The Birds and the Beasts Were There

by Margaret Millar

  Everything went well until the following spring. The Hylands noticed no change in Morgan’s vocal efforts. That such a change had taken place, however, was clearly indicated by the behavior of the other pigeons. Some of them began to come quite boldly into the yard to eat and drink, and a small dapple grey one even landed on Morgan’s perch. Morgan was furious, naturally, since he hap­pened to be on it at the time, but almost immediately his rage turned into display. Indeed, many of the same ploys that had been used to indicate anger now served to show what a fine, strong, handsome fellow he was—the pacing (now an obvious strutting), the inflated neck, the wing flapping.

  The Hylands watched the budding romance with considerable misgiving. Their fondness for Morgan did not blind them to his faults. He was, for one thing, set in his ways like an old bachelor and resisted the slightest change in his routine. As for Dapplegray, his mate, she was not so much smitten by Morgan as she was by his perch, which she’d been eyeing covetously for months from a neighbor’s roof.

  As if to invalidate the Hylands’ low opinion, Morgan and his bride started to set up housekeeping. Pigeons and doves are inept nest builders anyway and the efforts of Morgan and Dapplegray were pathetic. Dapplegray wanted to build right on the much-admired perch, but the sticks she brought simply fell down. Even­tually a nest of sorts was put together, though it was precariously situated on a tiny ledge under the eaves.

  Mary Hyland, who had strong nest-building instincts of her own, refused to tolerate such sloppy housekeeping and went to the pet-supply store and bought a substitute nest of the kind used by raisers of homing pigeons. But every attempt to persuade Morgan and Dapplegray to use it came to nothing. Morgan, in fact, at­tacked the substitute nest as if it were a rival and eventually Dap­plegray laid two white eggs on the meager pile of twigs under the eaves. One rolled out almost immediately. The other, incubated by both parents, hatched in about three weeks.

  The fledgling appeared healthy and Morgan and Dapplegray were attentive to its needs. It was, nevertheless, doomed, its fate having been decided at the time Morgan refused to accept the substitute nest. Dapplegray’s flimsy cluster of sticks had been fairly adequate as an incubator; as a nursery it wasn’t. Fledglings de­velop at a very rapid rate. In order to carry this increasing weight, their legs must grow correspondingly strong and they can’t do this without proper support in the nest.

  As soon as Morgan and Dapplegray became aware that their offspring was crippled they abandoned it. The Hylands made an attempt to feed the little creature themselves and when that failed they took it to the Museum of Natural History, where the trouble was explained to them. The fledgling was straddle-legged and would not survive.

  Meanwhile Dapplegray had already started building another nest on the opposite side of the house. What was the seventh or eighth twig to Dapplegray was the last straw for the Hylands. They could visualize a whole series of inadequate nests and crippled babies left to starve. Morgan and Dapplegray were given one more chance to accept the nest from the pet shop. When they refused, Tom built a trap and baited it with Dapplegray’s favorite food, Spanish peanuts. Dapplegray made no fuss as the trap door closed behind her. Either she was so crazy about the peanuts she didn’t care what was happening, or else she was rather relieved to be getting out of a situation she couldn’t handle. Tom drove her down to the wharf and released her in the middle of one of the flocks of pigeons that hang out along the waterfront.

  It was the Hylands’ hope that Morgan; deprived of his mate, would return to the innocence of his youth, the uncluttered days before Dapplegray. Morgan had other ideas. The day after Dap­plegray’s enforced farewell, her successor was ensconced on Mor­gan’s perch and the whole sequence began again—the collection of sticks and twigs and the refusal of a substitute nest. After a long discussion it was decided that in fairness to all—the smaller birds which Morgan kept chasing away, the Hylands themselves and Morgan’s future progeny—Morgan should be taken to the Bird Refuge, another pigeon hangout.

  The trap was set, Morgan entered without hesitation and the trip down to the Bird Refuge began. It was a sad occasion, with Mary moist-eyed in the front seat and Morgan moping in the back. At least the Hylands assumed he was moping. My own feeling is that he must have been quietly memorizing the landscape because when Mary and Tom arrived home, Morgan was already on his perch waiting for them.

