One Wild Bird at a Time

by Bernd Heinrich

  A starling’s most puzzling peculiarities show up during feeding. Most birds use their bills as picks or pincers. But Slick would stick his bill into my ear and then spread his mandibles apart rather than closing them. This odd bill movement is suited to flipping dried cow-patties to find dung beetles. It is also suited to lifting fallen leaves to check for worms underneath, opening crevices, and spreading grass apart to expose insects and other food. But it was misplaced when he was poking around in my ear.

  A second oddity Slick shared with other starlings was an inability to hold food in place with his feet in order to manipulate it for feeding. He was a physical contortionist when it came to preening and scratching himself, but he could not catch on to the idea of clasping a piece of food with his toes. Blue jays and chickadees routinely use their feet to secure a nut or sunflower seed against their perch while hammering it open, or to grasp a cracker while eating it bit by bit. A nuthatch steadies food by inserting it into a crack in a tree’s bark and using the crack as a vise. But Slick, when given a piece of food such as a cracker, was at a loss as to what to do. He squawked in frustration, flew back and forth from perch to perch, flung the food item around wildly, shook his head, and sometimes battered the cracker against his perch. But never once did he step on a piece of food to steady it and then try to pry a piece off.

  Slick was an opportunistic omnivore. Grapes, raw cabbage, lettuce, scrambled eggs, raw diced carrot, fresh bread, cooked potato, blueberries, yogurt, his own feces, raspberry jam, raw and cooked hamburger, Cheerios, rice, peanut butter, apple, worms, grubs, and insects were all on his bill of fare. But his begging for food was most insistent when he saw me with a cluster fly in my hand. There was no shortage of these flies moving sluggishly in our house in the winter, along with the so-called variable ladybird beetles.

  Ladybird beetles are brightly marked in red, orange, and black, and when handled roughly they exude a noxious smell. They evolved the smell, and the bright colors that advertise their noxiousness, to discourage birds and other predators from eating them. I knew this but offered Slick a ladybird beetle anyway. To my surprise he took it, although he had eaten his full dish of food scraps that morning. He shook it, then ate it with little hesitation. I offered another, and another, and eventually twenty-two ladybird beetles in a row before he began to reject them. He beat most of them against his perch as if to shake off their chemical secretions, but in the end he ate them anyway.

  The next day he again ate all his food scraps, yet he also consumed eighteen freshly captured ladybird beetles. He gulped the first few quickly, but before finishing them all, he occasionally gave his head a rapid shake after swallowing. Later-presented beetles he beat against his perch before ingesting them, and finally after the eighteenth he started dropping them, seemingly inadvertently. Wondering if he was satiated, I brought in another handful of beetles along with some fresh cluster flies. Now when given a beetle he either ignored it or wiped it against his perch and then flung it aside. But of the forty-five cluster flies I had picked off an upstairs window, he ate every one, right after the other, never once wiping one against the perch or dropping it.

  Here was a welcome potential solution to the cluster fly problem, except for the inevitable aftereffects in a free-ranging bird. After Slick’s mega-feeding I let him out of his cage to fly around in the house, and he quickly landed on or in my wife’s ample hair. This excited them both and caused the starling to produce an unwelcome deposit from his cloaca.

  A flock of starlings.

  Starlings are not well liked in America. In the non-breeding season they may roost in flocks of hundreds of thousands, each one singing engagingly but all together making what to us is noise, all the while defecating on everything below them. They are an all too successful invasive species that often usurps bird boxes meant for bluebirds. From two hundred of them released in Central Park in the 1890s, they now number over two hundred million and range across the whole continent. They accomplished their population expansion a lot quicker than did their human counterparts from Europe.

  Even when in their huge winter crowds, starlings sing almost constantly and remain vocal long into the night. What is irritating and obnoxious when practiced by the many, however, can be a delight when performed singly. Birds’ singing has important practical functions, but because starlings practice it so easily and often it is most likely also fun for them.

