In The Private Eye we learn about snow geese through the eyes of Native people, scientists, artists, hunters, and farmers. Yup'ik Eskimo Charles Hunt harvests snow geese along the Yukon River delta each fall, continuing a subsistence way of life that has existed for millennia. Russian, Canadian, and U.S. scientists track the movements of the geese each spring and fall, banding, sexing, counting, and precisely monitoring the activities of these beautiful birds. Robert Bateman provides an artist's view of nature and relates how his curiosity led him to join a camp set up at a remote nesting site.

Mary Burns also talks to hunters, joining a party of them as they wait for their snow geese decoys to lure the real thing into a Westham Island field in the Fraser delta. As well, Burns travels around the Skagit River delta during a population survey and meets a dairy farmer who describes both the wild flocks that converge on his fields each spring and the snow geese he raises in pens.

The Private Eye suggests that by acknowledging our many and varied connections with the natural world, we will have a better understanding of the human place in it.

Mary Burns grew up near Chicago and emigrated to Canada during the Vietnam War years. A former journalist and documentary filmmaker, she is the author of several stage plays, numerous radio plays and seven books, including the Literary Press Group’s Writer’s Choice, Suburbs of the Arctic Circle, and The Private Eye: Observing Snow Geese, shortlisted for the Science in Society Book award. Talon published her collection of short stories, Shinny’s Girls, and a trilogy of novellas, Centre/Center. Her most recent novel is The Reason for Time, historical fiction set in the turbulent “Red Summer” of 1919 in Chicago, and listed as a “Must Read” Chicago book. For twelve years she served as chair of Creative Writing at Douglas College where she taught fiction, play writing and personal narrative. She now lives on the Sunshine Coast of B.C. and spends regular time each year in Quebec City.

Mary Burns' profile page

... the passionate story of her involvement with these geese who summer in the remote north of Siberia and winter on the deltas of the Fraser and Skagit rivers, as well as a strong sense of the geese within their environment, and a never-diminished sense of involvement....A wonderful read. (4 stars)

The Milestones Review, Books for the Interior, Fall/Winter

an interesting, sometimes poetic, factual narrative combined with an introduction to some of the natural history of a local species....occasionally Snow Goose behaviour is described in sufficient detail for me to recognize similarities with Konrad Lorenz’s greylag geese in the classic Here am I. Where are You?

Discovery, Dec. 1997, Vol. 26, No.4