The Bluebird Effect

by Julie Zickefoose

  Upon graduating college and leaving the last in a series of noisy little apartments in and around Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1981, I promised myself that I would always live in the country, where crickets and katydids, owls and whip-poor-wills would sing me to sleep, and the din of traffic and sirens could fade away into memory. I fetched up on a sanctuary in East Haddam, Connecticut, owned by The Nature Conservancy. To my joy, there were barn swallows nesting in my landlord’s garage. Like my father had, my landlord always left his garage open for the swallows; as one of the founders of The Nature Conservancy, Dick Goodwin lived gently on the earth. But he didn’t much like droppings on the hood of his little pickup truck, so I climbed a ladder and hung an old umbrella upside down under the barn swallows’ nest to catch the mud and droppings. I wanted to improve relations between this venerable conservationist and the birds I loved so much.

  After that simple act, the barn swallows, formerly innocuous neighbors, were deeply suspicious of me. They didn’t like the umbrella so close to their nest, and they remembered who had placed it there. To my dismay, they singled me out for persecution, swooping and clicking their bills next to my ear at the low points of their dives. Kiveet! Kiveet! they’d shrill, and pester me until I drew far enough away from the garage to defuse their aggression. I noted with bemusement that they had no such objection to my landlords; the Goodwins could walk in and out of the garage with impunity. Didn’t the swallows understand that, in hanging the umbrella, I was trying to help them? No, they remembered that I’d climbed up to their nest and hung an oddly shaped thing under it, and they would hold a grudge indefinitely. Or so I thought.

  One afternoon, as the swallows’ chicks were nearing fledging age, I came home to pandemonium in the garage, a ruckus far more frantic than their usual objection to my getting out of my car. The resident swallows, joined by a number of other birds attracted to the commotion, were swooping and calling anxiously. The lanky loops of a five-foot black rat snake slithered smoothly along one high rafter. It was headed for the swallows’ nest, and it would certainly clean out the plump nestlings if they didn’t jump to sure injury on the garage floor below. I sized up the situation and gathered my courage. I’ve never much liked catching large snakes over my head while standing on a ladder. Maybe there’s a word for that little cluster of phobias. Stepnophidiophobia works; I just coined it. If what one is frightened of is truly, ridiculously scary, is it fair to call one’s fear a phobia?

  I ran to the house and grabbed a pillowcase off my bed—always my preferred nonpoisonous-snake-carrying apparatus. I decided that a long-handled iron rake would be handy, too, given the size of the predator and its station high above the garage floor. I tucked the pillowcase into my pants and moved the ladder into position beneath the barn swallow nest. The snake froze, watching me. The swallows ceased their frenetic motion and landed in the rafters, watching the scene in eerie silence. I eased a rake tine into one of the snake’s loops and carefully pulled it away from the rafter. It did not want to give up its perch, but, presented with a choice between coiling around the rake and falling, it chose to follow my suggestion. I lowered the rake into the pillowcase and shook the snake off the tines. A hushed twitter arose from the barn swallows as this icon of pure terror disappeared from view. Still they perched and watched.

  I looked up and made eye contact with the birds. “There. I’ve got him now, and I’m going to take him for a ride down the road. He won’t be back to eat your babies this year.” I knotted the writhing pillowcase, folded the ladder up, and put it away. Still the swallows sat, their eyes glittering as they cocked their heads to watch me go. From that moment on, they never swooped at me again. I could walk beneath their nest with perfect impunity. The umbrella incident was forgotten or perhaps forgiven, replaced in their memory, I believe, with my removal of the snake. Could gratitude be part of a bird’s emotional makeup? It was clear to me now that they could distinguish individual people and remember grievances and kindnesses alike. And, as I was to learn many years later, they could recognize people out of context, far from home.

