The Urban Bestiary

by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

  Birds and Lights

  Birds can’t see glass. Where we see a window, they see a safe, transparent passage or a habitat that looks inviting; outdoor trees and plants reflected in a window, or houseplants on the other side of a window, can look to a bird like something it might like to fly toward. Nighttime lighting confounds birds further, especially in cities with tall buildings, where the many surfaces reflect one another and create a maze of bewilderment. All of this confusion is heightened during migration, when birds are attempting to navigate unfamiliar terrain in huge numbers. If they don’t hit windows outright, they may circle lighted buildings in confusion until they collapse from exhaustion. Audubon estimates that every year, ninety thousand birds fatally collide with buildings in New York City, and the numbers may be much higher (counts are difficult—early-morning street sweepers clear the streets of migratory-bird bodies before the rest of the city wakes up).

  Both residential- and commercial-building dwellers can help provide safe passage for birds. For new construction, low-reflective glass or pattern-imprinted glass is available. For existing windows, a pattern laid across the pane is most effective—strips of paper, polka-dot decals, painted zigzag stripes, whatever you like. The key is an overall pattern that is easy for birds to quickly perceive and avoid. Those popular hawk silhouettes are not effective on their own (they don’t really scare birds), but a bunch of them arranged in a pattern across the glass will help. Many businesses are joining in the national Lights Out campaign, keeping building lights off from dusk to dawn, especially during migration times. Apartment dwellers can encourage the same throughout their buildings.

  As the young are born in late spring and early summer, birds become highly protective—small birds like warblers hide out in silence; larger birds like robins, jays, and crows vigorously defend their nests against other birds and perceived threats.

  The young emerge into a period of tremendous frailty; many will die from exposure, starvation, parasites, cars, and cats. Those that grow and fledge will be begging boisterously throughout the summer, following the adults and also finding their own wings, their own lives. It is a beautiful time for observation in the bird year.

  Come fall and winter, the family groups will break down and open up. Birds might form communal foraging groups, and many species will start gathering into the flocks that provide both communication and protection during the winter months.

  As I write this day in July, the neighborhood young of the year are out of the nest, grown to full or nearly full size but still begging from the adults. They are naive and quiet, unafraid. I can hardly keep my eyes on my written words as a young chickadee quakes in the begging posture. But then, why would I? Stopping, I pick up the binoculars and watch. This is all that is asked of us, isn’t it? Just to stop and see sometimes. We go back to our work enlivened, enlightened, and more deeply embodied in our own wild lives.

  Without knowing the name of a single bird, we can enter this enlivened bird city. We think of bird language in terms of their vocalizations. We know that each species has a particular song that is sung mainly by the male during the territorial breeding season, and we know that although a few people are very good at identifying birdsong, the vast majority of humans, visual-knowers that we are, are not. When birding by ear is taught, it usually involves memorizing song after song, a dubious process, to be sure. But the good news is that we do not really have to identify a birdsong to species in order to enter the discourse of birds, and in fact, by loosening the focus on identifying individual songs, we can learn a great deal more about what birds are saying and how their language responds to our presence.

  Spring Woodpecker Drumming

  The wonderful desert-nature writer Ellen Meloy wrote, shortly before her death, about a flicker that had been incessantly drumming her house. She had named him Stalin, and one morning she found him trapped in her screened porch. “I feel wicked,” she wrote. “Stalin, you ignorant slut. You are trapped. This bird batters the nest of our resident phoebes. He drills the house as if it were a giant sugar cube. He could peck away until only a roof on sticks remained. Or I could let him die here.” I love it when nature writers show malice toward wildlife–it makes them seem more human.

  Every spring I hear from friends who want to know what they can do about their own nemesis—the woodpecker that is maniacally drumming the house at all hours, almost always the Northern flicker, the most common urban-suburban woodpecker. They are beautiful fawn-colored birds with black spots, longish bills, and pretty, dolphin-like faces. Unlike many birds, woodpeckers don’t sing—instead, they drum to attract a mate in spring and to proclaim a territory. They rap their bills repeatedly and rhythmically on whatever surface provides the loudest noise—they love metal drainpipes, electrical transformers, and the most resonant parts of our houses. They drive many people completely nuts.

  Remember that the flickers’ goal is not to destroy your house; they just have a hormone-driven need to make noise this time of year. To deter them, you can tack a simple length of cloth over the flickers’ favored drumming places. Birds don’t like things that move randomly, so a wind sock or a trash bag cut into streamers and hung near the flickers’ favorite spot will help discourage them. My own tactic: I run outside waving a broom and yelling, “Bad woodpecker! Go away!”

  You can also try a gentle attitude shift. Woodpecker drumming usually doesn’t hurt anything (besides one’s nerves—oh, and of course, there’s the small matter of the 1995 space-shuttle mission that was delayed when flickers tapped six little holes in the Discovery’s external fuel tank). If flickers really are drilling holes into your house, they may be seeking food rather than noise, or they may have discovered soft wood in which to excavate a nest hole. In such matters, they rarely err—check for termites, carpenter ants, or wood rot.

