if you did go upstairs to visit, they give you a plastic visor to wear and there's a set of rules that you have to follow. You're not allowed to go to anyone else's bed. You're not allowed to touch anybody else's things or speak to anybody. You're not allowed to eat or drink that would cause you to bring your mask down. So it's very regimented. But but like I do understand the caution, because you there are so many people that especially in this ward that have open incisions and they could get infection very easily. I totally understand that. And when the doctor called in and told us that everything went well, I said, are you are you sure that we can't go in to see him? Because I just really need to see him. And they said, look at it this way, try to find comfort in the fact that if if if you were allowed to go in, it would only be because of something bad happening, so take comfort in knowing that it's all good that he's is on the right track.

RB: It doesn't make it any easier, though, does it? Kim, thank you for sharing your story with us. And I'm really glad to hear that Cody is recovering that and he's OK.

KIM GOGO: Thank you. Thank you.

RB: That's Kim Gooo. She lives in Ottawa. She was allowed to visit her son for an hour every other day after he had major heart surgery last month. Well, it is not just patients and family members who want to see visitors returned to hospitals. Most health care workers say the benefits far outweigh any possible risks. And for an overburdened health care system, it's an overdue change. Dr. Fahad Razak is an internist and epidemiologist at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto. And Dr. Alex Wong is an infectious disease physician in Regina. They're both on the line now. Good morning to you both.

DR. FAHAD RAZAK: Good morning.

DR. ALEX WONG: Hi, Robin,.

RB: Dr. Razak, what impact have you seen these tighter visitation policies have on patients?

DR. FAHAD RAZAK: I think Kim's example is extremely heartbreaking and is something that we've seen play out over the last year and a bit as we've had these restrictions come on and come off, it is very difficult at the best of times for someone to be in hospital with critical illness and the impact of not having a loved one, whether it's an essential caregiver or a family member with them, just makes that doubly difficult.

RB: So what about staff? I mean, what what how how do these restrictions put additional pressure on them?

DR. FAHAD RAZAK: It's been it's been an extremely unusual and difficult experience. I have to say, over the last over the last stretch. We we do our best. I think everyone on the health care system, we're doing our best to care for patients. And part of that is communicating with their families and loved ones. And that communication is is often easy to do when someone is at the bedside with the patient and it becomes increasingly harder for someone when they're not there. And that can be for a number of reasons. It can be because the video technology we're trying to use to connect patients and family members, you know, there's still glitches. It can be hard to get it to work. For people with family members who have language barriers or difficult to reach, trying to arrange phone calls often doesn't work. And then there's all these updates to try and provide. So, you know, over a lot of fronts, it can be difficult and it's definitely not a substitute for the real thing.

RB: I asked Kim whether she thought it was cruel. What do you think?

DR. FAHAD RAZAK: You know, I think the the process was extraordinarily difficult to watch. I don't want to use the word cruel because I don't you know, our intention, on the health system side, was to protect patients, to protect family members, to protect health care workers. So the intention was good. I think that what we've learnt over the course of the year is that the science didn't match the intentions. So in Ontario, we have a science table that does extensive reviews of scientific literature for policymakers. And one of the biggest reviews we did was whether visitors are actually a mechanism of spreading covid-19. And we pore through hundreds and hundreds of papers and we found globally that there is no convincing evidence that a visitor or an essential caregiver can be a major mechanism of spreading covid-19. And so think the policy change. But I think the intention originally was good. It was it was protection and it was caution.

RB: Well, Dr. Wong, given what Dr. Razak has just said, why do these policies why are they still in existence, do you think?

DR. ALEX WONG: Well, again, I think there's as Dr. Razak has mentioned, I think sometimes a mismatch, maybe not necessarily an intentional mismatch, but a mismatch between, you know, intent and policy and the science and the evidence. And that's not only relevant to Visitacion policy, but a lot of decisions that have been made over the course of the pandemic. There's just a lot of competing interests and a lot of competing challenges. And so here in Saskatchewan, we've been fortunate to have loosened not completely unrestricted visitation policies. You know, people have to still designate a small number of individuals as they're sort of designated visitors. But there aren't limitations in terms of the amount of time that you can spend and that's really helped to improve the dynamic of care, at least in our health care facilities going forward. And again, we've not seen any meaningful danger or risk or spread or outbreaks as a result of visitation.

