Lying in bed one night in 1985, Bill Lishman told his wife Paula that he was going to teach birds to fly with him.

The dyslexic, colour-blind, wildly creative sculptor woke his three young kids up and told them the same thing. They laughed off their ever-enthused, larger-than-life father and went to bed.

But for the next three years they all worked with geese, which “imprint” on the first thing they see, considering that person or thing to be their parent and follow it. Lishman tried to get them to imprint on the sound of an engine and follow his motorcycle first, and then, his plane.

In 1988, Lishman took off in an ultra-light plane (picture a lawn-chair with wings) with a flock of 12 Canadian geese on either side of him. In a V-formation, together they flew — the geese had imprinted on the plane.

Five years later, he flew with 36 birds to South Carolina from Scugog township in Durham Region.

His flight was documented in the 1996 movie Fly Away Home starring Jeff Daniels and was based on Lishman’s autobiography, Father Goose.





“Prior to shooting Fly Away Home, I’d always consider myself a creative spirit but when I met Bill, I found someone even more creative, even more alive, even more imaginative,” Daniels wrote in an email to the Star. “He taught me a lot about what it means to be a true artist and it was an honour playing him.”

Lishman died Dec. 30. Ten days prior, he had been diagnosed with leukemia. He was 78.

He died in the house he built: a 2,600-square-foot underground home with igloo-like domes, built on top of a hill overlooking the Purple Woods valley and Lake Scugog, 80 kilometres northeast of Toronto.

Like everything he did in his life, his family was close by: his wife of 50 years, fashion designer Paula, 68; his two sons, Aaron, 45, and Geordie, 42; and his daughter Carmen, 34.

“Everything he made seemed to either take flight or was about to,” said Will McGuirk, a friend of the Lishman family and local arts and culture writer. “Everything he worked on seemed to elevate us as a planet and give us a view from way out there.”

His flight with birds impacted the way migration was explored by biologists, helping to preserve the whooping crane.

Lishman was raised by a Quaker mother on a dairy farm in Pickering, where dinner preparation involved anatomy lessons. He never finished high school but was, in his words, “unencumbered by formal education.” He learned how to work with metal at a blacksmith’s workshop he moved into as a young adult.

“He had a real sense of the big picture,” his son Aaron said. “As much as technology would allow, he experienced it all. He had the ability and the nerve to make it happen. He had the vision and tenacity to see it through and to bring it to reality.”

Later in life, he’d receive two honorary degrees for his extraordinary imagination.

“He was a renaissance man, probably one of the only one I’ll ever meet, a true multi-talented intellect,” said family friend Kerri King.

Over the years, his sculptures kept getting bigger and taller: a 13-metre-high metal sculpture inspired by icebergs in the Arctic installed at the Canadian Museum of Nature; a 26-metre metal cone with a swirling, still flow of traffic created for Expo ’86; 25 steel figures representing different human movements from dancing to snowboarding installed outside Bridgepoint Hospital in Toronto.

“He didn’t separate himself from the land, nature, air, birds,” said Mary Delaney, chair of Land over Landings, an advocacy group against plans to build an airport in Pickering, while preserving the farmland community in the central Ontario region.

“It was all one big inter-connected adventure.”

Land over Landings succeeded People or Planes, the movement Lishman helped found in the 1970s to fight the same cause. Lishman, one of the creative visionaries of the movement, staged mock hangings and led a march with coffins on Queen’s Park, labelled with names such as “Mother Nature.” It inspired Delaney, as did his constant advocacy work in the Arctic, Nicaragua and in his own backyard.

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Lishman’s words “in nature there are no straight lines” is being remembered widely in the days after his death.

“He just stepped on top of all those obstacles and kept on climbing,” Delaney said. “He taught us all to look at things askew. He taught us to think outside the box, over the box, under the box, through the box.”

At the end of a 2015, Lishman responded to the Oshawa This Week newspaper’s request for 16 words for the new year. His response: “Aliens will finally reveal that they are actually angels and will save us humans from ourselves.”

Plans for his funeral are still underway, the family said.

“How do you really capture everything that dad was?,” his daughter Carmen said.

The perfect send-off, said his wife Paula, would be to have it outside with planes flying over and birds all around. No minister, just the people who imprinted on him through his work and his persona.