The Birds and the Beasts Were There

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The Birds and the Beasts Were There Page 19

by Margaret Millar


  Whether B.T. was simply venting his spleen or whether he was issuing a genuine alarm to warn the other woodpeckers in the canyon against the newfangled poison, I will never know. I do know this: of the meal worms Jane put out, the scrub jay carried away three, the black-headed grosbeak ate one and the rest just disappeared.

  That afternoon I dropped in on Adu and Peter Batten to see the latest additions to their household. The most unusual was a week-old lion which Adu was bottle-feeding and which she let me hold. His coat was finer than silk and his paws like velvet pincushions. The only slightly rough thing about him was his tongue. Someday it would have the texture of the coarsest grade of sandpaper and his affectionate kisses would not be so popular.

  Another addition was a margay, a spotted wild cat of Central and South America, which looked like a small ocelot. The resem­blance almost cost the margay his life since he’d been purchased by some imbecilic woman to attract attention: she intended to parade him on a leash when she wore her ocelot coat. She knew nothing whatever about the care and feeding of animals and made no effort to find out. By the time the Battens got hold of the margay, he was so weak and crippled with rickets he couldn’t even stand up. They treated him with vitamin shots and a special high-nutritive formula made for humans and he was already showing improvement. By the end of summer he was active enough to make a real pest of himself because of his boundless curiosity.

  The third new member of the household was a little African bush baby, or galago, a primate about twelve inches long, half of which was tail. Like his nocturnal cousins, the lorises and pottos, he had huge round eyes that gave him a look of continual amaze­ment. In the wild, a bush baby spends the daylight hours sleeping in trees, sometimes in abandoned birds’ nests, but at night he comes alive. He can climb like a monkey and use his front paws the way a human child uses his hands, he can leap like a kangaroo, chirp like a bird, and furl and unfurl his ears like nothing else I know of in the animal kingdom.

  The bush baby was shy and disinclined to eat, so Adu was trying to tempt his appetite by offering him his favorite food, grasshoppers. Unfortunately she wasn’t as well equipped as he was for locating and catching grasshoppers, and feeding the bush baby was taking a disproportionate amount of time when she had so many other animals to look after. I suggested that since meal worms were used both as food and medicine for other small mon­keys, the bush baby would probably accept them as a substitute for grasshoppers. She agreed and I delivered the worm factory to her that same afternoon.

  It is commonly stated that the two happiest days in a couple’s life are the day they acquire a boat and the day they get rid of it. I’ve experienced both of these and neither can compare to the beautiful day that the Hoffman’s Pure Rendered Beef Fat can was removed from the bookcase, the thermostat was turned down to 72° and the Worm Factory became once again my plain and simple office.

  Besides a taste for acorns, the acorn woodpeckers share with the scrub jays the ability to live at close quarters with human beings. There is, however, a big difference in their approach: the jays are aggressive and fearless, the woodpeckers simply don’t give a darn. Evidence of this is the fact that Tucker’s Grove, a small oak-studded park where nearly every weekend hundreds of people go for company barbecues or club outings, is a favorite woodpecker haunt. I sat at one of the picnic tables recently and started to count the storage holes in the bark of the ancient live oak above me. I gave up at a thousand. There are probably thirty or forty times that many and the storage tree is still used.

  Estimates of the number of woodpeckers living in Tucker’s Grove ran from thirty to sixty. But Jody Bennett, then a graduate student at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who was doing research in the grove on the communal life of acorn wood­peckers, was convinced that these estimates were exaggerated be­cause the birds were so noisy and conspicuous, and that the actual figure was close to twenty. She asked the members of the Santa Barbara Audubon Society to help her take a census. A pair of observers was stationed at each storage tree and nesting site within the eighteen-acre area and an automobile horn signaled the count­ing to begin and to end. The results surprised everyone but Jody—there were only nineteen woodpeckers in the park. In a subsequent census the figure was the same.

  On the days after a large barbecue or picnic at Tucker’s Grove the woodpeckers will fly down to the ground for bits of food, and when the creek is dry they perch on the fountains to drink, but in my experience they cannot be readily tamed like some of the other birds. Their indifference to people is partly a result of nature’s bounty. B.T. knows I am the source of his breakfast doughnut, but he knows, too, that there is an abundance of other food available and that he can afford to keep his freedom and independence, and his inalienable right to rage.

  13

  The Younger Generation and How It Aged Us

  All spring and most of the summer the ledge served as a nursery. The personnel changed from week to week as babies grew up and departed voluntarily or were forcibly removed to make room for other babies. Many of the birds in our area have two or more broods. The championship in this de­partment must go to the mourning dove, who lays up to five clutches in a year—although poorly constructed nests on or near the ground result in heavy losses among both eggs and young.

