The Birds and the Beasts Were There

by Margaret Millar

  I was propping the note on his bedside table when he suddenly let out a loud groan and rolled over on his back.

  “Don’t wake up,” I said. “I’m just going to school.”

  “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “Not to me.”

  To me it was the beginning of a new day. As I backed the car out the driveway I felt curious and excited and a little nervous. It was like being eighteen again, on my way to my first class in Greek at the University of Toronto, but there was one big difference. This time I wasn’t going because it was the thing to do, or in order to please someone else or even to educate myself to earn a living. This time I was going for the most important reason of all: I wanted to learn.

  There is surely nothing more discouraging to the new bird watcher than the sight of a thousand gulls on a beach at low tide. This is especially true in an area that’s frequented by a dozen different kinds of gull, nearly all of which change plumage every year for the first four years. Some also change bill and leg color every year, and still others show seasonal changes in plumage.

  No matter how often I shifted position and readjusted my bin­oculars, the gulls on the beach that morning all looked exactly alike to me.

  Fortunately for my morale, there were other birds in the slough more easily identifiable: a dozen great blue herons, some snowy and common egrets and a black-necked stilt. The herons and egrets ignored me but the stilt pegged me as an intruder and an­nounced my presence with earsplitting cries while he flew over my head, his long black beak sticking straight out in front and his improbable long pink legs sticking straight out behind.

  The new bird watcher often thinks that the birds he or she identifies at the beginning are those which are common in that particular region. The very first identification of a friend of mine was a wood duck at the local Bird Refuge. She assumed that this species was as common as some of the others that hung around the refuge—coots, ruddy ducks, mallards, cinnamon teal. Five years have passed and she’s still searching for another wood duck. My experience with the black-necked stilt wasn’t quite so extreme, but I didn’t find a second one for almost a year.

  A stilt, poised in a shallow pool on his incredible legs, looks so beautiful and so gentle that one isn’t prepared for his loud, pierc­ing shriek. Many shore birds have noisy calls—gulls and terns, godwits and willets come first to my mind—perhaps because they must make themselves heard above the constant sound of the sea and the wind. Ken and I spend much time on our beach and there are very few days in the year when the tide is low enough, the waves small enough and the wind soft enough for us to be able to converse in normal voices. At the beach, if you want to be heard, you scream. So does the stilt.

  The stilt’s manner of flying is also in contrast to his voice. It is rather slow and dignified. I was watching him in flight when a car drove up and parked beside the bridge where I was standing; and a small slender man stepped out. I recognized Mr. Rett, the in­structor, but he didn’t recognize me and I hardly expected him to—at least thirty people had signed up for the class the previous day, all but two of them women.

  Mr. Rett, too, focused his binoculars on the stilt. Neither of us said anything. Watching the stilt together seemed the only form of communication necessary. When Mr. Rett finally spoke it was not to me in my language, but to the stilt in his: “Key up, key up, key up.”

  The startled bird paused above our heads and hovered for a moment with his legs dangling like strands of pink rope frayed at the end to form a foot and knotted in the middle to simulate a knee. (The Greek word himas, meaning thong, forms the basis for his scientific name, Himantopus mexicanus.) Then, with one final cry, the stilt took off over the bridge toward the other end of the slough. It was only after he had landed out of our sight that Mr. Rett turned to me.

  “Are you in my class?”

  “Yes.” I told him my name.

  “Margaret Millar,” he repeated, watching me carefully as though making sure he would remember what species I belonged to. “You’re early.”

  “I wanted to do some extra work on shore birds.”

  “Extra work?” Now he was really staring at me. “Where do you teach?”

  “Why do you assume I teach anywhere?”

  “Most of the class does. These field courses in natural history are set up for teachers to earn a couple of quick credits without interfering with the regular summer session. No exams are given. All you have to do to get a B in this course is to keep breathing.”

  “I’d like an exam,” I said, “and the chance to work for an A.”