  “Who?” he asked when the car drove in. “Who? Who?”

  “Who do you think,” Tom said crossly.

  Morgan’s second trip, to Carpinteria twelve miles away, was more of a workout for him but still no real problem. It was becom­ing increasingly clear that more drastic distances would be neces­sary. The Hylands had, for a long time, been planning a visit to the Southern California Audubon Center at El Monte, about 110 miles south of their home. Morgan accompanied them, settling down to enjoy the trip as if he’d planned it himself.

  The Hylands’ return without Morgan seemed final. Mary re­moved his food dish from the patio and Tom took down his perch and stored it in the garage. For a few days Morgan’s new mate hung around, but then she, too, departed and there was no reminder left of Morgan except a little pile of sticks on the ledge under the eaves.

  It was the middle of May by this time, and with Morgan and his pals no longer hanging around, a number of the small migrant birds were coming in to eat and bathe. Some, like the black-headed grosbeaks, brought their fat, fuzzy balls of babies, while others, like the male hooded oriole, came alone to filch the honey water out of the hummingbird feeder. Though the Hylands bought a special oriole feeder for him and he learned to use it, he kept returning to the hummingbird feeder as if making sure their food was no sweeter than his.

  This tendency of certain birds to drink or attempt to drink hummingbird mixture varies from neighborhood to neighborhood. Some people are forced to take down their hummingbird feeders because the house finches empty them as fast as they’re filled. Others claim that the house finches don’t go near their humming­bird feeders, and only on one occasion have I observed a house finch trying to drink from ours. In the summer the hooded and the Bullock’s orioles use it by perching on the spout, in the winter the Audubon warblers use it by hovering, not very successfully, hum­mingbird style. Sometimes I see an orange-crowned warbler take a sip, and very infrequently, a plain titmouse, this latter species being one of the few which don’t show a pronounced weakness for sweet things when they’re available.

  On the first Saturday in June, the Hylands returned from a shopping trip downtown to be greeted by a familiar sound from the top of the chimney: “Who? Who?”

  Mary quickly rolled up the car windows, but it was too late. Tom had already heard. “Good Lord,” he said, “it can’t be Morgan.”

  But good Lord, it was. Nor had he come back alone. Some­where in the course of his 110-mile, nineteen-day journey from El Monte he’d picked up a lady friend who was now sharing the chimney with him. She might have been one of the neighborhood belles like Dapplegray or she might have flown all the way from El Monte with him, led on by pigeon pleas and promises. In any case the twig gathering began again, again the nesting site was the tiny ledge under the eaves, and again the Hylands decided that Morgan must go and stay gone.

  This time their preparations were more careful, based on greater awareness of Morgan’s capabilities. Through a friend they con­tacted a pigeon fancier in Bakersfield, some 150 miles inland. He agreed to take Morgan and his new mate, and keep them penned with his other pigeons for two or three months before releasing them. After this long a period he was sure that Morgan’s home ties with Santa Barbara would be cut and new ones formed with Bakersfield.

  He was correct. Somewhere on the outskirts of Bakersfield right now one pig-headed pigeon is flying fancy free.

  As this is being written it is March and many of our bandtails are getting ready to nest. Mates have been chosen and display is the order of the day. An imp
ortant part of this display involves the male flying out from a eucalyptus branch, making a soft buzzing sound and wiggling his wings as he passes the female, a maneuver that should remind you, according to your age group, of human displays like the shimmy and the watusi. The male bandtail also uses inflation (to a lesser extent than the domestic pigeon) and a mating call that sounds like ca----hoo, the ca part being more like an inhalation of air than an intentional sound. Though it is not particularly loud it has a carrying quality, especially in a canyon area like ours. All day long the ca-hoos of the bandtails mingle with the incessant oo-hoo-hoos of the mourning doves. As the sun begins to set—sometimes even before—the great horned owls start in, hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo, and a little later the screech owls, with their tremulous hoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoo, until our canyon becomes a veritable hoos’ hoo in America.