  But overall, these woodpecker rhythms are heralding the season of light and fertility, and the noise is temporary (once they get into nesting, they stop drumming). We can try to relax and celebrate the role that our households play in the cycles of nature. Think of the unseen cavity nest full of fluffy little woodpecker babies that will be helped into existence by the resonant capacities of our very own dwellings.

  Most of the bird conversations we hear daily are the songs, calls, and chatter of the passerines, colloquially called the perching birds or, even more colloquially, the songbirds. This is the large order of birds that evolved for life in the trees, and it encompasses everything from crows to bushtits, including the swallows, thrushes, blackbirds, chickadees, kinglets, wrens, warblers, and many others. In spite of the great variety of passerine species, all of them share basic physical adaptations. Three toes point forward and one back, and the toenails are long and pointed for perching and grasping tree limbs. There is an automatic clutching mechanism in the feet that keeps them wrapped securely around branches, even during sleep. Most passerines are good flyers with nine or ten primary feathers, and many, like the warblers that live in Central and South America but breed here in North America, migrate long distances. There are a few passerines that do not sing, among them the corvids—the crows, jays, and ravens. These birds have a highly complex vocal repertoire that they deploy year-round, but they do not have a seasonal song. And though there are other sorts of birds populating the urban landscape—gulls, woodpeckers, pigeons, hawks, ducks—the songbirds are the ones we most often see and hear in the trees on our walks; these are the birds that most often alert us to what other birds and animals are doing, the little bird that tells us the secret news. Entering into avian discourse through attention to the passerines is a lovely occupation, accessible to all of us, every day. Bird language is complicated, but as Wilderness Awareness School founder Jon Young explains in his book What the Robin Knows, there are basics of vocalizations that, with practice, are relatively easy to tease out:

  The seasonal song. This is an often complex and sometimes very beautiful song, normally sung by the male during the mating/breeding season to attract
a mate, defend a territory, and continue to claim territory during the nesting/rearing of young. Some think that birds also sing when they are happy, or because they just like to sing. These songs are unique to species, and a practiced ear can tell what bird is singing, even if it is hidden in a leafy spring forest.

  Contact calls, or what I like to call chatter. This is the moment-to-moment communication we hear among birds, both male and female, in flight, while feeding, and in the other activities of the bird day. We pass through all this chatter daily, and if we listen, we will hear that it sometimes changes because of our presence.

  Juvenile begging. If you have ever lived near crows in the summer, you have heard this vocalization. It is a long-drawn-out somewhat annoying sound, often accompanied by a hunched, wing-shivering posture. Some people have a very maternal response to this sound, even when it comes from crows. It is part of the background sound of summer birdlife.

  Alarm calls. These are vocally charged calls in response to a perceived danger. Their pitch and intensity carries beyond the normal baseline bird talk. Alarm calls often signify the presence of a raptor or other predator, and following them can lead to all manner of urban-wild encounters.

  Aggression between birds can also be physical, with a little chest-fluffing and posturing, and is almost always symbolic. It’s in everyone’s best interest to avoid a fight.

  This may all seem like common sense, but until it is laid out in this way, most of us just lump bird vocalizations into a kind of ambient sound, or something pretty and cheering to hear. With just a little attention to nuance, we enter a whole new way of knowing. We find that we are walking not just through movement and sound but through an unfolding story, and we begin to inhabit this story ourselves—to hold one end of this thread that weaves between the birds’ lives and our own.

  Along with these vocal clues, birds employ a physical language understood among themselves and other animals. A single bird’s response to disturbance can resonate far beyond the location of the bird itself, creating a ripple of alarm among nearby creatures. When a person (or a fox or a cat or a raccoon) steps oblivious into a natural area, walking heedlessly, perhaps chatting with a friend, he unwittingly creates what Jon Young aptly calls a bird plow: the birds in his path will fly up and away and lapse into hushed silence; their flight will signal other birds and animals to get out of the area as well. This avian response to human presence seems so normal, and happens so often, that we’ve come to believe it’s just what birds do. We hardly attribute their flying away to our own bungling selves.

  But Young and I discussed the curious reversal of the bird blow in urban places. The birds that are resident in cities are so used to people moving quickly and noisily and fiddling with their phones that they hardly take note of us. If you want to freak out an urban bird, try silently stalking around the sidewalk! I see this in my own backyard, where the resident birds are accustomed to my family’s habits, and to those of our cat. If Delilah is lying about or wandering around the lawn sniffing into the sun, as cats do, the birds take note but keep on with their lives; if she starts crouching and sneaking, the birds sense it right away and fly to a higher perch. (For the protection of birds, Delilah is officially an indoor cat, but she is allowed to sit in the backyard when someone is there to watch her.) If I amble out to sit beneath the wax myrtle with a book of poetry and a glass of lemonade, the chickadees go about their business. If I tiptoe out, they go silent. The goal for an urban birdwatcher is to be calmly natural, not furtive. Some sensitive species always worry over human presence, but if we walk peacefully, mindfully, and in a manner appropriate to the place, then our path—whether it leads through a forest of native trees or the disturbed wilds of an urban neighborhood—will remain alive with birds living in fullness and activity, alert but unafraid.

