Birders in bushtit country should not merely be content with identifying a flock of these birds. They would do well to observe each individual carefully, since one or two may turn out to be not bushtits at all but other tiny birds who’ve joined up with the flock to forage. In our area these others are mainly warblers. In the company of bushtits I’ve found Townsend warblers, Audubon, myrtle, black-throated grey, orange-crowned, Wilson, yellow and hermit.
Winter arrived and the visits of our small gourmet friend became less frequent. Unlike some species of birds which have a regular routine you can set your watch by, bushtits are spasmodic foragers. When the flock passed quite close to the house, our friend would pause for a bite of doughnut; when the foraging was too far away to permit her to rejoin the other members of her group easily, she played it safe and stayed with them.
In midwinter the roving bands of bushtits began to get smaller as pairs formed and left the group. The first week in February, I caught sight of a male bushtit cocking an inquisitive black eye at the cornucopia. The next morning, in a heavy rain, two of them arrived together, male and female. And high in the air the red-shouldered hawk was screaming at his mate, ordering her to come here, come here, come here. From the acacias down by the creek the song sparrow was pressing for Presbyterians and the Hutton’s vireo whistling for sweets, sweets, sweets.
“. . . All over town the doves are nesting, the bandtails and the towhees, the mockers and hummingbirds. And so on . . . ad, one hopes, infinitum.”
12
Life in the Worm Factory
What distinguishes a bird from all other living creatures? Feathers. And what distinguishes an acorn woodpecker from all other birds? Practically everything.
Acorn woodpeckers are the characters of our part of the bird world, the true uniques, in appearance, voice, mannerisms, feeding, nesting and care of young. So it was natural enough, I suppose, that they should have been the ones responsible for our going into the worm business.
The word “togetherness” usually conjures up a picture of a large family group celebrating Thanksgiving or Christmas. To me it conjures up the telephone pole beside our driveway, for in it lived a family group that celebrated every day in the year. I don’t know exactly how many members constituted the group—an acorn woodpecker census, as I’ll show later, is not simple, and estimates of numbers tend to be too high since the birds are so noisy—but I would say between seven and nine.
Our road in Montecito is a circle, half a mile around. Three families of woodpeckers lived on this street, approximately equal distances apart. The first family had its headquarters in the top of a dead palm tree. I had almost nothing to do with this group except to watch for it in passing. The second group I came to know better. It used a telephone pole located beside the creek that ran through the neighboring canyon, an area of numerous mature live oaks, any one of which would have made an excellent storage tree, in my opinion. But the woodpeckers didn’t invite my opinion. For their storage tree they had chosen the attic of a pretty little white frame cottage whose owner, Miss Holbrook, fortunately for the birds, was both a nature lover and somewhat deaf.
The third family was ours—or we were theirs, depending on point of view. Less than fifty feet separated the window beside my bed from the excavation in the telephone pole where they slept, if so mild a word can be used to describe the deathlike coma into which they fell with the darkness. I heard their guttural goodnights as they squeezed and squashed into the hole, and in the morning, their throat clearings as their metabolism quickened after the torpor of the night. Their temperatures rose, their bodies warmed, their senses became alert as they returned to life. With life came hunger, and with hunger, the hope that the Millars would be serving breakfast al fresco, as usual. They chose a sentry to keep watch.
Acorn woodpeckers are not the earliest risers in the bird world —based on the records I’ve kept, I would have to give this distinction to the brown towhee—but they were well ahead of me. By the time I opened my eyes the sentry was already perched on a dead branch of the eucalyptus tree, loosening up his voice box with a few rolling notes now and then. The instant I stepped out on the porch, he let go:
Jacob, Jacob, wake up, wake up!
Jack up, jack up, get up, get up!
Yack up, yack up, yack up, yack up, yack up, yack up, yack up, yack up, yack up.
