The Big Yard: Notes from a Pajama Birdwatcher

March 10, 2024

There are no birds.  Again.  My friend—one of the few who knew how to live life well with passion and verve and concern for the smallest of living things—is gone.  Last week, Elizabeth Bernays quietly left this world in a way of her own choosing, which was her way.

Liz was raised in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, where she studied zoology in the early 1960s as an undergraduate before moving to Britain to further her education in entomology at the University of London.  It was here she met Reg Chapman, who would become her self-described “soulmate” for 37 years, the two traveling as scientists for the British government to far-flung regions in India and tropical West Africa before immigrating to the US in 1983 and taking positions as professors at the University of California, Berkeley, and later at the University of Arizona.

I met Liz after she had retired as Regents Professor and shortly before Reg’s death in 2003.  She had started her second career as a writer at age 62 by joining the UA MFA nonfiction program and mentoring with my friends Richard Shelton and Alison Deming.  I remember the carboard box she carried to classes, full of caterpillars—Manduca hornworms as fat as green cigars she had to feed mulberry leaves to at regular intervals.

If you asked her what she was doing, she would say she was studying “bugs.”

In the years that followed, I would housesit for her at her gorgeous Joesler-esque home, nested on five-acres of untrammeled Sonoran Desert on Tucson’s northside.  While her pool turned green with algae, I wrote books, watered her salvia and night-blooming cereus, and cared for her kitten Bowtie and adopted cottontail bunny.  Liz and her partner Linda rescued the newborn rabbit after a car killed its mother, Liz documenting the story with Linda’s photos in a book called Saving Pocket.

Liz would publish two additional books about Pocket, a book about walking her desert place called Three Miles, another about memory, art, and the meaning of home titled House of Pictures.  My favorite is her 2019 memoir Six Legs Walking: Notes from an Entomological Life.  After she joined my Tucson creative writing workshop, she began working on her last book about her unexpected and unlikely relationship with Linda called Across the Divide: The Strangest Love Affair, which she published in 2023.

I like to think, with a nod to Richard Shelton, that when we are gone, we become what we have to say.  Liz would say, despite—but contented with—the small part she played in the bumpy progress of knowledge, that she will be forgotten as the years pass.  “We are tiny points of light, like a mass of glowworms in a cave, each living briefly and passing on, but wonderful at the time.”

Elizabeth Bernays, the scientist and teacher, the poet and writer, has passed on.  But the light of her words remains.  Here is the last poem Liz shared with us in workshop:

Love in the Gum Trees

holes and bays on leaf edges

tell of Eucalyptus tortoise beetles

spotted domes and sticky feet

Paropsis gorging leaves

whose signatures I embossed

with affection on leather

for folders and desert boots

dry crunchy wilderness

notched leaves spiral down

forest footsteps release

bouquets of tree worship

eucalyptol pinene cineole citral

trees now worldwide

perpetual nostalgia

but without insects

no leaf beetle monikers

my teenage insect specimens

live in Canberra

in the National Insect Museum

where beneath each beetle the pin

impales - place date my name

back then I collected the oils

a distillation set on Mama’s lawn

leaf vapor to drops in a glass vial

passion in my pocket

EAB

Liz with Bowtie in her desert home.

Liz and Linda with Pocket.

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