RB: When you say that it has improved the dynamic of care, you often have, advocates say that that patients needs those add because they need those loved ones to be able to advocate for them. I mean, why, Dr. Wong, do you think that patients need to be able to have trusted family members or friends with them at hospital?

DR. ALEX WONG: Well, I think we heard, you know, at the beginning with the story that was at the beginning of this segment was just how important it is. It's a scary time for people when they're admitted to hospital. It's a foreign environment. So there's a lot of complex stuff going on. Oftentimes, patients are on medications where they may or may not be completely with it persay. And so having, you know, additional family members, people to help advocate people, help listen and sort of absorb information, ask questions, that is crucial. And without that, it becomes challenging. And we've tried to do what we could, you know, with virtual means and so forth. But as Dr. Razak mentioned, it's just not quite as effective and not as good to have those types of virtual strategies as opposed to having someone right there at the bedside advocating for their loved one.

RB: Doctor Razak, I understand the visitor policy at your hospital has changed as of today, up until now, who was able to allowed to visit patients?

DR. FAHAD RAZAK: We our policy has been progressing over the last months and actually today is a big step forward. So we previous our prior policy required someone to be in hospital for seven days before essential caregivers began visiting. Now, this did not apply for someone who was at the end of life or had a really critical process. But in general, a hospice patient, there was a seven day waiting period. But starting today, that waiting period has been waived and any essential caregiver identified by the patient, up to two of them can visit within a 24 hour. That's increased now to three people within 24 hours. And the balance here is that the hospital is still trying to maintain some limit on the number of people so that we can maintain physical distance. And so there's that balance. But but the hospital is definitely progressing forward. And I know other hospitals across the province are doing the same. And I should mention that as part of our review, when we went through the science, one of the other things that we found, which is really relevant and this has impacted the hospital decision making, is that the absence of having that essential caregiver at the bedside is not just about emotional support, which is incredibly important, but it's also about health. So those essential caregivers, they play a critical role in healing after critical illness. We know, for example, that after a surgery, people recover quicker. They end up staying in hospital longer and feared complications, things like delirium. There's lower rates, if you have someone with you at the bedside.

RB: It kind of begs the question, Doctor, is like, who is making these policies? I mean, Kim was saying she understood that the Heart Institute here in Ottawa, where they were at because it was mandated by the province. But in some places it seems like the hospitals are making up the rules. I mean, I guess it might be a complicated question, but can you can you try to answer that, Dr. Razak?

DR. FAHAD RAZAK: There's a difference across the country in terms of where these decisions are made. But just using an example of Ontario, the decisions at the end of the day do rest with the hospitals. Hospitals are private entities in Ontario. Obviously, there is some guidance that's coming centrally from the province, but each individual hospital at the end makes its own decision. There's some rationale to that that's appropriate for covid. So there's been widely varying rates covid across Ontario. So you could imagine that it makes sense to some extent for an individual hospital to try and match its policies to the people that surround the hospital. The problem, though, is that if you try and change the policy as an individual hospital. You can imagine that that involves a lot of risk, and so the tendency across a system like this, I think, is that hospitals generally are conservative and no individual hospitals will tend to be more progressive in its policy because of the risk involved. You can you can imagine if one hospital changes all state and suddenly there was an outbreak there, people would say, well, why did that one hospital suddenly change its policy? So there there certainly should be a role for some provincial oversight and guidance, this decision making

RB: Dr. Wong, in Manitoba, immunisation cards have been introduced that will allow family members into hospitals for visits. Do you think that being fully vaccinated should be mandatory for visitors?