  It is a common summer sight to see mated pairs of birds feeding the first batch of babies while building a new nest or fixing up an old nest or otherwise preparing for a second or third batch. One afternoon I was watching a female brown towhee feeding her off­spring on the dead limb of an oak tree. A male towhee suddenly appeared, and with the full cooperation of the female, he mounted her quickly and flew away. This was repeated four times at inter­vals of about ten seconds. Both parents seemed to have forgotten the baby bird who eventually left the scene with some of his bloom of innocence rubbed off.

  During the last week of May the hooded oriole, that most pa­tient of fathers, was pestered from dawn to dusk, from pine to pepper, from eucalyptus to eugenia, by his tenacious green daugh­ter. Whenever he managed to elude her for a fraction of a minute she would deftly spear a grape or take a bite of doughnut, but the instant she caught sight of him again she became a quivering, helpless, starving infant. If he was annoyed by her silly posturings he didn’t show it the way many parent birds did, with a swipe of the wing or a sharp peck. He certainly had reason to be annoyed—waiting for him in the nest were two babies who were truly help­less.

  They made their debut on the ledge in the middle of June and the sight of them sent me scurrying to consult the bird books: they resembled their drab little mother, as they were supposed to, ex­cept that each of them wore an orange skullcap. I’ve been unable to find a reference to such a color quirk in any of my bird books but I saw another example of it that same week when I visited the Krigers’ house. The hooded orioles had nested, as usual, in the banana tree outside their living-room window and one of the second-brood birds was marked exactly like the two at our feeding station.

  Our young orioles departed early, still capped in orange and mystery. Was their unusual plumage temporary or permanent? Was it caused by genetic mutation, or some factor like diet, or a substance they came in contact with, like pollen? Were all three of the birds I’d observed males and was the orange color the result of premature activity of the hormones? I suspect this was the case but as an amateur I can afford the luxury of simply saying that I don’t know.

  On April 7, the first brood of house finches appeared on the ledge, and about a month later, the second brood. Each young bird wore tufts of feathers that looked like horns. This was appropriate enough, for they were veritable devils, sometimes actually attack­ing the mother in their attempts to prove they were still babies and needed food and attention. In between broods I watched an inter­esting little scene which proved to me that the human female isn’t necessarily the only determined woman.

  The action took place at B.T.’s feede
r, the wooden dish. When the larger birds were busy elsewhere, the smaller birds ate here, in this case a male and female house finch. Some male house finches show a wide color variation and this one was a dingy pumpkin color whereas the majority of his relatives were red. Pumpkin showed no evidence of special appeal or, in fact, of any interest in the little lady eating opposite him, but this didn’t faze her. She had chosen Pumpkin, he was it, and that was that. She quivered seduc­tively in front of him. He looked baffled, then nervous, and finally flew away in alarm. She flew after him, and a few minutes later they were both back and she resumed her attempts to make him think she was irresistible.

  She did turn out to be irresistible, but not to the right bird. A second male, Red, watching from a nearby cotoneaster, was en­chanted by her performance and indicated as much by swooping down on the feeder, and driving Pumpkin away. Instead of taking this as a compliment, the lady was furious. She turned on Red and pecked at him violently until he flew off. Then she set out after Pumpkin again and brought him back to the feeder.

  This scene was repeated twice. The third time another female got into the act and made it clear that she, too, had fallen for Pumpkin’s well-hidden charms. In the animal kingdom it is the peculiar-looking mammal who is shunned, the odd-colored bird who is at the bottom of the pecking order. Pumpkin’s difference only made him more appealing to the ladies. Affairs of the heart, in man, beast or bird, are not always easy to comprehend.

  Every April we watched the blackbirds courting. The redwings, their epaulets almost fluorescent, whistled in concert from the tangles of ceanothus their mad and merry Oo-long-tea, whee! The Brewer blackbirds, bodies inflated and wings raised, looked like comical little Draculas as they pursued the females around the ledge. The cowbirds, heads glossy as milk chocolate, sang the gurgling notes which sounded so much like water trickling down a drain that I checked the kitchen plumbing half a dozen times before I discovered that the noise was coming from a bird, not a leaky tap.

  In mid-May the baby Brewers appeared and used our ledge as the place where they learned the rudiments of living—how to fly, how to drink and bathe, how to forage for themselves. The ledge made an ideal kindergarten or, more accurately, Brewery. It was high, but with shrubs below and nearby in case of falls; it was safe from daytime predators since the sharp-shinned hawks had moved north to breed and our three dogs kept the area clear of cats and boys with BB guns or slingshots; and there was an abundance of food and fresh water. Most baby blackbirds took their lessons in stride and wingbeat, but a few were unlucky, some were timid and some slow to learn.

