Operation Migration aka Take me home, please ...

Oil and acrylic in underpainting on high quality canvas

size 60 x 60 cm

unframed

As a boy growing up on a small dairy farm in Pickering, Ont., Bill Lishman would watch the great flocks of geese flying overhead with wonder.

"I'd look up at them so high and go, 'Wow, where did they come from? How do they see the world?'"

Decades later, in the early 1980s, he would finally see for himself. During an early morning flight in his ultralight aircraft (one of his many hobbies), Mr. Lishman found himself surrounded by a giant flock of ducks.

"It was probably thousands of birds," he said in a video interview posted on his website. He was going at the same speed, at the same climbing rate as the ducks. He was flying so close that he could see every muscle in the bird's backs – every detail on every feather.

He was mesmerized. The experience, to him, was magical.

As soon as he landed, he ran back to his house, where he told his family: "I've got to repeat that experience."

Over the next several decades, he would "fly with the birds" over and over again.

Initially, he was just experimenting, filming short videos of himself flying, up-close, with the birds. But after he was contacted by scientists, including the British-born zoologist William Sladen, the experiments morphed into a three-year project to develop a technique to "teach" the birds migration routes, helping to pull some of the world's most endangered species back from the brink of extinction.As "Father Goose," Mr. Lishman was best known to the rest of the world for Operation Migration, the non-profit that formed out of the bird project. But his work was so varied that, when asked by strangers what he did for a living, his typical response was to ask: "Can you start with an easier question?“