DR. ALEX WONG: Contentious topic, across all of the country, probably the short answer here is no. I think it's an easy,eflexive thing to think about. But again, I mean, in this kind of situation, we're thinking about sort of the bigger picture of the importance of having family and loved ones present, especially when you're considering, you know, urgent situations or end of life or palliative situations or even just general day to day type stories like what we heard from Kim. Again, I don't think we want to be in a situation where we push mandated vaccine again. We want to encourage everyone as much as possible to be fully vaccinated. That's that's a given. But I think, you know, mandating it and forcing it and to limit restrictive and to restrict policy otherwise is probably not a good idea.

RB: I appreciate both of your time this morning. I know how busy you are. So thank you so much.

DR. FAHAD RAZAK: Thanks, Robin. Thank you. Good to be with you.

RB: That was Dr. Fahad Razzak. He's an internist and epidemiologist at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto. He is also an advisor on Ontario's pandemic response through the science table. And I was also speaking to Dr. Alex Wong. He is an infectious disease physician in Regina. Well, the CBC News is coming up next. And then.

SOUNDCLIP

Speaker 1: we spent an hour watching a thing in her field that either was a snowy owl or it was a gallon white plastic milk bottle, just as we had decided that it was a white plastic milk bottle it flew.

RB: That's Margaret Atwood. She's going to be telling a few tales about getting awfully cold. Well, birding, she's also going to give her best imitation of a parrot because why not? We will be revisiting Matt Galloway delightful conversation with Margaret Atwood from earlier this year coming up in about six minutes time. Thank you for being with us this morning. I'm Robyn Bresnahan and you are listening to The Current.

Margaret Atwood on her late partner Graeme Gibson, and their shared love of birds

Guests: Margaret Atwood

RB: Hello, I'm Robyn Bresnahan, and you're listening to The Current. When Graeme Gibson died in 2019, we lost a gifted novelist, a great champion of Canadian literature and a passionate conservationist with a special love for birds. He captured decades of fascination with all things avian in a beautiful volume called The Bedside Book of Birds. It's a combination of a memoir and a wild array of writing about birds. Fictional, historical, scientific, poetic. There are gorgeous illustrations as well. The book was rereleased this spring with a new forward by his longtime partner, Margaret Atwood. She spoke to Matt Galloway in March, when that edition of the book came out. Here's their conversation.

MATT GALLOWAY: Tell me about Graeme and birds. What did he love about birds?

MARGARET ATWOOD: Well, Graeme was a late-life convert, by which I mean he did not grow up watching birds. And then he had one of those light bulb experiences in one of the Don Valley ravines when he saw a large bird, and he didn't know what it was. So he found out it was a red-tailed hawk. And from that moment on, he was a birder, as we say. And he was indeed very passionate. And we went on many an adventure for that very purpose, including to Amherst Island, which is a very super place for owls in the winter, where I almost froze to death. We were up there in a cold snap. And where we spent an hour watching a thing in a field that either was a snowy owl or it was a gallon white plastic milk bottle. [Matt laughs] Just as we had decided that it was a white plastic milk bottle, it flew. [laughing]

MATT GALLOWAY: It pays to wait! [both laughing].

MARGARET ATWOOD: That's so!

MATT GALLOWAY: What did he love... I mean, you talked about the red-tailed hawk, and that was like his... his trigger bird. What did he love about... about seeing that bird, and what did that kick-off for him, do you think?

MARGARET ATWOOD: He was not a lister, by which I mean he did not keep a life list, and he wasn't interested in seeing a bird just to check it off and say that he had seen it. I think he found it a form of meditation. There's a book by somebody called Baker called "The Peregrine", in which he follows around a peregrine falcon just to see what it does. And to... to partake of its life, which is very different from our life. So Graeme was like that. He... he liked watching what birds did, not just identifying them. And towards the end of his life, when he had forgotten the names of the birds, he said, well, I no longer know the names of the birds, but that's all right because they don't know my name either.

MATT GALLOWAY: He writes in the book that watching birds was it produced a kind of ecstasy. I mean, that's a really powerful word. What did he mean by ecstasy, do you think?