  “You mean you signed up because you’re interested in birds?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  It was such a shock to his nervous system that he completely forgot my name and kept referring to me for the next two weeks as Mrs. Whatchamacallit-who’s-interested-in-birds.

  Few teachers have either the desire or the opportunity to live their subjects. The man who conducts classes in Shakespeare may frequently quote the bard but he doesn’t talk in iambic pentame­ters and wear long hair and a pointed beard. But for Mr. Rett birds were not only a livelihood, they were a life. He had been in mu­seum work since his early teens. He was now in his sixties, a very small, spare man who bore a certain physical resemblance to a bird. He was light on his feet and his movements were quick and precise. Sometimes on very early morning field trips when he was hunched inside his sheepskin jacket he looked like a sparrow who had fluffed out his feathers to insulate himself against the cold.

  In the midst of a conversation with people about birds, he would suddenly switch and start talking about people to birds. When he called them, they would answer. Hot, dry stretches of mountainside that seemed too desolate to support any kind of existence would suddenly come alive with the exuberant ringing of wrentits or the fretful duckings and mutterings of California quail, or the clear, haunting octaves of a canon wren.

  Of all western bird songs, the canon wren’s must surely be the one that everyone notices and remembers, even tone-deaf nature haters. The first time I heard it was when Mr. Rett took the class on a walk through the Botanic Garden, sixty acres in the foothills above the Old Mission, planted entirely with native California trees and shrubs and flowers.

  It was the last week in July. A trickle of water was still running in Mission Creek and the garden was lush and green. Mr. Rett kept pointing out birds but I was still having trouble using the binoculars and the field guide, as well as the check list Mr. Rett had given to each of us. I spent most of my time trying to focus the binoculars, looking at the check list and the index of the field guide and shouting, “Where? What tree? What kind of bird? I don’t see any—”

  When I had finally located the bird and attempted to match him up with his picture in the book, Mr. Rett and I were a quarter of a mile apart. In the intervening space the rest of the group were strung out like mismatched beads.

  Some of the types I was to meet on many future birding trips were represented in the class. There were the Eaters, and though they carried binoculars, field guides, notebooks and extra sweaters and sun hats, they always managed to hold a sandwich. There were also the Talkers, and though some of them looked quite young in years, their life histories already seemed inordinately long.

  Then there were the Shutterbugs, a busy lot indeed. They took pictures of the Old Mission and the Old Mission dam, each other, members of the class getting into cars and getting out of cars, Mr. Rett pointing west, Mr. Rett pointing south, Mr. Rett pointing east by northeast. A person examining the entire collection of pictures taken during those two weeks would be lucky if he found a single clue that the class was about birds.

  Such a group would have proved most disheartening to Mr. Rett as a teacher if he had taken it seriously, so he didn’t. At least he didn’t until that morning at the Botanic Garden when he stopped at
the bridge over the creek. Three members of the class stopped with him—myself, out of breath from sprinting to catch up after the last pause, a shutterbug who used the bridge railing to park her gear while she changed film, and a little old lady I couldn’t remem­ber seeing the previous day. She had a soft, benevolent smile and pure white hair which was drawn back in a simple bun at the nape of her neck. She wore a khaki skirt, a long-sleeved plaid cotton shirt with matching hat and a pair of navy blue sneakers. It was the kind of versatile outfit an outdoor person needs to be com­fortable in our area where there is a wide range of temperature in any twenty-four hour period—a cold, foggy dawn, a hot noon sun, a brisk sea wind in the afternoon.

  She also wore, suspended on a strap from her right shoulder, a leather bag where she kept some obviously old, German-made binoculars and a field guide protected by a plastic wrapper. Across the top of the wrapper, in black marking pencil, was printed the word beals. The make and condition of her binoculars, if nothing else, should have tipped Mr. Rett off. Perhaps a succession of Eaters, Talkers and Shutterbugs had dulled his perceptions. Any­way, he was unprepared for beals.