  I’d lived in the little cottage in Connecticut long enough to have built up some nice compost to use in my garden. I had brilliant jewel-toned nemesia and alyssum, valerian and other early spring flowers in bloom, and I fed them all with a top dressing of rich compost from the pit out back of the garden. There were coffee grounds and lettuce stubs, orange peels and rotten tomatoes, old carrots and cantaloupe and eggshells, to name just a few of the things that, through the magic of decomposition, had become plant food. In the spring, I rarely approached the compost pit without frightening a bird up off the refuse. Female prairie warblers, blue-winged warblers, redstarts, and blue-gray gnatcatchers were among those who haunted the pit. Even the gnatcatchers grubbed around in the compost, but for what?

  I kept bluebird boxes all around the property, and half of them filled up with tree swallows. Early in the spring, I kept spooking tree and barn swallows out of the front flower bed. It’s not often one sees a swallow on the ground, and their presence here was a mystery that needed to be solved. I stationed myself behind the curtain inside and waited for the swallows to alight. The birds weren’t gathering nesting material, as I’d originally suspected. They were trundling around, picking up and avidly eating pieces of eggshell from the compost I’d spread among the flowers. Apparently, birds that feed on flying insects have a high requirement for calcium, and eggshells satisfy that need.

  A light went on in my head. I began saving eggshells and baking them in a low oven until they started to brown around the edges, just to make sure they harbored no harmful bacteria from the eggs. Then I’d spread them on a big flat rock out in the yard, where the swallows had room to approach and take off. There would be no more grubbing in the flower bed for my swallows.

  When we moved to Ohio, in 1992, I brought my eggshell-feeding habit with me. I’d bake the shells, crush them, and spread them on the paving stones that led up to the front door. A small flock of barn swallows keyed in to the bright white offering and put our sidewalk on their feeding route. Years passed and our children were born, and it was time to put in a real sidewalk: a tricycle road, a place to draw with chalk and bounce a basketball. The swallows seemed to like feeding on the wide gray concrete path. When the trike and tractor traffic got too heavy, and the swallows had a hard time settling to feed, we started tossing handfuls of eggshells atop the garage roof. It was the perfect solution, because it gave the birds the remove they needed to feel comfortable while we went about our business in the yard below. Now, we could eat at the picnic table and watch the swallows scuttling around on the garage roof, picking up eggshells and gulping them down.

  The flock has grown, and now there are as many as seventeen barn swallows visiting our garage roof four or more times a day. Over the years, we’ve put many small platforms up under our eaves, trying to entice barn swallows to nest there. One pair built a nest but never laid eggs. The more I watch barn swallows, the more convinced I become that they prefer nesting colonially, in large structures that afford many nest site options. We’d love to leave our garage open for them, but the raccoons would take the invitation just as readily. So try as we might, we’ve never had nesting barn swallows. We have to borrow them from our neighbors.

  It’s been twenty years since we moved to southern Ohio and started building a relationship with area barn swallows. They’ve learned our rhythms, and we’ve learned theirs. From early May to late August, they come in for eggshells first thing in the morning, a couple of times in the afternoon, and at dinnertime, arriving as a flock and leaving together. They come from the northwest and head back the same way. If the eggshells on the garage roof have all been eaten up or washed away by the rain, the swallows swoop conspicuously around the yard until they succeed in catching our attention. We obediently drop whatever we’re doing to replenish the supply. Without much of a stretch, you could call it begging. Starting the lawn mower brings an almost instant escort of swoopi
ng swallows, as they forage for insects that are scared up by the roar and vibration. I’ve yet to figure out how they know I’m mowing. Can they hear it from where they live? And where in the blue yonder do they live? There is a large barn within sight of our home, but there are no swallows using it; the farmer keeps it shut tight all summer until the hay comes in.

  You wouldn’t think it would take a curious amateur ornithologist fifteen years to figure out where a flock of swallows might be coming from. But I figured it out only in August 2007. I was driving along a country road about four miles by car from home. There are two buildings that host barn swallows there: a cow barn and an open machine shed. As I drew alongside the machine shed, I noticed a line of swallows on the wires beside it. There were about twenty birds in the flock. I can’t describe what happened next without raising the hair on the back of my neck. I slowed to a crawl, counting swallows through the windshield. They craned their necks and looked down at me. A jolt of recognition shot through me to them, and back again. “It’s you!”