MARGARET ATWOOD: Well, I think out of your own body, and at one with this other life that you're watching. Naturalists are quite frequently like that, especially field naturalists. And that... that experience can be had watching all kinds of animals, and seeing what they do, and seeing how they live. You know, what... what how are they conducting their time on this earth? And for Graham, it was birds, but for E.O. Wilson, it was... it was ants. [both chuckle]

MATT GALLOWAY: Is that something that you have ever felt in watching birds?

MARGARET ATWOOD: Well, that's a hard question. So you can feel joy, and I don't know whether ecstasy... ecstasy you're really carried out of yourself in ecstasy. You know, those pictures of saints with their eyes turned up to Heaven? I'm not sure on that much of an extremist in any way, [Matt chuckles] but they certainly can make it make you feel very joyful. And if birds were suddenly all of them to vanish from this earth, we would miss them. We kind of take them for granted. But if they were gone, we would really miss them.

MATT GALLOWAY: When did this book start for him, "The Bedside Book of Birds"? When did... when did he start to pull this together?

MARGARET ATWOOD: Well, we were just going here and there, and he was collecting. So he was collecting images primarily. And then he started collecting mentions of birds. And that took place over... over years. So, if we were in a place, for instance, New Zealand, and there was a natural history museum, off we would go to it to see what was in it. Or if there was an art museum, off we would go to that to see what was in there in the way of birds. So he collected these things over years and years and years and years. And then he put the book together, and it was turned down by everybody. So 10 years later, [chuckles] they... the point was grasped. You know, suddenly the point was grasped, and then Graeme started going, well, it has to be forest-friendly paper. [both chuckle] Then we got into a whole range of other issues. But it worked out because they thought that the pictures wouldn't print as well on forest-friendly paper, but, in fact, they printed better. So that was a great thing. And he had a wonderful designer on this book who was very involved in the project. And by the time they were deciding to publish it, the publishers were all on board. They... they they got it. Whereas 10 years earlier, they were saying, well, who would buy this and what is that anyway? And we wouldn't know what shelf to put it on in the bookstore and things like that.

MATT GALLOWAY: What is it anyway? I mean, how would you describe what it is?

MARGARET ATWOOD: It's a miscellany, which was a well understood Victorian form, and it's making a comeback. For instance, I just read a miscellany about dogs published in England. It's not so much the pictures, but it's... it's writing about dogs by various people.

MATT GALLOWAY: Right.

MARGARET ATWOOD: Musings about dogs. And before this, the closest you would come to it would be a poetry anthology. But a miscellany is somewhat different because a poetry anthology is going to be all poems. And a miscellany is all sorts of things. So the kitchen sink. It could be a carving, it could be a painting, it could be from somebody's diary, it could be a poem, it could be a scientist writing. And that's what he has done. He has mixed up all the modes and under various themes. So one chapter is about birds that are scary. Remember "The Birds", Alfred Hitchcock? [Matt chuckles] Unfortunately, you could see the strings tying their legs to the roof, but never mind, they were supposed to scary. [both chucKling] So, like that. It's a miscellany.

MATT GALLOWAY: Did he... I mean, I'm trying to imagine because as you mentioned, you were travelling around, and he would sort of collect these things. I mean, did it fill up the house? All of the little bits of bird ephemera that he had collected around the world?

MARGARET ATWOOD: We do have a lot in the way of prints and... and doodads. You know, little doodads of various kinds.

MATT GALLOWAY: Is the technical term.

MARGARET ATWOOD: Yeah, doodads. And so. [both chuckling] Yes, bird items we have, but they don't fill up the house. And every once in a while, for instance, upcoming on May 8th is our Pelee Island Bird Observatory and Pelee Island Heritage Centre online gala, and some bird doodads are going to be door prizes, and other bird doodads are going to be silent auction items. Both of these events are things that Graeme was a founder of. So people are enthusiastically carrying on with them.

MATT GALLOWAY: In the book, he writes that one of the rewards of bird watching is the escape from our need to make nature useful.