  Starlings adapt their vocalization to what they hear, and have been known from antiquity for their vocal talents. People who have had them as house pets report that it took their hand-reared birds from a few days to months to incorporate portions of tunes, ranging from Mozart concertos to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” into their vocal repertoires. They also mimicked words and short sentences, including “Give me a kiss,” “I’ll see you soon,” and even “Does Hammacher Schlemmer have a toll-free number?”

  Slick did not know enough to grasp a cracker in order to eat it. But recent laboratory studies are thought to show that European starlings can “accurately recognize acoustic patterns defined by recursive, self-embedded, context-free grammar” and “reliably exclude a-grammatical patterns.” In other words, they can grasp grammar. Pretty slick.

  I made no attempt to teach Slick how or what to sing, but all winter he sang almost continuously from mid-afternoon through the evening and long into the night, stopping only when I turned off the light. These untutored monologues were punctuated only by occasional pauses of a few seconds. They were a seemingly endless string of the usual starling trills of various pitches, tinkles, whistles, twitters, growls, and squawks. Thrown in also were phrases of a common yellowthroat warbler song, a wolf whistle, and the ring of a telephone. These sounds were his private repertoire, and they may have reflected some of his past. My occasional whistling at him might have accounted for the wolf whistle. The warbler song meant that he had been near open, swampy, or disturbed habitat in spring. His lack of human words indicated that he had not grown up in a situation where he bonded with people. As the biologists Meredith J. West, A. N. Stroud, and Andrew P. King wrote in an article on starlings’ vocal mimicry, starlings listen actively to and mimic only those humans with whom they interact socially in shared companionship. So I suspect that even if Slick had had human keepers before me they had not interacted with him much.

  I recently saw a YouTube video of a starling named Beakie with an impressive and varied repertoire of songs, words, and whistles it had learned over ten years from its keeper, who often talked and whistled to it. The most famous starling in human company was the one kept by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Vienna. Mozart reputedly was walking on a street when he heard a caged starling sing a close rendition of his own Piano Concerto No. 17. He bought the bird on May 27, 1784, and made a record of the purchase that said “Vogel Stahrl—34 K—Das war schön!” (Starling Bird—34 Kroner—That was wonderful!) When the starling died, three years later on June 4, 1787, Mozart buried his pet in his backyard and wrote a commemorative poem about it.

  A starling singing and gesticulating with his wings.

  Slick craved company and was not deterred in the least by the hustle and bustle of even the loudest party, staying cheery in the middle of it. Such tolerance was probably related to starlings’ social evolution, in the context of being with sometimes hundreds of thousands of jostling, noisy flock mates, especially in the balletic synchronous flight maneuvers they achieve when returning to their communal roosts in the evening. A starling needs not just a mate and/or a companion. It needs a crowd. To be a starling is to perform airborne dances with myriad others, tracing elaborate syncopated flight patterns in the sky. We call these gatherings “murmurations.”

  When Slick felt threatened I could almost literally not get him out of my hair, although when relaxed he became a pleasant companion on my shoulder. I was reluctant to let him loose in the winter, when there was no nearby flock for him to join. But in early spring, for a trial, I walked into the yard with him on my shoulder. He stay
ed perched on me the whole time. I tried it again a day later. This time he flew off and landed in the cherry tree next to the porch. I stayed on the porch and waited to see what he would do next. After a few minutes he returned to my shoulder, then flew through the open door into the house.

  When the weather improved later in the spring I took him outside more often. One day he disappeared, and we never saw him again. I still miss his cheerful song, but I could not and would not have kept such a social bird cooped up in a cage unless I could have guaranteed him at least an hour of daily attention to bring out the true starling in him.

  Some animals, especially social birds like crows and starlings, require constant companionship, sometimes for years on end. This commitment is not for most people, but wild pets can be an inspiration to others.

