Melanie had the stamina to continue her dazzling display indefinitely. Her span of concentration, however, was short and it was only a matter of time before she got tired of the game. The question was, at what point would she quit, before she dropped the key ring, or after?
The question was soon answered. One moment my key ring was glinting in the sunlight, the next moment it disappeared somewhere in the middle of the chaparral-covered hillside, and Melanie was flying, empty-beaked, back to the top of the pine tree. A long groan went up from the onlookers and almost immediately they began to disperse as if the show had ended.
There was no use in attempting a search. The hillside was full of ticks and poison oak, and the chances of finding one small key ring in all that brush were minimal. A Junior Aide with the name Connie stitched on the pocket of her working smock claimed that Melanie had extremely sharp eyes and would certainly be able to find the keys if she wanted to. What would make Melanie want to was anybody’s guess.
Meanwhile Melanie remained on her perch on top of the pine tree. Perhaps she was merely resting. More likely, she was wondering what had happened to her audience and how she could get it back again. There is no such thing as an ex-exhibitionist.
Connie, it turned out, was something of an authority on Melanie since she lived with her family in the immediate neighborhood of the museum.
“She used to come to all our barbecues,” Connie said.
And why, I wanted to know, had Melanie stopped?
“She didn’t, we did. We haven’t had a barbecue since last Easter.”
I didn’t ask what had happened last Easter. I felt that under the circumstances I was better off not knowing.
At Connie’s suggestion we decided to try a new tactic based on the fact that Melanie couldn’t stand being ignored. Marie, Connie and I sat down again at the redwood table and pretended to be completely engrossed in the contents of Connie’s social studies textbook. For reasons which will remain forever unknown, the mynah bird chose this moment to start showing off his rather limited vocabulary.
“You’re a stool pigeon, Mother! You’re a stool pigeon, Mother!”
Whether Melanie was galvanized into action by the mynah’s voice or by our ignoring her, we will never be sure. But galvanized she was. She swooped down low over the hillside, and without an instant’s hesitation, located the key ring in the underbush and picked it up.
The speed of her performance raises questions: did she remember where she’d dropped the key ring? Or could she actually see it in the middle of all that brush? I’m inclined to believe she used her memory rather than her eyes, partly because I know how dense the underbrush is in that area and partly because of similar experiences I’ve had with dogs, our German shepherd, Brandy, in particular. Frequently while playing on the beach he loses a ball or a stick, yet he has no trouble finding them when told to. He doesn’t track the object down by smelling—this breed is not very keen-nosed anyway—and his eyesight isn’t half as good as my own. I must conclude that he remembers, not in the human way—where-did-I-drop-that-blinking-ball ?—but in his own and Melanie’s way, which we still do not fully understand.
Keepers of parrots, cockatoos, budgerigars and the like usually have tales to tell about the prodigious memory feats of their pets. Usually, too, ornithologists put a grain of salt on these tales. Experiments conducted on wild birds indicate that some species have a remarkable capacity to remember. Joel Carl Welty cites one such experiment in his definitive work, The Life of Birds:
The Nutcracker, Nucifraga caryocatactes, in Sweden lives on hazelnuts and spends its full time for three months in the autumn gathering and storing the nuts. In a series of observations by Swanberg [1951] the birds were observed to fill their throat pouches at the hazel thickets and fly as far as six kilometers [about four miles] to bury them in their spruce-forest territories, in small heaps covered with moss or lichens. The Nutcrackers live on the nuts over winter and feed their young on them the next spring. Apparently the birds remember where they have stored the nuts, for of 357 excavations, some of them through snow 45 centimeters [about 1 ½ feet] deep, 86% were successful.
Probably we will never know exactly how Melanie located my key ring with such speed and will have to be content with the fact that she did find it. She landed on the redwood table, wearing the key ring proudly in her beak. Both Marie and I made attempts to grab it away from her, but Melanie let out a reproachful croak and daintily stepped beyond our reach.