MARGARET ATWOOD: Right, yes. And we do try. And it's the same with the arts. You know, you're constantly being asked about the usefulness of what you do, [chuckling] whether it has social relevance, and what is your message, and things like that. But I think the arts are something that human beings have always done. It's a part of being human. And they can have all sorts of functions in various different societies. But there isn't one use that you can point to. Similarly, birds. Go as far back as you can and you will find bird images, and bird mythologies. In fact, a lot of how did the universe originate stories begin with an egg, an egg out of which things then hatch or they begin with sort of original birds. Even the Bible begins that way. The spirit broods upon the waters. Well, what is broods? Broods is when you're hatching an egg. [laughing].

MATT GALLOWAY: What is it about birds that make them so ripe for metaphor, do you think? I mean, to your point, you can track that all the way back through history, through literature, through the intersection of the two.

MARGARET ATWOOD: Well, first of all, they do two things that we have always wanted to do, singing and flying. And we, like the birds, seem always to have had a connection with music. They have found a 40,000-year-old flute made out of guess what? A bird bone. And the scale on it is the same as the scale we have today. So we seem to have been musical for a very long time. And, of course, so have birds. Some of them are not musical as such. They make horrible squawks and rackets, but they communicate with other birds through the sound that they make. So we have been like that. And the flying, we gave the bird's wings to the angels because we didn't have any. And we gave the claws to the devils. We're not very... we don't want to have claws like birds, but we do want to have wings like birds. And the closest we've been able to come are hang gliding and balloons, aeroplanes and helicopters and rockets.

MATT GALLOWAY: Tell me about Harold Wilson, who is not the former British prime minister, [both laughing] but his pet parrot. Graeme's pet parrot.

MARGARET ATWOOD: Harold Wilson, was named after the former British prime minister. And Graeme tried to teach it to say, what about the workers, but [Matt laughs] not that kind of parrot. So he rescued this parrot. It was the year he was living in Mexico writing "Five Legs". And he rescued the parrot, which was in a sack, and some kids had it. And so he bought it from them. And then he had to make a case for bringing it back to Canada, which he managed to do. And then it was with him, and it learned to imitate a vacuum cleaner. And it gave him a bit of trouble when he was out on his front porch, and the parrot was behind him, not very visible. And girls would walk by, and the parrot would go [whistles]. Thy'd all look at him, and he'd go, no, no. Not me, not me. And then they would go along a little further, and the parrot would go [sqwaks]. [both laughing] Than they thought he was really crazy, and they would run very fast. However, the house was... was dark in winter, and he felt that Harold Wilson was unhappy and lonely. So he took Harold Wilson to one of these zoos where there were some other parrots because parrots are a group animal, they fly around in flocks. They're very social. So Harold Wilson, at first, was... was rather perturbed. And he was put into an enclosure with a female parrot called Olive, and all of a sidled towards him. And Harold Wilson sidled away. And Graeme said it was like dropping your kid off at summer camp because as he walked away, the parrot said in his children's voice, which it had never had before. It said, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy. Then he felt horrible. But when he went back to visit Harold Wilson six months later, there was a happy flock of parrots, and Harold Wilson did not acknowledge him. So Harold Wilson had adjusted to his life at college, [Matt chuckles] and did not wish his parents interfering.

MATT GALLOWAY: You mentioned the scary birds. You have a poem in this book, "Vultures". Would you mind reading it for us?

MARGARET ATWOOD: Vultures are not scary birds.

MATT GALLOWAY: Well, we'll talk about that in a moment. OK, read the poem, and then we'll talk about scary... scary or not.

MARGARET ATWOOD: In Disney movies, they're are given a bad rep. But India had an awful vulture problem, which was that an antibiotic used in cows killed 95 per cent of them before people caught on to what was doing. And all of a sudden, there was a huge infestation of rats and wild dogs and rabies. And it cost the Indian government billions of dollars. So be thankful for the vultures you have. They clean up dead animals, which would otherwise become quite troublesome. OK, "Vultures". And some vultures are actually very good looking. And there is a reason why a vulture was one of the royal symbols for ancient Egypt. Vultures, but these are just... these are not God vultures. They're natural vultures.

