The Urban Bestiary

by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

  3. Feeding birds attracts alleged vermin. The inexpensive seed we buy at the hardware store is full of filler in the form of millet that most birds toss away as they try to get to the good stuff—the larger sunflower and other seeds or nuts in the feed. The throwaway seed on the ground (as well as the seed in the feeders) draws rats, mice, squirrels, raccoons, starlings, house sparrows, and pigeons.

  4. Birdfeeders attract predators who want to eat little birds. Cats and sharp-shinned hawks make them regular hangouts.

  5. Birdseed is expensive. The typical birdfeeding household spends over $100 a year on seed. Birds are just as happy with natural birdfeeders in the form of garden sunflowers, fennel gone to seed, and especially native plants and trees that provide flowers, fruits, and seeds evolutionarily suited to local birdlife.

  Taking all this into account, I have struck a compromise by keeping just three small feeders attached to my study window by suction cups: a hummingbird feeder, a sunflower seed feeder, and a recently added suet feeder (which draws several species that weren’t attracted by the seed feeder, including bushtits, woodpeckers, and various warblers). I can fill the feeders easily just by reaching out the open window, and extra seed drops into the planter box beneath the window, so I can clean it up easily. These feeders are small enough to discourage large birds, and placed high enough on the windows that rodents, including the nimble squirrels that race up and down the nearby cypress, can’t reach them easily (and cats can’t reach them at all). The opportunity such feeders bring for detailed study is unparalleled, and having so many native neighborhood birds visit me continually (and just inches from my nose) as I sit working at my desk is a source of constant delight.

  After learning the first five birds, make an effort to learn twenty more—the next twenty most common birds seen around your home and neighborhood. Even if you live in downtown LA, there will be twenty. (For perspective, I have seen nearly ninety species just from our urban yard, and I see about twenty of these regularly without lifting my bum from the chair in which I now sit.) Twenty is a perfectly reasonable number of birds, not large, yet potentially life-changing. Again, I cannot tell you what they will be. They will likely include flickers, some species of hummingbirds, perhaps a variety of duck, goose, or gull. I have Steller’s jays and chestnut-backed chickadees; you may have birds that are common near you but that I will never see in Seattle—blue jay, tufted titmouse, cardinal. It is good to know the first five birds, but in the next twenty species lie the secrets of the urban wilds.

  On my desk is a calendar open to a page for the day. On that page, I list, alongside appointments, reminders, and to-dos, the birds that I see every day through my study window while I sit there, thinking and writing. Rather than distracting me, this little list engages me, daily, with life beyond my window, beyond myself. It heightens my attentiveness. It keeps me happy while I work, and it keeps me aware of the presence and seasonality of birds. The warblers that arrive in April, the cedar waxwings in autumn, the young chickadees begging as they shake their wings today, in mid-July. I add their names to my page in green ink. And it makes me realize just how present, changing, and wild my home field can be. Once we can identify some of them, keeping track of the bird species seen in a given place or over a certain amount of time is a simple way of engaging with the birdlife around us.* Lists are a lovely way to cultivate an attunement to a place—a seasoned sense of what to look for, and when, and where; to be expectant, and sometimes surprised. It is in this light that I also keep a list of all the bird species seen in our yard. All of the usual birds have long since been spotted, so any new bird is a small celebration and a reminder that even in the diminished urban wild, anything can happen.

  Birders are criticized, mimicked, and belittled for their monomaniacal focus. But surely there is far more useless knowledge to be had. There is much to be said for knowing a bird, its name, something of its life, at a glance. I am not arguing that we should all become expert birders, just that we might begin to know the birds, a little, and in the way that makes sense within the round of our individual lives and homes. I like to think that such knowing is a kind of gracious hosting, one that enriches not only our own lives, but also the lives of birds. What is it that we know? The mingled spiral of our lives—human and nonhuman, flesh and feather. How wonderful that something like everyday birdwatching, an activity that stands so far outside of the consumer-economic model of value, has meaning still. My little daydream is that we will all live in urban communities where a person saying, “I saw a hermit thrush this morning, the first one I’ve ever seen at our house,” will be met with more than a blank stare. The kind of community where the hearer, though she’s not a birder, just a neighbor, might still know this bird and what it means, and will perhaps share a bird visitation of her own.

