One day, Wes Homoya came out of the magical regions of Ash & Elm — the near Eastside cider house — just after a small child and a grown man had spotted what one presumed to be a bat, and the other, a bird. The kid had “bat” but I had my money on “bird,” positing that it might have been a barn swallow. I was trying to show off, but Wes was kind in rebuttal, a gentle hint toward this knowledge of birds. He went back into the magical regions, where the cider is made, and I wandered the back hallway of the cidery, trying to find that bird.
On Thursday, September 8th, I met Joseph Kilbourne at an event at the Coal Yard Coffee House. Joe, the “assistant cider-maker,” was selling Ash & Elm’s cider at the event and after a casual conversation with him, he revealed that Wes Homoya was an ornithologist. The next day, I took my copy of Mark Obmasick’s The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession; my column on “My Big Year,” and my birding journal and plopped them before Wes as he served me my glass of “Dry.” I asked him if he wanted to talk about his pending birding tour to Australia.
I have written before of my interest in birds and birding, but on this day, Wes spoke of his much deeper interest. When Wes is not delivering a glass of my favorite cider at the cider house co-founded by his brother, Aaron, and his sister-in-law, Andréa, he works as a tour guide for Tropical Birding, whose website advertises tours “led by expert guides who are themselves passionate birders and naturalists.” I heard that passion as we spoke, sitting at a table in the front of the cider house. Wes’ interest in birding was a natural outgrowth of his upbringing: his father, Michael Homoya, is the “state botanist” for the State of Indiana’s Department of Natural Resources, Division of Nature Preserves, and his mother is a nature-loving nurse. His exposure to “all kinds of nature” was guided toward birds when his parents gave him his first Petersen Field Guide to Birds. And though he maintains an interest in all things in nature, ornithology was the winner when he attended Purdue University.
“I heard you were taking a group to Australia,” I said to Wes, and he warmed to the subject. This tour will be the third he has led, including his second to Australia. He did some guiding while he was at Purdue and has been a co-guide on other tours but Tropical Birding encouraged him to go to Ecuador for an apprenticeship.
Wes’ tour to Australia will take six people on four legs, starting with Cairns, in N.E. Queensland, and including O’Reilly’s Rainforest, the Royal National Park in Sydney and Tasmania, which has, according to Wes, its “own set of endemics.”
Wes’ tour lifts off on September 30th, which means that for about a month, he’ll be leaving to Melissa the pouring of my favorite beverage. But his six tourists will be snorkeling, seeing emus, cassowary, bower birds, budgies and “any cool wildlife,” including the fairy penguin as it comes onto land to find its nesting burrows. And as he seeks for his tourists a balance between quantity and quality — the sighting of the maximum number of birds versus the delight in the sight of those birds — I will raise a glass to his joy and while sipping the “Dry” in the bar and looking for the barn swallow, patiently wait for the stories from “The Bird Man of Indianapolis.”