The Birds and the Beasts Were There

by Margaret Millar

  The pygmy owls, committed as they were to a fixed location which was well marked, proved the easiest of all the R.B.A. birds to locate. The tiny pair became our star attractions, all the more so after Nelson Metcalf discovered that if the male was off hunting when visitors arrived, he could be coaxed back by an imitation of his call notes. It didn’t matter how poor the imitation was—I’ve never learned even to whistle properly, but by pursing my lips as if I were about to whistle, then saying “hoo-hoo” instead, I could always evoke a response from the little owl, who would answer from a considerable distance and come flying in with his obstrep­erous escort of swallows.

  Refugio Canyon is too far away to permit anyone with a job to perform to keep the owls under close observation. But they must have raised their young in a manner satisfactory to them because they returned the following year to the same nesting hole accom­panied by what surely appeared to be the same escort of swallows. Eventually a road construction crew bulldozed over the red marker I’d put out, but by that time every birder within a hundred miles knew exactly where to find a pair of pygmy owls.

  Another member of the owl family, much rarer than the pygmy and probably the most difficult to find of all eighteen North Amer­ican owls, couldn’t be put on the Rare Bird Alert because private property was involved, and the owners, after losing a valuable colt to a trespassing hunter, had the area posted and patrolled.

  It was a canyon near Santa Maria, with steep sides heavily wooded, the preferred habitat of this particular species of owl. The trees along the stream were mainly cottonwoods, willows and syca­mores, and on the slopes, mature oaks, both deciduous and ever­green, with an abundant undergrowth of poison oak, more popular with owls than with owlers. Mary and Tom Hyland had received permission to watch birds on the property, and it was here on an April twilight, in 1966, that they came upon a pair of spotted owls. With the enthusiastic help of Mickey and Ed Williams, the Hy­lands kept the birds under observation for four months.

  Mary had called me from Santa Maria in late April when she and Tom found the owls, and again in May to urge me to drive up and see them. Once the owls were located early in the morning in a particular place, Mary said, they could almost certainly be de­pended on to stay in the same place for the balance of the day. The trick was to locate them. Many owls are seen more often by day than by night—the burrowing, the pygmy, the short-eared, the snowy, the hawk owl—but spotted owls are nocturnal. The best time to find them is at night when they call to each other as they hunt. The best time to observe them, however, is in the daytime while they doze in a tree.

  Though I certainly wanted to see the owls I wasn’t keen about driving seventy-five miles by freeway, then searching through a remote canyon on foot to try to find two silent, motionless birds endowed with almost perfect protective coloration. I decided to wait.

  On June 7, Mary called to tell me that while none of the ob­servers had been able to find a nest, the evidence that one existed had been photographed the previous day—two baby spotted owls perched on the limb of a valley oak some fifteen feet above the ground. How the babies, still in natal down without tail or wing feathers, had gotten out of the nest and onto the limb of the oak tree was a mystery. Presumably the parent birds moved them because when I visited the canyon the next morning, only a single baby owl was in evidence, and according to Mary, he was in a different tree from the one he’d shared with his sibling the previous day.

  It was 9:30 a.m., a time for all nocturnal creatures to be asleep. Baby Spot evidently hadn’t been told this. He was awake, his large dark eyes wide open and as luminous as two smoked agates. He was about twelve inches long, a little more than half-size, and so fuzzy all over that he appeared to be wrapped in cotton candy which someone had colored light beige instead of pink. The presence of five observers—Mary, Mickey Williams, Jewell Kriger, Nelson Metcalf and me—didn’t alarm him in the least. He dozed off while we watched him, his claws hooked securely around the limb of the oak tree, his head sunk into his shoulders, giving him a completely neckless appearance. With neck and eyes hidden he looked not so much like a bird as like a kind of large oval-shaped fungus growing out of the tree.

  Thinking that Baby Spot was settled for some time, we decided to drive further up the canyon to a meadow where Mary had recently seen a blue grosbeak and a flock of the tiny, temperamen­tal Laurence goldfinches. We missed the grosbeak, an uncommon summer visitor in our part of the state, but we found the gold­finches, the largest flock I’ve ever seen. Some two hundred of them were feeding on the seeds of low-growing plants none of us could identify.

  Here, beside the meadow, we ate our lunch and watched the goldfinches eat theirs. Then after another long, futile search for the grosbeak we returned to the oak tree where we’d seen Baby Spot perched that morning. It was empty. The night baby who was supposed to sleep all day, who had no wings to fly and no tail to steer, had somehow managed to reach another oak tree, some seventy-five feet from the first one, and settle on a branch about twelve feet from the ground. Had his parents moved him? If so, why? And where were they now? And what had happened to the other owlet, Twin Spot ?

  Baby Spot was awake and he was hungry. He twitched and fidg­eted on the branch, pecking fretfully at his toes like a little boy biting his nails. Every now and then he let out a long sigh which was no more an owl sound than the sound of any young animal wanting food and attention.

