Bill Lishman (FRCGS)
1939-2017 | Toronto, Ont. 

By James Raffan

Like most Canadians, I knew of the one and only Bill Lishman long before I ever met him, largely through the success of the 1996 Oscar-nominated film Fly Away Home, which was based on his exploits imprinting migratory birds to fly with a man on an ultralight aircraft. It’s an amazing story, to be sure, but in the flesh, the man himself made the character in the Hollywood film seem pale and one-dimensional by comparison—and seriously lacking in pyrotechnics.

Although we crossed paths a couple of times at the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough, I really met Bill at Purple Hill, his iconic underground home on the rolling Oak Ridges Moraine northwest of Toronto. He and his wife Paula were hosting a party to celebrate the resolution of legal difficulties that had arisen from the grounding of a ship called the Sea Adventurer on a massive rocky ridge in the middle of the Coronation Gulf in the Canadian Arctic. Everyone at the party had some kind of connection to Adventure Canada, the company that had chartered the ship and hired people like Bill to animate it; indeed, many in attendance had been rescued from the stranded ship.

[He was] impulsive, confident, nonlinear, fearless and a whole lot of fun, and those around him were usually happy to follow him to places on the map that said “There be dragons.” And throughout his nearly four score years (he died just 44 days shy of his 79th birthday), he was richly recognized for his trailblazing ideas, particularly his singular work with geese and cranes — not that that mattered to him.

He held honourary doctorates from the Ontario Institute of Technology and Niagara University in New York State. He was a Fellow of The Royal Canadian Geographical Society and a Fellow International of the Explorers Club. In 2016 he was awarded the Stefansson Medal, the Canadian Chapter’s highest accolade, for his “exemplary lifetime accomplishments and groundbreaking innovation.” And at the height of his worldwide fame as Father Goose, he was awarded the Governor General’s prestigious Meritorious Service Medal for bringing honour to Canada for his pioneering work with migratory birds. He left behind a remarkable legacy of books, films and public artworks, and people all over the world who he inspired in one way or another, sometimes flamboyantly but more often in his own quiet and inexorably arresting way.

Read the full memorial.