MARGARET ATWOOD: [reading] Hung there in the thermal white-out of noon, dark ash in the chimneys updraught. Turning slowly like a thumb pressed down on target. Indolent these flies until they drop. Then they're hyena's raucus around the kill, flapping their black umbrellas, the feathered, red-eyed widows whose pot-bellied bodies violate morning, the snigger at funerals, the burp at the wake. They cluster like beetles, laying their eggs on carrion, gluttonous for a space, a little territory of murder, food and children. Frowzy old saint, baldheaded and musty, scrawny-necked recluse on your pillar of blazing air, which is not Heaven. What do you make of death, which you do not cause? Which you eat daily? I make life, which is a prayer, I make clean bones, I make a grey zinc noise, which to me is a song. Well, heart, out of all this carnage, could you do better?

MATT GALLOWAY: That's Margaret Atwood reading "Vultures" from "The Bedside Book of Birds" written by her late partner, Graeme Gibson. So I love the sight of turkey vultures in fall, in the fall migration, over a big city like Toronto, you'll see Turkey vultures drifting over the city, and they're beautiful and kind of ominous, but way up there and wonderful. How did they get a bad rep, do you think?

MARGARET ATWOOD: Well, you can see why. [both laughing].

MATT GALLOWAY: What, with the eating of the dead, what have you?

MARGARET ATWOOD: Yes, the squawking, the eating of the dead. I mean, when they drop, it's because one of them has something to eat, and the others watch all... all of their pals. And when one drops, they... they will all come and see what's up? And then they will do a certain amount of squabbling. So we were on Pelee, we spent March there. And the ferry doesn't run in march, and it's supposed to start running on the 1st of April. But something went wrong, and therefore we were on the island. We couldn't get off. And the food was running low. So I was out on the lawn digging up the dandelions because you can eat dandelions in the spring, and the spring, vulture migration came through. When vultures see you down in a sort of low position, they think, hmm, [Matt chuckles] maybe something for me soon. So they all settled around the tree, around in the trees and were watching me like [Matt chuckles] I was going to fall over. [both chuckling] And it was pretty funny.

MATT GALLOWAY: You mentioned Pelee Island. You and Graeme helped create the the Bird Observatory in Lake Erie down on Pelee Island. What did that place mean to him?

MARGARET ATWOOD: Oh, he loved it. It is a... it is a bird migration hotspot. So if you look at a map of Pelee Island, you will say there's a chain of islands that used to be a limestone land bridge going right across Lake Erie. There used to be two Lake Eries. And the islands that remain are remnants of that. So, although Hawks did not like flying over open water, a lot of other birds will migrate across the lake. And they typically stop at the southern end of Pelee, and they eat their way up to the northern end and wait for a favourable wind. And then they will take off and fly to the mainland of Ontario, where they will disperse out into the boreal forest in order to nest. And a lot of them land on Point Pelee, which means that it's a birding hotspot, too. So he just loved all of that. And he particularly liked having people from other parts of the world who hadn't seen those birds come to see those birds. So one of the more recent people that we had as an honorary birder at the Pelee Island Heritage Centre's Spring Song event, which involves a green bird rice than a conventional bird rice was Sean Dooley from Australia, who is BirdLife Australia. And he had a wonderful time seeing the spring migrating woodland warblers, which of course, he would never have seen. So birders are very sharing in that way. If you have not seen a bunch of birds because you've never been to that place, they're very happy to show you around. And our honorary birder this year is coming to us remotely because we had to do it online. But it's David Lindo, who you go to Urban Birder on Twitter or other places, he's called Urban Birder. And he's currently in Spain. So he'll be beaming to us from Spain. And the last time I was talking to him for his show, he said, let's go to Serbia and watch owls. [both chuckling].