This last sequence is like a crescendo and decrescendo, reaching its height of volume and pitch on the fifth yack up, then decreasing. It sounds so much like a carpenter sawing through a board that I actually mistook it for just that. When we first moved here I used to wonder how our neighbor, a professional man with a demanding job, could afford to spend so much time at home building things.
The sentry’s calls brought immediate responses. Pretty soon the canyon was an echo chamber of noise, for if there was one thing the acorn woodpeckers liked it was a loud and lively family conference. They seemed ready to confer at any time from dawn to dusk, on any subject from soup to sunspots. At least that’s the impression a listener might get from their variety of noises and their range of pitch and volume. They talked to their relatives and friends and to the other species of birds who’d responded to the breakfast call, especially the scrub jays, their chief competitors for acorns, or in this case, doughnuts and bread. They also talked to themselves. Under ordinary circumstances this was done quietly, rather like a person muttering to himself while he tries to solve a personal problem. But there was one bird, a hot-headed male, whose soliloquies could be heard all the way to City Hall. He will be formally introduced later.
Breakfast was served on a corner of the porch railing, in a wooden dish that had once been a salad bowl. A large nail had been driven through the dish to keep it steady and to serve as a spear for two doughnuts. This left room for a couple of pieces of bread, broken into bits, and a few grapes when they were in season. I have never seen woodpeckers go after grapes on the vine—it would be difficult for them to find a proper landing place—but they ate them readily out of the wooden dish, frequently flying across the canyon to hide them behind the loose bark of a blue gum eucalyptus which also served as a hiding place for other choice tidbits. Remembering our little wine-making friend Richard the rat, I used to watch the woodpeckers carefully for signs of tippling. I never saw any. Either they ate the grapes before the process of fermentation started, or, more likely, they forgot about them since they invariably store much more food than they can possibly eat.
Nature has been generous to the acorn woodpecker. He is not dependent, as his relatives are, on the vagaries of insect life, nor is it necessary for him to fight for seeds or vegetation that are in short supply. Our part of California is filled with oaks and acorns, and living has been relatively easy for the woodpeckers dependent on them. Their abundance so testifies. Santa Barbara’s Christmas bird census always lists several hundred of them. In last year’s Christmas bird census Santa Barbara listed 456—the highest count in the nation.
As soon as the sentry had issued the call for breakfast, he himself came down to the wooden dish to eat. I knew it was a male because he lacked the broad black forehead band that marks the female and is noticeable at a considerable distance. (For some reason this sexual dimorphism is not often mentioned in bird books.) I wasn’t sure whether it was the same male who acted as sentry all the time. On some mornings I noticed a decidedly pink cast to the normally whitish eye, which led me to believe that more than one male bird was involved. I still believe it—not, however, on this evidence. Dr. Mary Erickson, an ornithologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara who has been doing field work on these woodpeckers for a long time, tells me that this pinkish cast is not due to pigmentation but to a suffusion of blood caused by stress or excitement. She has observed it frequently in the eyes of woodpeckers who are being banded.
I knew from the sleekness and brightness of his coat that the sentry was an adult
bird. Young birds often show dark eyes— perhaps because their pupils are expanded after time spent in the murkiness of the nest hole—and considerable red in the under-plumage of the chest, neck and head, a reminder of their close relationship with the red-headed woodpecker of the East and Midwest, Melanerpes erythrocephalus. The acorn woodpecker’s scientific name, Melanerpes formicivorus, meaning creeping black anteater, was based on inadequate or faulty information. Ants constitute such a small percentage of the diet that it seems likely they’re ingested by accident while the birds are eating acorns or other nuts and fruits.