“You’ll never get it from her that way,” Connie said. “My dad tried that at Easter and Melanie still has his gold-plated monogrammed bottle opener. If you want her to give up something, you should offer her a substitute. Do you have any jewelry you wouldn’t mind losing?”
Marie wore no jewelry, and all I had on was my wedding ring. I made it clear that I would prefer to walk the six miles home rather than add my wedding ring to Melanie’s collection of trinkets.
We finally decided, after a brief caucus, that we would have to appeal to another aspect of Melanie’s greed. She was always hungry, Connie said, and frankfurters were her particular weakness, especially if they were doused with ketchup or barbecue sauce, perhaps to give them a more authentic carrion appearance. Connie went to the kitchen and returned with two ketchup-covered frankfurters on a paper plate. She put the plate on the ground about ten feet away from Melanie, who had turned her head and was ignoring the whole business.
“She’s not hungry,” I said.
Connie disagreed. “She’s just pretending. Keep watching and be ready to grab the keys when she drops them.”
For the next few minutes Melanie gave an Academy Award performance as she-who-couldn’t-care-less. She took a few dainty steps and gazed pensively up at the sky; she studied the oak trees and the sycamores; she lifted her right foot and examined her name band like a bored young woman consulting her wristwatch; she cocked her head to listen to the mynah bird who was still telling Mother she was a stool pigeon.
Then, suddenly, Melanie plunged to the ground. I think she meant to pick up both frankfurters while still retaining the key ring, but even Melanie’s formidable beak wasn’t capable of managing such a load.
There are probably few times in life when a person is grateful for a ketchup-covered key ring. That was one of them.
Even now, Melanie’s admirers point out that it was a hot summer that year, and if excuses are made for human misconduct during a heat wave, they should certainly be made for corvine delinquency. The fact is that ravens are as impervious to climate as they are to environment. They are at home in the treeless arctic tundra and in thick forests of spruce or alder, in town and country, in the mountains, on the coast and in the desert. While driving through the Mojave Desert in a severe windstorm with the temperature well above 100° F., when it seemed no living creature could exist, I have seen ravens looking as sleek as if they’d just stepped out of a cold shower.
No, it was not the heat that was responsible for Melanie’s repeated indiscretions that summer; it was the restlessness in her bones, the quickening of her blood. Melanie was growing up. While her misdeeds were not planned to call attention to the fact that the time had come when she needed the company of another raven to carry out her purpose in life, this was the effect of them. It was decided that Melanie should be returned to Santa Cruz, the island where she was born.
Her journey across the twenty-five miles of channel was taken in style on a boat borrowed for the occasion by her adopted family. Melanie rode in the galley, sitting part of the time on the refrigerator, the rest on the top bunk. She was very quiet and refused to eat. Perhaps she was seasick or tired. I can’t, however, discount the possibility that she was quietly remembering her first sea voyage and all the things that had since happened to her—and to a lot of others!—and her fine collection of admirers and earrings and silver bells that had to be left behind. Any orn
ithologist will tell you ravens don’t think, but any friend of Melanie’s will insist they do.
Santa Cruz Island, twenty-three miles long, from two to six and a half miles wide and comprising 62,000 acres, is a ruggedly beautiful area, privately owned and almost completely uninhabited. Conservation organizations, led by the Sierra Club, have been working for some time toward the goal of making Santa Cruz part of our National Park System.
Most of the shoreline of the island, which was once part of the mainland, is composed of cliffs rising straight out of the water. Here and there tides have eaten into the cliffs and formed caves. One of these, Painted Cave, is seventy feet high and can be explored in a small boat when the tide is low and the sea calm—two distinctly different conditions which may or may not occur together. The cave’s inner walls have been painted, not by intrepid Indians, but by the chemical action of salt water on the various rock formations.
Some parts of the island are shale, sandstone and volcanic rock, almost bare of vegetation. A few areas have enough water to support groves of Monterey pines and oaks, in addition to the various chaparral shrubs like ceanothus. These sections are inhabited by a bird that is found nowhere else in the world. The Santa Cruz Island jay, once considered a separate species, is currently listed as a subspecies of the scrub jay.