  4

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  Woodpecker with a Drum

  WE ASSUME THE REASON MALE WOODPECKERS DRUM ON wood is no great secret: they do it to attract females. But although I’ve seen and heard flickers and hairy, downy, and pileated woodpeckers do their instrumental renditions of birdsong as long as I can remember, I don’t recall ever seeing females attracted, or males’ territories expanded, as a result.

  The yellow-bellied sapsucker is hardly an exception when it comes to drumming behavior. It is, however, one of the few woodpeckers that do not excavate dead trees for grubs. Instead, it taps live trees to lick sap and to feed on insects that feed on the same sap. Unlike any of the other half dozen species of woodpeckers in Maine, it is so intent on drumming loudly in the spring that it opportunistically uses not just dry branches but also tin roofs and metal stovepipes for sound amplification. Aside from that, this species, with its striking deep crimson throat and top of head, pale yellow underside, and bold black and white markings, is knockout beautiful. For all of these reasons, I was pleased to find an excuse to get to know it better.

  That excuse came to me unexpectedly around 7 a.m. on my birthday, April 19, in 2012. In the clearing by my cabin is a yellow delicious apple tree at least a hundred years old. Sap still runs in its living wood, but age has hollowed its trunk and thinned parts of its dry-wood walls, creating an excellent drumming place for a woodpecker. And this tree has, thanks to a bear and me, an added attraction for a sapsucker.

  The bear had climbed the tree the previous summer to reach early-ripening yellow apples. It had damaged some of the brittle branches, and to protect the tree against a second raid I tacked steel sheathing around the hollow trunk. A sapsucker just returned from its winter home discovered that the metal could serve as an amplifier to make a super drum.

  Before that day, sapsuckers had rarely landed on the apple tree, which stood about fifty meters into the clearing and a hundred from the cabin. They generally stayed in the woods, only occasionally venturing to the edge of the clearing and drumming on the cabin’s stovepipe. On this gorgeous spring morning I was sitting next to the wood stove, enjoying my first cup of morning coffee and writing up some notes, when I was jolted by the most resounding sapsucker drumming I had ever heard. From my window I could see the male bird (it has a red throat bib, the female a white one) on the apple tree.

  One rat-tattat-tatatattat-TAT drumroll followed another in rapid succession as the sound went on, and on, and on. After some drum sequences two additional sapsuckers landed on the same small tree. The drumming then stopped, and I heard screechy calls and saw a lot of posturing by the birds, then the three flew off into the woods. Almost immediately one came back to the same spot, only to leave in a few seconds. Why did the others come and all three quickly leave? I had never before heard such a woodpecker din, nor seen other woodpeckers come to it. To have the ones that had been attracted then immediately leave seemed puzzling.

  Minutes after the sapsucker started that morning I grabbed pencil and paper and went outside to record what else might happen. I realized I had caught the moment when a sapsucker found the mother of all sapsucker drums, and had an opportunity for making a discovery. I had found a question that would keep me busy for a long time. Why does a woodpecker drum? I had assumed that the drumming, which I had also heard in the fall, winter, and spring, was a territorial advertisement, like an aural No Trespassing sign. But here, instead, others were attracted to it. I needed to take detailed notes to create a foundation with which to compare later events, because I had no idea what might be relevant.

  The old apple tree with metal flashing that served as a “super drum” for the sapsucker.

  At 7:51 a.m., after a short break, the sapsucker returned to the tree and produced one drumroll after another for five minutes. Then he left. Eight minutes later he came back and drummed briefly, stopping when another sapsucker arrived—a female. He left in moments, and she then also left. He returned at 8:39 a.m., and after ten drumrolls a female again arrived, and again neither stayed more than a few seconds.

  At the end of five hours he had completed seventeen separate drumming sessions, for a total of seventy-six minutes. His performances had dramatic effects. Nine times other sapsuckers came: five times lone females; once two females; once a male; and twice three birds at once, which left before I could identify their sex. The females, just before arriving, seemed to announce their presence in the nearby woods with a relatively soft drumroll and/or a vocalization. The one time another male came, the two males appeared to be totally indifferent to each other, and both, when they left, flew in the swooping pattern typical of woodpeckers.