  While we don’t need to know the names of bird species, it is gratifying to know those of the birds that live near to us, to know, with Hamlet, a “hawk from a handsaw.” Thoreau wrote, “When I know the name of a creature, I find it difficult to see.” This is a pretty, poetic notion—that we can see more, discover more, when our experience of a creature is unmediated by the intellectual dimension of the human mind. But I have never found it to be true (and it is a touch disingenuous coming from Thoreau, who knew well the name of every bird and obsessively learned the scientific name of every organism in his wood). Certainly I’ve been annoyed on birding trips where every participant’s goal seemed to be to name faster than anyone else anything that moved. But when I see a glimpse of yellow-edged fawn-brown tail feathers, and cedar waxwing comes involuntarily to my lips, I feel a peaceful intimacy. I believe it is an act of neighborliness, of politeness, of basic goodwill, of intellectual hospitality to learn about the birds around us, beginning with their names. This bird before me becomes not just a bird, but a particular bird—a yellow warbler, a hermit thrush, a rufous hummingbird—and its presence (or absence) on the electrical wire above my sidewalk speaks to many things: evolution, habitat, communication, migration. As an it, this is just a bird; as a dark-eyed junco, it is a whole world.

  Identifying Birds

  It takes practice to identify birds, but it gets easier as you go. With vision as the dominant human sense, we tend to focus on a bird’s color, which is not always the best place to start. People always wonder if crows are related to blackbirds, the sole connection being that they are both black. But look at the two birds’ beaks: the blackbird’s is long and lovely, with sharp, curving sides characteristic of its family, the icterids, which includes the orioles. One day, a woman I’d never met contacted me about a bird she’d seen. It was a Blackburnian warbler, she told me with an infectious enthusiasm, and she knew it would be of interest since she could see in the field guide that it was an East Coast bird, and here we were in Seattle. I asked her a few questions and guided her to the black-headed grosbeak farther back in the passerine section of her book, a bird that, besides having the same bright orange and black coloring, bears little resemblance to the Blackburnian. Yes, she admitted with good humor, this was the bird. Color is one thing to take into account, but if you are not sure what a bird is, paging through the entire field guide looking for a color match can be rough going. Instead, look at the size of your bird (compare it to a robin), the structure of the bill, the shape of the body, their proportions to one another. See if you can discover what sort of bird it is generally—finch, warbler, woodpecker, duck—and start there in the field guide. If there is a bird in front of you, try not to reach for the field guide too quickly. A mycologist has the luxury of holding a book up and keying out his fungal quarry for hours at a time, and my geologist friend likes to remind me that he can spend thousands of years studying a formation without its changing much, but birds can fly. Seize the moment to take in everything you can about the bird’s physical shape and the uniqueness of its topography: Are there wingbars, eye rings? Is the tail long? Is the bill heavy or slender? Have you seen everything, and is the bird still there? Then make a simple sketch, either in your notebook or in your head. Still there? Well, then you can choose between enjoying it further or finally turning to the guide. Eventually, you will know the birds, not through the effort of identifying each one, but in the sweetest way, by just knowing—seeing a bird from afar and knowing it like you know the shape and way and walk of a friend in the distance before you can see her face. There is a singular comfort in this knowing, a sense of shared belonging.

  Birders, from attentive backyard birders to regional experts, know pretty much every bird they are likely to see around the places that they live. For everyone else, learning even the common birds can seem overwhelming, even impossible. But it’s not. First, arm yourself with a good field guide (and, if possible, a knowledgeable friend), and take some time to learn the five most common birds around your home. I cannot tell you what these are, as they will vary geographically, but in urban places, they are likely to include house sparrows, robins, crows, house finches, starlings, and perhaps c
hickadees. Take some time to learn these birds inside out. Know the subtle female house sparrow, making sure she is not a female house finch. Know the brown plumage and dark bills of juvenile starlings (and if this is difficult, know you are in good company—Darwin often thought young birds, in their more subtle plumages, were separate species), as well as the adults, and know that while they are black birds, they are not blackbirds. Know the robin tip to tail, and if you learn one single bird’s song, learn this one. If you do this, you will be more familiar with birds than 98 percent of Americans.

  To Feed or Not to Feed

  Birdfeeders encourage study and observation that has precious value, but the decision to feed or not to feed is more complex than it seems on the surface. Some things to consider before setting up a birdfeeding station:

  1. Birdfeeders need to be kept scrupulously clean, or the birds that visit them can get very sick. It is not uncommon to see finches with growths on their eyelids (a kind of avian conjunctivitis that leads to blindness and possibly death); sociable birds such as finches and siskins that gather readily at feeders are particularly susceptible to communicable diseases spread at feeders through feces.

  2. The pesticides used on commercial birdseed may be harmful to birds. Since the sunflower and millet used in birdseed is not a human food crop, the regulation of pesticide use is lax.