The number of these woodpeckers feeding from the wooden dish varied according to the time of year. In spring and summer there were a great many—I didn’t attempt to count individual birds since this was impossible without banding; I simply kept track of how often they monopolized the feeder—and in the fall there were absolutely none. I used to think this was due to post-breeding dispersal, families splitting up and moving from one pole or tree to another pole or tree when the groups became too large and the quarters too unsanitary. These movements did occur every summer, but the birds never went far. When the family in the telephone pole beside our driveway moved, for instance, it was only to the large dead eucalyptus tree on the edge of the property. This location was no further away from the wooden dish than the other, yet in September the birds stopped coming. I would see them hurry past our porch railing as if it were a bird trap and doughnuts were poison bait and I a sinister stranger; I, who for months hadn’t been able to step out of a door without evoking a canyonful of clangorous “good mornings.”
It was as though our house had suddenly been declared off-limits. Perhaps a single woodpecker stopped for a rest, a quick grape or a bite of doughnut during that autumn and the early part of winter, but if he did, I failed to see him. No mere moving from one headquarters to another could account for such a complete reversal in behavior pattern. There had to be another explanation. And there was—staring at me from every twig of every coast live oak tree in the canyon. In September the acorns begin to ripen and fancy tidbits that can’t be properly stored must be forgotten in the interests of the future.
The group worked busily and harmoniously together. New holes were made in the storage tree, in this case a sycamore, and the acorns were pounded in, usually lengthwise, very occasionally sideways, if this was the way they could best be fitted in. I have seen a woodpecker try a particular acorn in a dozen or more different holes until one was found that was the exact fit, an essential part of the proceedings since the hole is intended to serve as a vise to hold the nut securely while they hammer the shells open with their beaks. Anyone skeptical about the skill and efficiency of these birds would do well to visit a storage tree and try to remove an acorn with his hands. Many ancient California Indian tribes, like the Chumash, Yokut and Shoshone, who shared the territory of these woodpeckers before the arrival of the Spaniards, undoubtedly obtained their method for cracking the nuts from watching the birds. The Indians used a hole in a rock instead of a tree, putting the acorns in securely, pointed end down, and hammering open the wider, exposed end. After the nuts were cured and ground, the tannic acid was removed with hot water and the meal was left to harden into cakes. A friend who has tasted one of these cakes, still made by the Yokuts, claims the Indians would have done better to have copied the woodpeckers entirely and eaten the acorns right out of the shell.
Every day when I passed Miss Holbrook’s small white cottage I could hear the woodpeckers at work. Sometimes I stopped to watch them drilling under the eaves as industriously as if the lady of the house was paying them carpenters’ union wages.
Work sessions were sometimes silent, sometimes accompanied by loud and spirited conversation which may have sounded to an untutored ear like quarreling. Actually they were good-natured, gregarious birds. For all their crowded living quarters and communal breeding—things which would have driven the human animal to distraction—I never saw them fight with each other. Although there appeared to be a pecking order at the wooden dish, it was maintained merely by a polite exchange of words:
“That’s my doughnut you’re eating, dear chap.”
“Really? I’m terribly sorry. I’ll leave immediately, old sport.”
They could fight when they wanted to, however, and they often did, their usual adversary being their fellow consumer of acorns, the scrub jay. In battle the woodpeckers took advantage of their proclivity for group action. A single scrub jay eating on the porch railing was, to mix birds and metaphors, a sitting duck for a trio of acorn woodpeckers who took turns dive-bombing him from the roof. No actual physical contact was involved but the harassed jay would nearly always retreat to a more peaceful foraging area. I didn’t waste much sympathy on him. He himself used the dive-bombing technique on other birds whenever he had the chance.
In the meantime the scrub jay, too, was gathering acorns and storing them. His storage method—burying them in the ground, then often as not forgetting where—seemed much inferior to that of the woodpeckers, but was, in fact, a neat piece of ecology. Some acorns would be found and eaten, enabling the jay to survive, and some would be forgotten and reseed, enabling the oaks to survive.