  6

  Companion to Owls

  Masculinity in our society is usually as­sociated with larger size, greater strength, more aggressive instincts and a deeper voice. Conditioned to these notions, Ken and I made all the wrong assumptions the evening we saw our first horned owls.

  It had been a hot day and we were watching the beginning of the California twilight. (If you don’t watch the beginning, you see very little of it—our twilights are brief, the least possible compromise between day and night.) I must have heard owls before, both here and in other parts of this country and Canada where we’ve lived, but those remembered sounds lacked reality, position in time and space, because I heard them before I was interested in birds and aware of what I was listening to. For the record, then, that warm clear evening in Santa Barbara was the occasion of my first owl.

  Fortunately for me it was the great horned species, which makes a distinctly owl-like hoot, recognizable even to someone who has only read about it. Some of the other owls hoot infrequently, if at all, and make a variety of non-owlish noises: the saw-whetting sound that gives the little saw-whet owl his name, the sneeze of the barn owl, the sharp yipping of the desert elf owl, and the daytime stuttering of the burrowing owl which differs greatly from its own nighttime cooing. Tiny, the burrowing owl who’s been a pet at our local Museum of Natural History for several years, has a sound I’ve never heard this species make in the wild. When I stroke the side of his neck and ask him for a kiss, he nudges my hand gently with his beak, if he happens to be in an affectionate mood. If he’s not, he turns away with a peremptory “Zhut!” as Bronx a cheer as I’ve ever heard in California.

  Ken and I went outside to see if we could locate the source of the sounds we’d heard. It wasn’t difficult. There was plenty of light, since the sun had barely started to go down, and the two owls were calling and answering each other, one from our televi­sion antenna, the other from the top of a Monterey pine tree two hundred feet away. The birds were identical except in size and voice, the one on our antenna being smaller and having a voice considerably higher in pitch. This, we learned later, was the male. His inferiority to the female in size is shared with a number of species, mainly predators like hawks and eagles and other owls, but also unrelated birds like phalaropes and kingfishers.

  As we watched, the female swooped down from the top of the pine tree and passed over us so low that though I heard nothing I felt the air being displaced by her great wings. The male followed, also in utter silence, also barely clearing our heads. Were the birds trying to frighten us away? Or were they aware, as wild creatures are so often aware in advance, that something unnatural was about to happen? Perhaps it had already happened and they had heard it. Owls have so acute and accurate a sense of hearing that they can pinpoint a mouse in utter darkness.

  Our faulty and underdeveloped human senses told us nothing. Even when we saw the sky changing we thought at first it was caused by jet trails. But the trails kept enlarging and spreading, forming weird moving patterns splashed with color intensified by the light from the setting sun.

  Most enthusiastic bird watchers are able to remember in detail their initial meeting with any given species. Ken and I are unlikely to forget our first great horned owls since we happened to see them at the very moment that an intercontinental ballistics missile, just launched from a nearby base, was discovered to be defective and ordered to blow itself up over the Pacific Ocean.

  Ken suggests another explanation why the owls, on that one occasion only, flew so audaciously low over our heads. We hap­pened to have Johnny, our little black Scottie, with us at the time. Since the great horned owls eat many mammals like rabbits and skunks, it’s quite possible that their behavior was due not to any ICBM being blown up, but to curiosity whether Johnny was a black bunny or a stripeless skunk.

  The female superiority in size among certain birds leads to a number of questions, some of them along the line of which-came-first-the-chicken-or-the-egg? In the case of at least one species, the sparrow hawk, there is evidence that the female, who is responsi­ble for preparing and distributing to the young the food brought to the nest by the male, feeds the female nestlings oftener than she feeds the males so that the latter are some twenty percent smaller and considerably more docile than their sisters. This sys­tem of preferential treatment can be called a matriarchy.