  “There used to be a canon wren living around these boulders,” Mr. Rett said. “Let’s see if he’s still here.”

  He whistled the wren’s song and the sound of it was so pierc­ingly beautiful that even some of the Talkers paused to listen. A few seconds later Mr. Rett’s answer came from the creek.

  The degree of success in translating a bird song into human syllables depends on the listening ear, certainly, but also on the song itself. That of the yellow warbler sounds to my ears like see see see see, witty me. But even in the case of a simple song like this one, there are differences in the ways it is translated by various people: R. T. Peterson hears it as tsee-tsee-tsee-tsee-titi-wee, George Gladden as sweet, sweet, sweet, sweeter, sweeter, Ralph Hoffman as tsee, tsee, tsee, tsitsi wee see.

  In the case of a much more complicated song like the canon wren’s, the range of differences widens. Peterson calls it “a gushing cadence of clear curved notes tripping down the scale,” with which I agree; but then he interprets it as te-you, te-you, te-you tew tew tew, which is surely inadequate. Hoffman despaired of translation and used description instead: “. . . the cañon wren pours out a cascade of sweet liquid notes, like the spray of a waterfall in sunshine.” Perhaps W. L. Dawson gives the best impression of the song, not in the syllables he chose, which seem more pharmaceuti­cal than faithful, but in the way he wrote them:

  cuick

  cuick

  cuick

  para

  para

  goric

  goric

  goric poozt teetl

  Mr. Rett kept imitating the canyon wren in an attempt to bring him out into the open where we could all see him. The trick didn’t work that day, and the little singer remained hidden behind his boulder. (This same boulder is the site of a wrenery every spring, and if you’re lucky, you can catch the young ones in the act of practicing their songs.)

  Meanwhile another small brownish bird landed on a sycamore branch hanging out over the water. Merely the way it sat, motionless, erect, alert, would have indicated to a novice bird watcher that it was a flycatcher. But I wasn’t even a novice yet, and all it meant to me was one more clumsy search through the field guide for one more small brownish bird.

  Mr. Rett identified it, for anyone who was interested, as a Traill’s flycatcher.

  Immediately beals lowered her binoculars and raised her eye­brows. “It’s an Empidonax, certainly. But Traill’s?—how can you be sure?”

  For a few seconds Mr. Rett looked too stunned to reply. Then he said, “I know a Traill’s when I see one.”

  “Really? Some people, some quite knowledgeable people, in fact, are content to call the whole group Empidonax and let it go at that.”

  She turned away with an elaborate shrug. It was the kind of gesture I’d seen performed in court when a lawyer was attempting to cast doubt in the minds of the jury about a witness’s credibility.

  The jury, in this case, wasn’t paying much attention. Some were out to lunch, some were discussing more important topics such as themselves, and the two lone men in the group had found a sunny redwood bench to sprawl out on and were, to all intents and purposes, asleep. That left me, still plodding through the field guide in search of small brownish birds. I was beginning to suspect that the day was still far distant when I could pronounce and spell Empidonax let alone identify one. Obviously I needed a system, some way of knowing which of the sixty color plates in the book would most likely contain the bird I was searching for. (During the first year of bird watching, my field guide was reduced to a handful of loose, limp sheets of paper. The one I’m currently using is my third.)

  My efforts, involving as they did considerable paper-rattling, groans of frustration and muttered maledictions, did not go un­noticed.

  “What on earth are you doing?” Mrs. Beals said.

  “Trying to find a picture of that bird.”

  “What bird?”

  I couldn’t point, since by this time the bird had moved. I couldn’t remember the word Empidonax and it would have been rather tactless to call it a Traill’s flycatcher, so I said, “The one Mr. Rett believed to be a Traill’s flycatcher.”

  “Why shouldn’t he believe it ? It was.”

  “But you—”

  “Even the experts must be kept on their toes. Unless they’re challenged now and then, they tend to get sloppy or take things for granted.”