  Starling, House Sparrow, Pigeon

  Duality, Humanity, and the Nonnative Triumvirate

  Last summer, we had a new roof put on our house. Our roofline is complicated, and the job took nearly a week to complete. One day while the roofers were there and I was out working at a café to escape the noise, two voice messages were left on my mobile phone. They were from the owner of the roofing company, and the first said, “Hi, Lyanda, we found a nest full of baby birds in the cornice and wonder what we should do.” Then the second: “Well, we made a house for the little birds so they wouldn’t die in the sun and put it on your house, close to where the nest was. It’s not a very good house because we didn’t have proper materials, so I’m sorry about that.” I listened to the messages, smiled at the thoughtfulness of the roofers, and wondered just how horrible this ramshackle birdhouse was going to be. But when I got home, I found the cutest nest box, neatly made, with a leather hinge to open the box and a perch for the parent birds. The roofers happily showed me photos they’d taken of the process—muscly, large-handed men delicately lifting the tiny birds and their mess of nest stuffs into the new box. How good of them to take time out of the hot day and their busy job to take care of these birds.

  The nestlings are, of course, house sparrows, sometimes called English sparrows, an introduced species, an urban invasive, and one of the most ecologically despised of all North American birds. Bluebird advocates in particular hate the sparrows for attacking bluebirds and evicting them from their nests, and they recommend lethal control for the sparrows. One intrepid elder in the movement catches them in a live trap, then cuts their heads off with her kitchen scissors.

  House sparrows join European starlings and rock pigeons to form a triumvirate of ubiquitous and disdained nonnative urban birds. These species are complex and confusing in their duality. They are, of course, far outside their places of origin and so in the ecological sense all wrong. And yet they are birds. As individual birds, they are—well, they are just birds, with no moral rightness or wrongness inherent. They are both ecologically disastrous and biologically perfect. And in light of their presence, our human responsibility is likewise complicated. We have two tasks, seemingly at odds, but I think intimately related:

  We are obligated, I believe, to learn from them. A house sparrow might not be valuable or desirable as an ecological member of the local avifauna, but as an Old World sparrow, it is a nifty little bird, offering a window into the well-kept secrets of birdlife.

  We are obligated to do all we can to limit their populations and keep them from taking over the earth.

  I use the word obligated, which sounds stern, and uninspiring, and little fun. But I think of this obligation as a creative one, rooted in the Latin obligare, “to bind.” We are bound, twined, wrapped together, obligated in a rich mutuality to the natural community. And when something goes awry, as in the proliferation of the sparrow? Then we are bound in the context we find ourselves to mine it for its value, to correct it as we are able. Each of the birds in this chapter of the bestiary—pigeon, starling, and house sparrow—brings something of value to the observer. It may be a sidelong, dark-clouded sort of value, and yet we begin where we ar
e, with what is in front of us.

  The presence of all three of these species in North America is interwoven with European settlement. Every urban pigeon in this country is considered a feral bird, descended from domestic stock brought over by settlers for food as early as 1600. The historical relationship between humans and pigeons is profound. We know from Egyptian hieroglyphics and Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets that pigeons have been domesticated for more than five thousand years—along with poultry, this is the longest known cohabitation between humans and birds. Because their history is so twined with our own, it is not possible to know with certainty the rock pigeon’s native wild range, though it is believed in general to be North Africa and parts of Eurasia. Perhaps because of pigeons’ connection with human sustenance and their long history in North America, pigeon presence is taken as a given, an inevitability. People may dislike urban pigeons, but they don’t spend a lot of time condemning previous generations of immigrants for bringing them here. The introduction of starlings and house sparrows is far more contentious.