Scrub jays are natural-born buriers. Even when the adobe soil was so dry and hard they had to chisel it like stone, they carried away everything that wasn’t nailed down—bits of bread, potato chips, grapes, peanuts, chunks of apple, pretzels, cheese crackers, cookies, hard-boiled eggs—and used every inch of bare ground they could find. Ours would have been quite a unique neighborhood if all the items they buried had sprouted and grown. Only one did, the sunflower seeds. By June the lower and upper terrace and the adjoining field had turned into a forest of the things. Nor did the jays confine their activities to our property. In fact, a stranger visiting our street for the first time would have thought that half the people living on it had decided to go in for commercial sunflower growing. Where the sunflowers stopped marked the territorial limits of the jays who patronized our feeders.
Give these birds a decent-sized piece of bare earth to work with and their planting is as neat and symmetrical as any human gardener’s. The man living next door had, at the rear of his house, a dirt road which was no longer in use. The jays took on the job of landscaping it. Down the middle of each tire track they planted sunflower seeds, exactly five inches apart.
Something of a more reasonable size might have escaped detection, but as the sunflowers reached five, six, seven feet they practically forced themselves on the property owner’s attention. He was not known as a nature lover, and had, in fact, been somewhat critical of my bandtails landing on his T.V. antenna and cahooing too early in the morning. When we met at the mailbox one noon he mentioned that sunflowers were coming up in his avocado orchard and lemon grove and even in his cutting garden, and he asked me if I’d noticed. I had a choice of admitting that I’d noticed or confessing to total blindness, so I said, yes, I’d seen a few sunflowers coming up here and there.
He gave me a suspicious look. “They’re all over the place. What do you suppose is at the bottom of it?”
“Sunflower seeds,” I said, and retreated before he could pursue the subject further.
People familiar with these noisy, colorful jays might wonder how the man could have missed seeing them at work. The fact is that when a scrub jay is doing something important like burying food or looking for other birds’ nests to rob, stalking a lizard or spying out the acorn caches of the woodpeckers, he is absolutely silent and moves with a practiced stealth which makes him almost invisible.
Planting sunflower seeds became such an obsession with our jays that we rarely saw them eat one. When they did, they anchored the seed firmly with their feet and hammered it open with their beaks, in the manner of titmice, quite different from the way the house finches ate. The finches didn’t use their feet; they simply held the seed in their beaks and sawed it right down the midd
le. Every few days I had to sweep their neatly halved hulls off the ledge.
All that cool, moist winter the jays planted, and in the sunny spring the sunflowers grew, and in the hot, dry summer they died. None reached fruition and the diligent but luckless farmers never harvested a single seed. Some of the plants were toppled by wind or their own weight; some couldn’t compete with the sturdier natives for what small amount of moisture was available; others were knocked down by dogs and cats or trampled by possums and raccoons and bush bunnies. With the sunflowers died my hope, never too robust, of saving a little money at the feed store. (Not long ago a visiting Easterner was complaining of having to pay fifteen cents a pound for the California-grown sunflower seeds he fed his birds at home. I told him that we Californians paid exactly twice that amount. There are many similar inequities in the price of produce. I once asked an agronomist why, and he replied in about ten thousand words that he didn’t know. He seemed delighted when I suggested the reason might be sunspots.)
While the sunflowers were dying, the baby scrub jays flourished. Perched on the porch railing, waiting their turn at the wooden dish, they were fat and fluffy and oddly quiet. In appearance they resembled the Mexican jay of Arizona and New Mexico more than they did their parents. They lacked the scrub jay’s eyebrow stripe and half-necklace and cobalt-blue head.
Their innocence and docility was quite touching. Soon they would learn that this is not the way of a jay, but for a little time they were gentle creatures bossed around by nearly all the other birds. They were dive-bombed by woodpeckers, crowded out by blackbirds, pecked by towhees and mockers, pushed off the railing by thrashers, even jostled by sparrows, and they never fought back or let out a single squawk of protest. The only noise they made was a very infrequent sound, loud and shrill, that reminded me of a flicker’s. I have heard it no more than a dozen times in our years of operating the feeding station.
The Birds and the Beasts Were There Page 17