  It turned out that Marie Beals was something of an expert her­self: at her place on Long Island she had banded more than 15,000 birds!

  Mrs. Beals pointed out to me my basic mistake. For every min­ute I spent studying a bird, I was spending ten minutes looking at the book.

  “Try reversing this. You’ll have plenty of time later to study the book. It won’t fly away. The bird will.”

  In fact, it already had. But a minute later I located it on the jutting branch of an elderberry.

  “Now,” Mrs. Beals said, “suppose you look at the bird not as an object that must be matched up with a picture in a book, but as a living creature intent on survival. What is he doing?”

  “Well, he seems to be staring down at the water at his own reflection.”

  “Nonsense. Only human beings have time to waste admiring themselves. He is looking for food. Among the smaller birds, the search for food occupies most of their waking hours. The next time you hear the expression, ‘to eat like a bird,’ remember that a robin can eat sixteen feet of earthworms in a day. It would be much simpler for him,” she added thoughtfully, “if he could eat one earthworm sixteen feet long, but perhaps that wouldn’t be so pleasant for the rest of us. It would certainly cause a sharp de­crease in the number of home gardeners.”

  The bird, meanwhile, had sallied forth, picked a small dragonfly off the surface of the water and returned to its perch. I watched him while Mrs. Beals explained that the first thing I should do when I encountered a new bird was to notice the shape and size of his bill because this indicated what type of food he was best equipped to eat. The thin bill of the little flycatcher wasn’t in­tended to crush seeds like the short bill of the even littler Oregon junco who’d come down to the creek to bathe. In general, she said, insect eaters like flycatchers, warblers, thrushes and wrens had thin bills, while seed eaters like finches and grosbeaks and buntings had thick bills.

  It was the kind of simple basic lesson I needed and wanted, but a long time was to elapse before I automatically looked first at the bill of a new bird.

  By now, Mr. Rett was some hundred yards ahead of us. As Mrs. Beals and I hurried to catch up with him, I asked her why she had signed up for the course. She explained that she had just moved to Santa Barbara and wanted to find out about our best birding areas, and, since she didn’t drive, ways of reaching them and people to
go with. On this last score, she indicated, the class was a big disap­pointment—as far as the members were concerned, it could just as well have been a course in skin diving or diamond cutting; none of them paid the least attention. I clued her in, as gently as possible, to the fact that the class was for credits, not condors or cranes.

  Mr. Rett hadn’t missed our company. We found him sitting on a boulder, talking to a small yellowish bird that was moving impa­tiently through the narrow grey leaves of a low-growing shrub. Mrs. Beals identified the bird for me as a yellowthroat and the shrub as a variety of buckwheat.

  It was a charming scene, the little man and the little bird en­gaged in earnest conversation.

  “Check.”

  “Double check.”

  “ChecK, checK, checK, checK, checK.”

  What they were saying, I don’t know. But I like to think that I was witnessing something more than just a man imitating a bird. (This scolding or protest note of the yellowthroat, which sounds like checK to me, Dawson translates as wzschthub. Try saying this with your mouth full of peanut butter—it’s the only way to do it.)

  At the time of this writing, a pair of yellowthroats are the star boarders at our feeding station. Although these are birds of the marsh and tule, the salicornia and slough, they can also be birds of the porch and the ledge or any other place where they’re able to cadge their favorite food, doughnuts. When the larger birds like the jays, thrashers and flickers, and the flocking ones like the cowbirds, house finches and white-crowned sparrows, have finished eating and deserted the premises for a while, the smaller and more solitary birds start to appear, normally singly, sometimes in pairs: the wrentit, the orange-crowned warbler, the Lincoln sparrow, the Bewick’s wren, and of course, the yellowthroat. We usually see the male first. His black mask edged with white may serve as effective camouflage among the lights and shadows of a tule marsh, but on our ledge he is as conspicuous as a butterfly in a bathtub.