  His percussion solos continued for up to forty drumrolls, one after another, before he left for a half-hour and then came back. Curiously, whenever a female arrived he would instantly stop drumming and they would have a brief face-off with vocalizations and displays of puffed-out head feathers. He would then leave, not in the normal swooping flight of woodpeckers, but rather in a fluttering, almost mothlike trajectory. The female would hesitate a moment or two, then fly into the woods in the same direction he had taken.

  It didn’t make sense. Why did he leave just when he had her attention?

  I was hooked. Something interesting was happening, and it had become interesting fast. Clearly the drumming couldn’t be directly related to mating: these birds had just finished their spring migration and would not mate for a month or more, after they had hammered out nest cavities, and their eggs were available for fertilization.

  I was up in the dark at 5:05 a.m. the next day. A normally nocturnal male woodcock was still doing his sky dance and peented after landing in the field on the bare spot next to the apple tree. Robins already sang. Chickadees dee-dahed. The phoebe, winter wren, hermit thrush, and blue-headed vireos were singing. No sapsuckers seemed to be stirring.

  At 5:40 a.m. a male finally arrived and started to drum. The sound carried for a kilometer or more on still days, and soon there were other drummers in the woods, but his performance was the most vigorous. Responses seemed to come from two directions. One was of ten drumrolls, the second of only one. But he continued on and on—to a record of forty-seven consecutive drumrolls. Then he left.

  As on the day before, a female came twice, and each time he left in fluttering flight. During his flight into the nearby woods at 8:26 a.m., I heard screeching and followed him to what looked like a probable nest tree: a poplar with the signature hoof fungus that sapsuckers preferentially choose to excavate for a nest site. However, in a short while he returned to his drum at the apple tree.

  I thought I was beginning to see a convincing pattern. But why, I wondered, did the male come back repeatedly to his drum, then leave almost the moment a female arrived? And why, when he left, did he fly not in the normal woodpecker style but rather in a showy fluttering flight? The female at times followed him, not the other way around as I had expected. None of my evidence would make sense unless I could understand what was at stake.

  It was clear from the first day that the drumming did attract females, and also that the male made an effort to drum loudly. I had watched as he tapped all around the dead stub of the old apple tree
, as though searching for precisely the right spot to produce the most dramatic effects. Then he came back again and again and hammered at that same spot. If he was trying to produce high-quality drumming, and if it served to attract females, then he must be trying to provide something the females wanted or required and were looking for. It could not be just loud noise, as such, because that could do the females no good. His leaving every time a female came made it clear that, at least at this time, what the females were looking for was unlikely to be mating. I wondered where he was going every time he left followed by a female. In my one pursuit of them through the woods I saw no mating.

  It was perhaps time for finding mates, but still far from mating time, which is near egg laying, as mentioned previously. Long before that these birds needed to hammer out nest cavities. Trying to think like a female woodpecker, I considered qualities I would look for in a mate. Why would I choose a male who made a lot of noise by pounding on a piece of tin on a half-dead apple tree?

  The drumming, as such, seemed like a useless activity. It therefore had to convey a message. I thought of the chickadees that were now traveling in pairs. The males make soft peeping calls, and now and then offer their mate a nuptial gift by feeding her an insect. The female then begs, fluttering her wings like a baby bird and mimicking a baby’s begging. By her actions she is testing the capacity of a potential mate to feed her young. If he responds to her baby signals by offering her a caterpillar, the male shows her that he is capable of feeding them. A chickadee pair may have to raise as many as eight babies at the same time, and she needs help for the monumental tasks of egg production and the feeding of fast-growing young. It occurred to me that the most difficult and time-consuming task a sapsucker female faces may not be the feeding of the young, but the making of a nest hole.