  We waited for one or both of the parents to respond to Spot’s needs but they failed to appear. The amount of information I’d been able to obtain about spotted owls from my bird books was meager. By all accounts, though, the birds were tame, stupidly tame, in fact, so it seemed unlikely that the presence of observers was keeping the parents from attending to Baby Spot. To make sure, however, we moved a considerable distance away to watch the oak tree and its forlorn occupant through binoculars.

  It was five o’clock. I had a most uneasy feeling that the three missing owls had met with disaster. There was no need to com­municate these thoughts to my companions. Their expressions made it clear that they were thinking along the same lines: if Baby Spot was an orphan it would be up to one of us to take him home and look after him until he was grown and fully feathered and could hunt for his own food.

  Before such a step was taken, however, we decided to do more investigating. Mary and Mickey were wearing heavy hiking boots so they volunteered to climb up the hill through the poison oak in search of clues. Baby Spot, still fidgeting back and forth on the oak limb and intermittently chewing at his toes, watched their ap­proach with minimal interest.

  Meanwhile Nelson had reached the tree where we’d seen the owl that morning, and it was he who found the first bunch of owl feathers. They were the feathers of a baby spotted owl and they were scattered all over the ground underneath the tree. Not just five or six of them, but whole handfuls. There were no hawks in the area likely to take on a spotted owl, and it seemed likely that the other predators, such as bobcats and coyotes, preferred game that was tastier, more plentiful and easier to catch. That left the most undisciplined and dangerous predator of all—man.

  “A hunter or a collector,” Mickey said quietly. “To a dead bird it hardly matters.”

  Mary suggested that since we weren’t getting anywhere standing around worrying, Nelson and Jewell and I might as well drive back to Santa Barbara, and she and Mickey would go and make dinner for their respective families, then return to the canyon at dusk to see how Baby Spot was faring.

  I reached home about the time they were setting out for the canyon again. After a quick meal I assembled all the available information concerning the spotted owl.

  Most bird books gave it either no mention at all or merely a sentence indicating it was the Far Western counterpart of the East­ern barred owl. In Birds of America, edited by T. Gilbert Pearson, and Birds of the Pacific Coast by Ralph Hoffman, it rated a para­graph. I found only two accounts that were by any me
ans ade­quate, in A. C. Bent’s Life Histories of North American Birds, and W. L. Dawson’s Birds of California. Both Bent and Dawson quoted the same sources, articles published in the ornithological journal Condor, one by Lawrence Peyton (1910), the other by Donald R. Dickey (1914).

  Dawson also included two of Dickey’s photographs of young spotted owls. The picture of a single owl, a dead ringer for Baby Spot, was captioned “A Feather-Bed Baby.” The other picture showed the same young owl with his sibling perched on an oak stump some fifteen feet from the ground and a hundred yards from the nest. Underneath this picture was a quote from Dickey’s arti­cle: “That the young could have reached the spot unaided seems incredible.”

  The alternative he suggested was that the parents, fearing for the safety of their offspring, had moved them. But he didn’t seem too happy with this explanation. Faced with the identical situation fifty-two years later, I wasn’t too happy with the explanation either. Baby Spot, while still technically a baby, would have been an awkward load to haul down from a perch twenty feet in an oak tree, across seventy-five feet of rough terrain and up twelve feet into another oak tree. And, even if spotted owls were as stupid as their detractors claimed, what would be the point of such a trans­fer? It wasn’t enough of a move to foil any predator worthy of the name, and the second tree offered no better concealment than the first.

  Later that night the fifty-two-year mystery was solved in a ten-minute phone call from Mary Hyland in Santa Maria.

  She and Mickey had returned to the canyon shortly before dusk to find Baby Spot in the same tree as we’d left him. He was still alone and obviously hungrier than ever, and to call attention to his plight he was flouncing around on the oak branch from one end to the other. Perhaps the approach of two observers added to his distraction. At any rate he flounced a bit too far and too fancy, somersaulted off the branch and landed on the ground below in a flurry of feathers.

  Mary and Mickey stood motionless with shock. Not so Baby Spot, who seemed quite unperturbed as if the experience was noth­ing new for him. First he shook himself vigorously to get rid of more feathers which had been loosened by his fall. Then, with a gait that was half-waddle, half-swagger, he headed back to the tree trunk and began climbing. (Since learning about the climbing tac­tics of owls, I have watched a flicker, too young to fly, climb a large palm tree in the same manner, using both beak and claws. And condor expert Ian McMillan tells of seeing these enormous birds ascend to the tops of trees in order to gain the altitude necessary for take-off.) It was a slow, laborious climb but both tree and bird were equipped for it. The owl’s sharply curved claws and beak fitted into the deep grooves of the oak bark.

  Up, up went Baby Spot and when he had regained his perch in the oak tree he promptly closed his eyes and went to sleep. But within five minutes he was awake again and the whole perform­ance started over, the fidgeting, the flouncing, and finally, to the dismay of his observers, the falling. For the second time in half an hour owl feathers filled the air and littered the ground. And an­other mystery was solved—the origin of all the feathers we’d found that afternoon. They belonged to Baby Spot, and it seemed probable that if he kept up his present rate he would become the first bald owl in ornithological history.