The differences between the two jays are many: size, color, voice, behavior, body-wing-tail ratio, dimensions of nests and of eggs, even the shape of the beak, which, in the island bird, is the same length but bulkier, almost half an inch deep at the nostril. This jay is heavier, has a longer tail and a sturdier body, but to me the most striking difference is in color. His plumage is a deeper and more vivid blue. Though some of his calls and actions resemble those of our mainland jay, his disposition is gentler, perhaps softened, as Dawson suggests, by the year-round food supply for which there is little competition, the equable climate, warmed in winter and cooled in summer by the sea, and by the lack of human interference with his affairs.
Because his wings are too weak to support his body in any sustained effort of flight, the Santa Cruz Island jay is fated to remain forever on his lonely island. There we see him every May and September when the Santa Barbara Audubon Society crosses the channel to check the migrations of pelagic birds like shearwaters, petrels and alcids. In order to land on the island, permission from the owners is required. This is often tedious, and for our purposes unnecessary, since the straight cliffs of the shoreline permit boats to cruise or anchor very close in. The flirt of a bright tail among the live oaks, a patch of cobalt blue gliding up through the Monterey pines as if it were attached to a sky hook—these mark the Santa Cruz Island jay, a bird unique.
Melanie was released from the galley fifty yards offshore. Rising on her toes like a ballerina, she lifted her great black wings and flew straight toward the land of her birth and of her destiny. She didn’t look back.
Since that day I have visited Santa Cruz Island many times and have seen in the sky bald eagles, peregrine falcons, red-tailed hawks, and of course, ravens, many ravens. But none of them wore a pink plastic band on its right leg. The band is probably gone anyway: she would have long since chewed it off as the last vestige of her flighty youth.
5
Morgan
Addiction to bird-watching may happen very suddenly as it did to me, or it may be a slower and quieter thing, as in my husband’s case.
From the beginning he adjusted well to the necessary changes in our household. He ate our much simpler meals without complaint, he was careful to avoid getting too close to the picture windows, he looked and listened with patience while I pointed out the ordinary birds that were now coming daily to the ledge and the feeders, and the grapes and doughnuts in the trees: house finches, song sparrows, scrub jays, mourning doves, wrentits, mockingbirds and towhees. The brown towhee, Houdunit, was practically a member of the family by this time, but of the rufous-sided towhee we could catch only glimpses as he foraged, both feet at a time, in the underbrush or flew low across the canyon. We had to wait until the following spring to see him right out in the open, singing his wheezy waltz: too-wheee—1, 2, 3—too-wheeee—1, 2, 3—too-wheee—1, 2, 3.
On very rare and special occasions the rufous-sided towhee has come up into the tea tree for a furtive bite of doughnut, but to this day he has never appeared on the ledge or any of the feeders. Often, especially just before twilight, we hear his plaintive question: Aaay? Aaay? From bush to bush he goes, asking over and over again, Aaay? What is life? Aaay? How did it start? Aaay? Where will it all end? But nobody ever answers.
Perhaps the nearest thing to an answer appears in the month of May. We catch sight of it as it hurries through the underbrush of the canyon, looking like a large black sparrow. Only the choice of flyway and the white outer tail feathers identify it as a young rufous-sided towhee.
The critical point in my husband’s conversion came one morning in early August. I was in my office working on a book. When I emerged for a tea break I found Ken at the dining-room table with the two field guides open in front of him and my binoculars hanging from his neck. “Have you ever seen a band-tailed pigeon?” he said casually. “There’s one on the feeder in the eucalyptus tree.”
The first band-tailed pigeon is an event, an experience. This is partly because of his size—he’s larger than the domestic pigeon—and partly because he is wild, a bird of the woodlands, not of the city streets or the ledges of office buildings. He also differs from the domestic pigeon in having, at maturity, a white crescent around the nape of his neck and a light grey, sometimes almost white, band at the end of his tail, which is very broad and can be spread out into a fan—hence the common misnomer, fan-tailed pigeon. Unlike all other North American pigeons, and doves, he has a yellow bill with a purplish-black tip, and feet that seem to have been painted to match, yellow with purplish-black toenails. He looks as though the moment of his creation had been a summer morning and the place a wild elderberry bush and one ripe dewy berry had clung to his beak and one to each toenail.