  Regarding the starling, some blame Shakespeare. It could not have been intentional on the part of the Bard, but one small hint of a bird in Henry IV appears to be the basis for one of the most successful and devastating avian introductions in North American history. It is a pivotal scene: King Henry demands that the headstrong soldier Hotspur release his prisoners, but Hotspur refuses to do so until the king agrees to pay the ransom that will free Hotspur’s brother-in-law Mortimer from the enemy. The king flies into a rage, forbidding Hotspur to mention Mortimer’s name. After the king’s exit, Hotspur speaks a quiet rant:

  He said he would not ransom Mortimer;

  Forbad my tongue to speak of Mortimer;

  But I will find him when he lies asleep,

  And in his ear I’ll holloa, “Mortimer!”

  Nay,

  I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak

  Nothing but “Mortimer,” and give it him

  To keep his anger still in motion.

  These lines appear in James Edmund Harting’s 1871 labor of love The Ornithology of Shakespeare, in which every bird mentioned in the whole of the Shakespearean canon is listed, along with the quotation in which it appears and the citation for the play or poem. The Bard had an ear for birdlife; there are larks and nightingales and chaffinches aplenty, winging and singing their way through the sonnets, the comedies, the tragedies. But there is just this one slender starling.

  In the mid-1800s, various naturalist and avian-acclimatization societies began to form in the eastern states with the goal of establishing European species in the New World. In 1871, the American Acclimatization Society incorporated in New York, its mission proclaimed in its bylaws: “the introduction and acclimatization of such foreign varieties of the animal and vegetable kingdom as may be useful or interesting.” Useful or interesting was interpreted broadly. Most of the literature tells us that English sparrows were brought over to eat insect pests, but the broader hope at the time was that they, along with the thousands of other individuals of nearly twenty different species that were released, would comfort human settlers from England with their cheerful presence, a reminder of the birds from home. There were literary aspirations as well, and when the zealous Eugene Schieffelin joined the group, he found an organization that matched his love of Shakespeare and that supported his glowing wish to bring every bird mentioned in the Shakespeare canon to the pale New World, with its substandard, unliterary avifauna. Schieffelin was an eccentric (some conservation biologists say lunatic) who raised a king’s ransom to purchase eighty starlings from England in 1890. He met their ship at the dock. It was a cold, snowy day in March when Schieffelin, along with the servants he’d enlisted to help, carried the cages full of starlings into Central Park. Attempts to acclimatize larks, nightingales, and chaffinches had all failed, and two earlier starling releases were unsuccessful; perhaps Schieffelin whispered something like a prayer in his quirky heart for the starlings’ well-being before letting them go. The starlings were likely still stressed from their journey; this release could not have been the romantic bursting into flight that Schieffelin had surely imagined. The birds would have walked uncertainly about in the unwelcoming snow before finally flying, as quiet as starlings can be, into the maple branches. Today there are an estimated two hundred million European starlings in North America, and modern DNA testing confirms that they are all related to those snowy Central Park birds.

  I love this story. Starlings are an ecological disaster, to be sure, a cautionary tale about what can happen when humans meddle with the ways of nature, the distribution of creatures. But the combination of love, fetishism, birds, literature, and tragically misguided intent is so richly human. We can all find ourselves, our lives, our human condition in this flawed man, these unwanted birds.

  In the fall and winter, we see their great flocks. The young have grown, and the breeding territories have broken down. The birds gather to feed, and then to roost, in murmurations (the rather poetic name for starling flocks, a reference to the thrumming of wing and voice accompanying their movements) that typically include hundreds of birds but may grow to include tens or even hundreds of thousands of starlings. As with other birds that flock, starlings gather for communication, foraging, and protection from predators. The movements of starling clouds are precise, quick, fluid, and mesmerizing; they remain a mystery to ornithologists.