  Once more he began his long, slow ascent of the tree trunk. He was about a third of the way up when through the canyon came a sound that was equally welcome to all three of the listeners. It was a series of notes, higher in pitch than the call of the great horned owl, and not so much a who, who, who, who, as a what, what, what.

  It was almost totally dark by this time, and what took place in the oak tree was a kind of shadow play with sound effects. The parent owls arrived in a fluster of what-what’s and whistles, and another noise that sounded to the imaginative Mickey like the squeaking of a mouse. Perhaps the other young owl heard it, too, for he suddenly appeared out of nowhere, took his place beside Baby Spot on the oak branch—where he had spent the day re­mained his secret—and the little family was united again. Soon the parents went off in search of more food and the babies were left alone. They sat quietly side by side, looking like twin ghosts rest­ing up after a haunting.

  The Hylands and the Williamses kept the spotted owl family under observation until mid-August when the opening of deer hunting season made the canyon too dangerous to linger in. By this time the young owls were ready for independence, with wing and tail feathers well developed. The last I heard of them, they were still haunting their wooded canyon.

  I have since had news concerning two other owls mentioned previously in this chapter. Someone cut the wire of the cage where Tiny lived, the burrowing owl who was a pet at the Museum of Natural History for years. Perhaps it was a senseless piece of vandalism, or perhaps Tiny’s escape was engineered by someone of good faith and poor judgment who didn’t realize the little bird had been raised in captivity and couldn’t survive by himself.

  On a happier note, the living quarters under the museum roof which were long left vacant after the death of the screech owl Hermie have been found, approved and occupied by another screech owl. Possibly among owls, as among humans, the dwelling defines the dweller. Hermie Too has developed the same peculiarties and social mannerisms as his predecessor, and most visitors to the museum don’t know he isn’t the original.

  Volumes could be written on the subject of the differences be­tween the sexes among birds. Space limitations permit me only to emphasize that there are no hard and fast rules.

  Usually the male is larger and stronger than the female, yet most of the male predators—eagles, hawks, falcons, harriers, buteos—are smaller than their mates and look to them for leadership.

  Though singing is the prerogative of the male of most species, female grosbeaks sing, and so do cardinals, robins and mocking­birds. The dipper sometimes joins her mate in a duet, as do the females of several species of owl. Recently a pair of great horned owls put on a concert while sitting, appropriately enough, on our television antenna. Perhaps it wasn’t singing in the Metropolitan Opera sense, but I’ve heard human performances I’ve enjoyed less.

  In at least one species of bird the female not only sings, she can do so with her mouth full. On a February morning I watched a pair of house finches during an early stage of their courtship. The female, who was being fed by the male, several times broke into song, enough like the male’s song to be identifiable, but softer and incomplete.

  Usually it is the male bird who makes advances to the female, by displaying in various ways or by presenting her with nesting materials. But here, too, there are buts. Some female birds, like the skua, present grass and twigs to the males at courting time, and mutual display is the rule rather than the exception among sea birds.

  One spring I watched a pair of mockingbirds put on what I thought was a mutual display beside the road in front of our house. The stage was an area about six feet square and the mockers stood facing each other, heads and tails held high, so that both birds looked larger than normal and of somewhat different shape. One of the birds hopped into the center of the stage and bowed briskly. The other did the same. The first bird gave a little hop to the left and bowed, the second repeated the movements exactly. This went on for some time, with the birds often meeting chest to chest in a seemingly amorous posture. The performance was both solemn and funny, and an onlooker couldn’t help being reminded of the fact that many folk dances originated in attempts to copy the movements of birds.

  When I first witnessed this mockingbird exhibition it was during early spring and I assumed the dancers were male and female, and the dance was intended to take advantage of the difference. This assumption was shaken when, the following October, I saw a pair going through precisely the same ritual. Perhaps October eyes are different, unblurred by the winds of March, the rains of April, the wild weather of the heart in spring. At any rate my autumn eyes saw the birds as two males engaged in a bluffing match to decide territorial bounda
ries.

  Since that time I’ve witnessed many such mockingbird rituals. When the same two birds were involved, the arena was usually the same patch of ground and the demonstration occasionally ended with feathers flying, but more often with the dignified retreat of one of the contestants. There can be little doubt that these were territorial disputes, or what Edward A. Armstrong calls “hostility displays, slightly socialised.” I say little doubt rather than no doubt because among birds, as among human beings, love-making exhib­its some striking similarities to hate-making.

  Mr. Armstrong also points out, in Bird Display and Behaviour, that among certain birds like terns, cormorants, grebes and band-tailed pigeons, even the climactic act of mounting doesn’t belong exclusively to the male.

  A friend was recently lamenting that the task of differentiating between the human sexes was becoming more and more intricate, what with males coiffed and perfumed like females and females dressed like males. I suggested that the only really certain method was to wait and see which one of a pair went to the hospital to have the baby. We might do well to apply this to birds: the one that lays the eggs is the female.

  7

  A Tempest of Tanagers

  The western tanager is a symbol for me of the strangeness and beauty of my first year of bird-watching. It is as effective as a time machine. At the sight of one of these birds I am instantly transported back to an August morning several years ago.