  As one, the birds lifted off the wire and headed southeast, flying high and strong. A smile spread across my face. I knew where they were going. My old car leapt forward as I gunned the engine. The swallows beat me home and were swooping low over me as I came up the sidewalk. I glanced at the garage roof. The eggshells were almost gone. I took a handful out of the big jar in the garage and threw them with all my might onto the shingles. It felt good to know where my old friends lived.

  Carolina Wren

  Kitchen Sink Ornithology

  LIVING IN THE MIDDLE of nowhere, working from my home studio, I have to confess that I’m fond of e-mail. I’ve got an all-but-defunct account that I check sporadically, just to make sure there’s not something important buried in the piles of spam that drove me away from it in the first place. And there, glimmering in the dross, was a week-old nugget from Louisiana State University’s resident ornithologist-artist John O’Neill, inviting me to show some paintings at an upcoming ornithological meeting. The concept behind the show, he explained, was to showcase work by ornithologists who also paint. My first reaction? He must be thinking of someone else. I’m no ornithologist; I’m a naturalist, a bird painter. But I was touched by the generosity and apparent looseness of John’s definition of an ornithologist, and I gladly accepted his invitation.

  Then I sat back and thought for a bit. Well, maybe I am an ornithologist. I do study birds, each and every day, in between meeting illustration and writing deadlines and fetching Popsicles for the kids. There’s a pair of binoculars in every room of the house, sometimes three, and they are as necessary to my everyday life as water and air. I just had to interrupt this sentence to train them on a female Blackburnian warbler in the birch outside the studio window. To find a pen and write that arrival down in my nature notes.

  This, I think, is the heart of science. Seeing a Blackburnian warbler is nice, but it really doesn’t mean much unless I write it down. (May 18, 2009. Arrived: Female Blackburnian in the birches. Had seen only males until today.) Suddenly, there’s context and meaning in this chance observation. Male Blackburnians come through first, a week or two before the females. When I start seeing females of these northern nesters on the move, I know spring migration is winding down. But I wouldn’t know that if I hadn’t been watching and writing for thirty years.

  Nothing is beneath an alert naturalist’s notice. There is always something new to be discovered, some context that will make a birding experience more meaningful. Since my childhood in the suburbs of Richmond, Virginia, I have loved Carolina wrens. Their ringing duets and spritely movements straight-arm winter away. Even those who love them may not know that these little birds are the only species of a large tropical genus, Thryothorus, that makes it up into the States. Go to Costa Rica, Brazil; watch the riverside wren, the buff-breasted wren, and see if those white eyebrows and brilliant melodies strike a familiar note. Like their tropical congeners, Carolina wrens stay in pairs the year around, and they holler back and forth to each other through the dense underbrush, often duetting, their notes so closely spaced that they seem to come from a single bird: a single bird with two heads, ten yards apart. It’s a great way to stay in touch when you can’t see each other, the avian equivalent of a cell phone.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Grubbing around for wood roaches. And you?”

  “Not much. Just wanted to hear your voice.”

  “Well, I’m here, but I may flit up to check the nest now.”

  “Need company?”

  “Sure.”

  So might go the conversations of mated pairs of Thryothorus wrens the New World over.

  As an AWOL undergraduate and field assistant at the National Institute of Amazonian Research (INPA) in Manaus, Brazil, I sometimes had the unhappy duty of preparing study skins of birds that had been mist-netted in various types of rainforest habitats. Tears mingled with powdered borax as I raced the equatorial heat to skin, preserve, stuff, and sew up the feathered pelts of the euphonias, antbirds, woodcreepers, manakins, wrens, and others that the graduate student to whom I was indentured was collecting. As I skinned and sorted through the organs of these tropical birds, I noticed things, things I could never have learned without opening stomachs and skulls. And, being a naturalist at heart, I couldn’t help but be fascinated, and add what I observed to the body of knowledge I was building about the birds on the wing. Cleaning the skulls of various species of Thryothorus wrens, I noticed that they are very brainy birds. Though I never weighed or measured, they seemed to have almost twice the brain mass that a sparrow of similar body size might. Over the years, I’ve seen ample evidence of this braininess in their everyday behavior.