  Historical range expansion of the starling

  Current starling distribution in north America

  The spread of starlings and house sparrows was swift, and complete. Both species were happy to live as human commensals, already accustomed to human habitation in their native Europe; they quickly colonized places that other birds avoided, those around human homes and towns, urban and rural. Starlings and house sparrows meet every criterion for successful invasion: they reproduce prolifically (with two or more clutches per season, and five or more birds per clutch); they fledge quickly and achieve sexual maturity before they are nine months old; they are not picky about where they nest and will fiercely defend their chosen site; their food sources are readily available and widespread; they are inquisitive and will eagerly explore and colonize new places. House sparrows fly down New York subway stairs for potato chips and stay to nest on the ledges. They nest in Death Valley at 280 feet below sea level, and in the Rockies at altitudes of over 10,000 feet. (In Yorkshire, they reportedly lived in a mine shaft 2,100 feet belowground, where the miners fed and befriended them.)

  House sparrows were once the most hated of introduced birds. Now that starlings are just as common in urban places, most people focus their wrath upon these larger, more conspicuous, and supposedly more aggressive birds (or on the calmer-but-poopier pigeons). In fact, though the house sparrow is one of the most ubiquitous birds in the country and on the earth, and though they are loud and stocky and busy from morning until night and in all seasons, in modern urbania, most of us pay little attention to these birds, or even consciously recognize their presence. I made a bet with myself, which I won, that if I polled my sweet but slightly overeducated friends, almost none of them would know exactly which little city bird is a house sparrow (more stringent studies by others bear out my findings on a wider scale). Both sexes are stocky and feathered in drab gray-brown, with plain, unmarked breasts (female house sparrows and house finches are often confused; the latter have heavily brown-streaked breasts). Females have a buffy stripe across the eye, and males have a gray cap, black throat, gray-white cheek, and a rich rufous nape.

  House sparrow taxonomy is fraught with misinformation. All of the native sparrows in North America are New World sparrows, and because of the word sparrow in the house sparrow’s official common name, and because the birds are sparrow-size and their feathers are shades of sparrow-brown, they are generally considered to be in the New World sparrow group. For years, informed birders have known that this was erroneous, and they believed them to be, as had been long taught, a species of
Old World finch related to the weavers. Images of the handily knit weaver nests were displayed in books and museums alongside the tangled nests of house sparrows, apparent evidence of the connection. But more recent DNA and hybridization studies demonstrate that house sparrows are Old World sparrows of the family Passeridae. There is one more in North America—the much less common Eurasian tree sparrow, introduced at about the same time as the house sparrow, and for the same reasons.

  Starlings are easier to identify than house sparrows, but there is still plenty of confusion—I’m often asked whether they are blackbirds, or even baby crows. They are actually members of the Old World Sturnidae family, a group of gregarious, terrestrial songbirds that globally includes many other starling species and the mynas. Our European starlings are a shimmering, iridescent purple-black, and in the breeding season, their plumage is edged in gold. While most birds molt into a nonbreeding plumage, the starling’s is acquired by wear—the more delicate gold tips wear off over the course of the summer, leaving the starlings a drabber but still pretty black in fall and winter. The bill is bright golden, and though the males and females are alike, you can actually tell them apart by a patch of blue or pink at the base of the bill—blue for boys, pink for girls. The testosterone-imbued males also strut a bit more and have longer spiky feathers under their necks that fluff when they sing to attract a mate.

  If you call it singing. The irony was not lost on anyone: among the many species the societies attempted to introduce so that, as the Cincinnati Acclimatization Society put it, “the ennobling influence of the song of birds will be felt by the inhabitants,” the only two whose introductions were actually successful were the two that, though they vocalize loudly, do not produce any kind of melodious song. Why the settlers could not have simply come to enjoy the native birds is an obvious question, but solace in the familiar is a potent psychological force.