  For a more extreme and better known example of it, however, we must go to the phalarope family. Among phalaropes the roles of male and female are reversed. The females are bigger and more aggressive—if such a term can be used to describe these gentle little birds, of which all three species visit our shores. She assumes the gaudy breeding plumage and does the courting. Mundane affairs like nest building, incubating, feeding and caring for the young she leaves to the male, while she, freed from chicks and chains, rejoins the giddy friends of her girlhood. As a matter of curiosity I sometimes ask my fellow bird-watchers the name of their favorite bird and the reason for their choice. I no longer have to ask the mothers of young children. Their choice, and the reason for it, is unanimous—the phalarope.

  To the amateur student of psychology this business of asking people to name their favorite bird can be highly interesting. I have a long list of birds chosen, and the reasons for each choice. A kind of rough pattern emerges from it. Surprisingly, not too many of the birds listed were picked for their beauty and those that were—among them, the western tanager, mountain bluebird, hooded oriole, vermilion flycatcher, lazuli bunting, rufous-sided towhee—were nearly always selected by rather plain-looking people. This pattern of opposites keeps repeating. Among oldsters there is a strong tendency to choose birds connected with their early youth. People who live alone are most likely to choose companionable birds, song sparrows and whitecrowns, robins, mockingbirds, meadowlarks. Timid people tend to favor the aggressors like hawks and falcons, and sad people to favor the clowns like the roadrunner, the chat, and the acorn woodpecker.

  Ask the man in the street how an owl looks and sounds and he will be able to tell you, although the chances are he’s never seen or heard one. The field checklist for our area mentions eight species of owl, yet the average birder is fortunate to find half this number in a year and our annual Christmas bird count for the last six years lists only some sixty owls.

  Owls are not, like the doves and pigeons which very early found their way into recorded history, a very obvious or regular part of everyone’s life. Yet they have captured the imagination and in­spired the painter, the poet, the sculptor. They are found on Egyp­tian wall paintings, Chinese screens and Indian vases. An owl stands guard beside Michelangelo’s statue of Night at the tomb of the Medici. Owls are mentioned in the works of Homer, the Bible and the Shakespearean plays, and there are to my knowledge five Greek and four Latin words for owl.

  During the fifth century b.c., and later, the staple currency of the Aegean consisted of coins known as “owls.” Manufactured in Athens, mainly of silver, each coin showed the head of Athena on the obverse side and the figure of an owl on the reverse. An argu­ment might be made that both were intended to represent aggres­sion and
conquest since Athena was originally goddess of war and owls had the same habits then as now. But Athena later became the goddess of wisdom and it is generally accepted that this is what the coins symbolized. The choice of an owl to represent wisdom astounds people familiar with these birds. Adu and Peter Batten, who have lived as intimately with wild creatures as it is possible for human beings to do, give the owls second prize for stupidity, first prize going to the little puffbirds of the Amazon jungle. A num­ber of observers, however, point out that great horned owls show great caution in the presence of gunfire. Our pair of horned owls gave us an example of this caution without a shot being fired.

  One evening I was sitting in my lookout chair in the living room. It was 1965, the end of April and the end of a day and I was waiting for two species of birds; the great horned owl and the Vaux’ swift, and hoping they wouldn’t arrive simultaneously. The night before, they had missed each other by less than five minutes. Except for this habit of hunting at dusk, the two species had little in common, least of all size. The great horned owl is some two feet in length, the Vaux’ swift is four inches. Seen for the first time against a darkening sky the latter can quite easily be mistaken for a large and capricious insect.

  The initial appearance of the Vaux’ swift at our place came at the beginning of May, 1964. It wasn’t entirely unexpected. The birds are known to migrate through our area in the spring, though they aren’t often seen when weather conditions are favorable to them. That spring, however, brought a series of heavy overcasts and the Vaux’ swifts were caught in one and grounded. A flock of fifty or so stayed, appropriately enough, at the Bird Refuge for several days. Another, much larger flock was trapped on a fairly well-traveled road north of town. Unable to orient themselves, and blinded by traffic and streetlights, they flew wildly into the wind­shields of passing cars and died by the hundreds. An impressiona­ble friend of mine unfortunately happened to be driving along this road after seeing Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds, and the combined effect was almost disastrous. She is still careful to omit Mr. Hitchcock from her prayers.