  When we moved to our southeast Ohio property, in 1992, we had no nesting Carolina wrens. We’d hear them singing in back of some of the broken-down outbuildings on the road to our place, but our lone house on its naked lawn held little allure for these denizens of underbrush and toolshed. Not until we planted shrubs and trees, not until the orchard grew up to briar and rose, not until the white-footed mice chewed portals in the scabrous wooden garage door were we graced with Carolina wrens. This took eight years, a little planting, and much laziness on our part.

  In the summer of 2001, I watched our pioneering pair of Carolina wrens raise their first brood in a rotted stump in the orchard. To my delight, they then began prospecting in the garage. I’d see them flutter up whenever I’d enter the garage and assume they’d blundered in by chance. Slow to catch on, and thinking they were trapped inside, I kept hoisting the heavy door open for them, until I saw one cock its tail, look me in the eye, bob once, and slip out a mousehole in the closed door. They had figured out where the entrance was long before I had.

  By then, it was June, and the black rat snakes were active, and the wrens may have judged the garage a bad risk for eggs and young. I saw one trying to wedge rootlets and leaves in the kink of a gutter pipe under the house eave, right by the front door. The nesting material kept falling down. “Hold on. I can help,” I said to the wren. “You just watch.” And it waited on the gutter as I ran for a stepladder, some wire, and a little copper bucket. I wedged the pail atop the gutter pipe and wired it securely under the eave, with just an inch or two clearance, weatherproof and snakeproof. The wren watched. Even as I was climbing down the ladder, I saw it fly to the bucket, peek inside, fly down to strip the moss from the bases of my bonsai trees, and begin filling the pail with nesting material. The pair worked furiously, and by nightfall they had a nest roughed out in its copper bottom.

  I watched and wrote, climbed up to the bucket to peer inside. Even amateur ornithologists should confirm their suspicions. A wren brought a tiny spider to the nest on the morning of June 16. Out came the stepladder. Four new pink hatchlings writhed in the nest. The Birds of North America, my favorite comprehensive life-history reference, cites the average age of fledging as 12.2 days in Alabama, with a range from 10 to 16 days. I watched, waited, wrote. On the morning of
July 4, at the ripe age of 19 days, four fledgling Carolinas made minor ornithological history as they leapt from the bucket, three days behind the latest recorded fledging.

  There was more to learn. With the 2002 nesting season, I had another surprise coming. I knew that thryothorine wrens were thought to be monogamous, year-round. The ornithological term is genetic monogamy. In other words, they’re programmed on the cellular level to be faithful. I always saw the pair together as they foraged, in snow or sun. They roosted in the bucket or the garage all winter, protected from the elements. They built a nest in a plastic grocery bag hanging from a nail in the garage, laying two eggs by March 25. Peace reigned. Then, on March 29, 2002, a third wren appeared in our yard. This event was heralded by furious singing. Two wrens rolled on the ground, ferociously pecking at each other’s vents (ouch!) and clutching each other’s faces with sharp claws. A third bird stood to the side, singing vigorously. I watched, fascinated, ready to intervene should the fight prove deadly. All three disappeared behind the garage. Quiet fell. The interloper, apparently alone, was vanquished, or so I thought.

  A week later, the two eggs were still cold in the garage nest. Then, on April 11, I spooked an incubating female off a second nest in the mess I call my recycling center, really just a mound of plastic grocery bags full of other plastic grocery bags. Four eggs hatched on April 26, the young wrens soon peering, bright-eyed, from their plastic-insulated lair as I went to and from my car. At the same time, only fifty feet away, I saw one of the wrens begin to refurbish the old bucket nest under the eave. Well, maybe the male is going to use that for a roost, I thought. Wrong. On May 5, I saw an adult take a tiny spider to the bucket. Hold on a minute. There was an active nest with nine-day-old young in the garage! Out came the stepladder. Five tiny new hatchlings writhed in the bucket nest. A huge grin spread across my face. I had seen the male wren take food into the garage, return to the mealworm feeder, and take food to the bucket nest. That third wren that showed up at the end of March must have been a lone female. He was hosting two females on two nests at the same time!