MATT GALLOWAY: An invitation you can't turn down!

MARGARET ATWOOD: You cannot turn down that. But then I said, have you been to Chernobyl yet? And he said, No, want to go?

MATT GALLOWAY: Let me just... before I let you go, just a couple of quick things. And one is about what we've seen in this pandemic, where because people are at home, there's been a huge spike in the number of people who... who have taken to watching birds over the course of this pandemic. And we've spoken to to David Alan Sibley about this. And we've spoken to people who perhaps had taken birds for granted, as you said, and now have a new appreciation for them. What do you think that this has given people in this moment?

MARGARET ATWOOD: Well, when you can't see your friends and relatives except online, and you're... you're worried about, you know, life and death, which people increasingly have been aware of, and you realize that possibly life is more transient and fragile than you may have thought. I think it's been very calming to a lot of people to feel I'm not alone on the planet, and other creatures are doing OK. But I think we're going to come out of the pandemic, and we're going to focus even more than we have been on the climate crisis and the endangered species problem. So wipe all life over it and and we're going with it because we cannot actually survive without other life, particularly the... the oceans that make 60 to 80 per cent of the oxygen that... that we breathe, as they did one-point-nine-billion years ago, before which it was a methane atmosphere. So we need oxygen. We're a mid-sized lifeform. And I think the cockroaches will probably be OK. But if the oxygen supply goes down, down, down, we will not be OK. So let's fix that if we want to be a species. And birds are the canaries in the coal mine. So when the birds start vanishing, you know, there's something toxic around. And possibly, we should be looking into what that is and doing something about our plastic and chemicals problem.

MATT GALLOWAY: Last thing is, this is... I mean, the spring migration is on our doorstep, and birds are starting to return. And and it's magical and wonderful when you hear them or you see them for the first time having been away. Is there... you said he wasn't, you know, somebody who kept a scorecard in many ways of the birds that he saw. But is there a bird that you see in that spring migration that lets you think of Graeme?

MARGARET ATWOOD: Oh, well, yes, we think of Graeme all the time anyway. But let's say the prothonotary warbler. He was always very happy to see one of those. And they do make it up as far as Pelee Island.

MATT GALLOWAY: That's a beautiful bird.

MARGARET ATWOOD: Gorgeous.

MATT GALLOWAY: Margaret it's a great pleasure to talk to you, as always. Thank you very much.

MARGARET ATWOOD: Lovely to talk to you.

RB: That was Margaret Atwood speaking to Matt Galloway in March. The occasion was the rerelease of her longtime partner, Graeme Gibson's book entitled The Bedside Book of Birds. As we heard in that interview, he wasn't a birder for the sake of making and checking off lists, he thought a lot about the animals he loved to watch. Before his death, Graeme Gibson spoke to the CBC's Michael Enright about the book.

SOUNDCLIP

I started out with The Bedside Book of Birds because I'd become a bird watcher in my early 30s, which was fairly late for most people in my generation. And I'm wondering why on earth is that so many people are interested in birds? What is it about them? I read more people watch birds in North America than play golf and tennis combined, huge. And many of us it's a modest thing you have a feeder in your yard or whatever it may be. So I went I put that book together to try and figure out why. What is it about birds? And the simple answer for me, at any rate, is that birds give the impression of being free of gravity. They may be associated with whatever survives the body's death, that they are associated with creativity, with longing, with imagination, with soul and spirit. I didn't come across a single creation mythology that didn't have a bird near its centre. So having done that, I said, OK, what is it that does this longing, what is it that the imagination inhabits? Where does it spring from? And that, of course, is gravity.

RB: That was the late Graeme Gibson in a CBC interview over a decade ago. That's our programme for today. Tomorrow will pick up where we left off with the CBC podcast, A Death in Cryptoland. Up next is Unforecast. The new CBC show delving into the cultural power and politics of what ends up on our plates. This week, hosts Samira Mohyeddin is delving into the world of beef and asks why it's so divisive in so many ways. I'm Robyn Bresnahan, in for Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current.

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