While these birds most frequently nest in oaks, and acorns are a main part of their diet, it is with eucalyptus trees that I associate them. We see them perched in these trees more often than any others. When the blue gum eucalyptus is very young, or when an older tree is putting out new leaves, the leaves are so different in color and shape from the older ones that they appear to belong to a separate family. These leaves are a soft velvety blue-grey, exactly like the plumage of the bandtails perched among them. No doubt this is just a happy accident, though it sometimes seems that the eucalyptus, like a good host trying to please his guest, grows new leaves to match the bandtails.
What is the difference between a pigeon and a dove?
People frequently ask this question and seem disappointed in the answer: there is no difference. The terms are interchangeable, and the birds eating milo and cracked corn on our ledge could just as well be called band-tailed doves and mourning pigeons. Although in general practice smaller birds are known as doves and larger ones as pigeons, this isn’t a rule. The Supreme Court of bird watchers, the American Ornithological Union, lists the domestic pigeon under the name rock dove.
However the columbine grapevine works—perhaps in a kind of pidgin English—it is quick and efficient in spreading the word about a new feeding and watering area. By week’s end our bandtail’s immediate family was well established and every hour brought a new batch of obscure in-laws and fifty-second cousins and friends of friends of friends. They all took an immediate fancy to the birdbath with the continuous drip. They stood on it, they drank from it, immersing their beaks to the nostrils and drawing in the water; they showered, lifting first one wing, then the other, letting the drip trickle down onto their wing pits.
Band-tailed pigeons share with some other flocking birds a custom that serves the species well in the wild but is not expedient at a feeding station. A bandtail arriving
at dawn for breakfast doesn’t immediately go to the feeder and start eating. Instead, he perches in one of the eucalyptus trees, and even though he must be hungry he waits quietly for his friends, now and then thrusting his head forward and back to appraise his surroundings more accurately. When a certain number of birds have arrived, as when a critical mass is reached in nuclear physics, the action starts. Suddenly, like clumsy blue butterflies, the pigeons begin falling out of the trees onto the feeder and the lower terrace. At one of these eucalyptical gatherings of the clan I have counted ninety-eight bandtails.
There must be some kind of signal to start this mass movement. If it’s a voice signal, I’ve never heard it; if it’s kinetic, either I haven’t seen it or don’t recognize it. It seems likely that one of the bandtails is the accepted leader and sets an example for the rest to follow. When he decides to eat, everybody eats—providing the dining area is a two-acre field, not a seed hopper with a perch meant for half a dozen birds.
The lone bandtail is a quiet bird with little to say as he goes about his business. But when twenty or thirty of them attempt to land on a narrow perch the resulting noise sounds as if they were approaching the boozy climax of an avian cocktail party with every guest trying to communicate at once in grunts and clucks and squawks. From a certain distance this cacophony is very human-sounding and I sometimes think that if, instead of a party, they were holding a meeting with rules of procedure to give each of them a turn, I might be able to understand what they meant.
By the end of that first week in August, it was becoming obvious with the arrival of each new in-law and fifty-second cousin that we needed a much larger pigeon feeder, placed in an area apart from the other feeders so that the smaller birds wouldn’t be frightened away. Not that the bandtails were aggressive—I’ve never seen a bandtail indicate rancor toward a bird of another species even in self-defense, and I’ve watched many of them being bullied and birdhandled by acorn woodpeckers, scrub jays, mockingbirds, even house sparrows. The size of the pigeons and their number, however, were discouraging some of the shyer species. The wrentit, the Oregon junco and the song sparrow seemed reluctant to share a table with the bandtails, without having any real cause to fear them.
The Birds and the Beasts Were There Page 5