"Sometimes I would accept so we could go to the place and watch birds," she says.

Gibson, who died in 2019 aged 85, was known well beyond the world of books. He was a prominent conservationist and ornithologist who helped found the Pelee Island Bird Observatory, served on the council of the World Wildlife Fund Canada and was honorary president of BirdLife International's Rare Bird Club. The Royal Canadian Geographical Society awarded him a gold medal in 2015.

Inevitably, his love for birds found its way into his writing.

The Bedside Book of Birds: An Avian Miscellany, an illustrated compilation of folktales, poems, fiction and nonfiction that Gibson had assembled on his own, was originally published in 2005. A surprise bestseller at the time, it has been reissued with a new foreword from Atwood, who called birdwatching a pursuit she and Gibson enjoyed together.

"Though if birdwatching were a religion," added Atwood, who spent part of her childhood in the backwoods of Quebec, "I'd have been the blase communicant who'd grown up in it and performed its rituals because that's what our people do, and Graeme would have been the new convert, smitten with blinding light on the road to Damascus."

"Every bird was a revelation to him," she wrote. "A red-tailed hawk! Look at that! Nothing could be more magnificent."

The Bedside Book of Birds is divided into nine sections - "habitats", Gibson called them - that centre on such themes as birds as omens, as revelations, avengers and mysteries. His sources ranged from Euripides and Marco Polo to a poem by Atwood (Vultures) and a brief passage from a June 1944 issue of Scientific American, which related the story of an Ohio women who used her ailing, feverish husband as an incubator for hens' eggs.

"She took 50 eggs, and wrapping each one in cotton batting, laid them alongside the body of her husband in the bed, he being unable to move a limb," according to the magazine. "After three weeks she was rewarded with 46 lively young chickens."

Atwood says Gibson struggled to find a publisher for The Bedside Book of Birds. He had released several previous works, including the novels Five Legs and Perpetual Motion, but initially couldn't get anyone interested in a book Atwood wryly describes as "an odd duck".

Atwood says that Gibson's personal favorite among birds were ravens: "He loved ravens, as everybody should. They're very smart, and they have very long memories."

In his book, Gibson also describes an unexpected bond with a parrot named Harold Wilson. He purchased the bird - illegally - in Oaxaca, Mexico, in 1964, and brought him back to Toronto, where his vocal expressions were mostly limited to imitating a vacuum cleaner and barking "like two dogs at once".

But Harold seemed increasingly lonely, and Gibson decided to give him to the Toronto Zoo. The zoo's director led Gibson, and Harold, to a "congenial cage" shared with a parrot named Olive.

"I said my goodbyes and turned to leave. Then Harold did something that astonished me," Gibson wrote. "For the very first time, and in exactly the voice my kids might have used, he called me 'Daddy!' When I turned to look at him, he was leaning toward me expectantly. 'Daddy,' he repeated."

"We think of our captive birds as pets," he concluded, "but perhaps we are their pets, as well."