  The unluckiest of them all struck the wooden gate that sepa­rated the ledge from the porch. It was a bad strike. I heard it in my office and I was amazed when I rushed into the living room to see that the bird was still alive on the ledge. He lay on his back, silent, trembling all over. During the next five minutes that were to be the final ones of his short life I witnessed a most touching exhibition of the group solicitude of these birds for their young. More than a dozen blackbirds assembled in as many seconds, most of them males. They surrounded and fussed over the injured baby, trying to coax him to sit up. Even after he died they kept coming back to him to make sure he couldn’t use their help.

  Other babies had better luck—and needed it. One afternoon when Ken and I returned home from lunch downtown we heard a commotion on the ledge before we even opened the front door. Its source was a baby Brewer taking his first lesson in flying. How he’d gotten as far as the ledge I don’t know, but one thing seemed absolutely certain—he didn’t intend to go any further. He had taken up his position as close as possible to the wall and was bleating loudly and piteously to be rescued. Meanwhile his father kept talking to him in a reassuring way and swooping back and forth in front of him to show him just how easy flying was. Here’s how it’s done—swoop—Nothing to it at all, really—swoop—Watch this and you’ll get the picture—swoop.

  Baby Brewer was not interested in how it was done; he didn’t get the picture and he didn’t swoop. He wanted only to be back in that nice, safe, cozy nest and he so stated clearly, lustily and several hundred times. For the entire afternoon Dad coaxed and swooped while his diffident child clung stubbornly to the ledge. It began to look more and more like a battle of wills than a flying lesson. Whoever won the battle, I knew who’d be the loser. By six o’clock my nerves were cracking and I’d already made a trip to the storeroom and another to the garage in a futile search for a con­tainer that would adequately house a baby blackbird. The ledge, safe enough in the daytime, became a different place at night. Rats scampered up and down it, opossums crossed it on their way to and from the tea tree, raccoons climbed it to claim their share of the bread and doughnuts, great horned owls watched it from the television antenna. There was nothing whatever to recommend that ledge to a baby bird and I wished to heaven I had some way of conveying the message to him before the sun went down.

  Perhaps it was the sun itself that conveyed the message. As it started to sink behind the eucalyptus trees the little bird mustered all his courage and strength and flew into the privet hedge five feet away. The Wright brothers couldn’t have enjoyed their moment of glory more thoroughly than Baby Brewer. Carried away by his success he swooped across to the tea tree, and from there, about a hundred feet to the neighbors’ roof. The last I saw of him was just before the sun disappeared completely. He was strutting up and down beside the chimney and he looked as though he was congrat­ulating himself: I made it in one swell foop.

  The devoted attention the young blackbird received from his father contrasted sharply with the parental treatment the young English sparrows received. They were sent out to fend for them­selves at so tender an age that they still showed nestling-yellow at the corners of their mouths. Their flight was weak and wobbly and it often seemed a miracle to me that they could cover as much as a few yards. But it was a case of fly or die, so they flew.

  The childhood of these birds was brief and bleak. For most spe­cies of animal and bird, playing is a part of growing up for the young, and of staying alive for the middle-aged and old. But I’ve never seen an English sparrow engaged in play. For them, life is real and earnest, and not much fun. Its purpose is simple—more life—and they have no time or energy to waste on anything not directly connected with their purpose. Playfulness, whether the puritans approve or not, is a quality much admired in bird, animal or man, and the reason the English sparrow is so widely despised is probably not because he’s common or has particularly bad habits, but because of his grim, cheerless assembly-line reproduc­tion.

  One of the first things I noticed about these sparrows at the feeding station was their lack of relationship with any of their fellow boarders. When they came to the ledge to eat, there were no preliminaries, polite or impolite. If other birds were already feed­ing, the sparrows didn’t try to drive them away, they merely squeezed in beside them and began eating. If the sparrows were there first and other birds arrived and attempted to drive them away, the sparrows, even the very young ones, ignored them. They seemed, in fact, not to comprehend the meaning of the other birds’ actions. Bluff is the main weapon in the arsenal of most birds. They use it and are, in turn, used by it. The sparrows neither used it nor recognized its use. A Brewer blackbird inflated to twice its size and with his white eye glaring may have looked awesome to the finches and tanagers, but to the English sparrows he looked like an inflated blackbird with a white eye. They had no time or taste for bluffing, which is, after all, a kind of game.

  In scientific circles it was fashionable for a while to believe that play was confined to the young and that it was merely an exercis­ing of the muscles and a practicing of the skills that would be necessary in adult life. This theory has had to be modified consid­erably as it became obvious that not all players were young, and not all playing constructive. Play seems to me a natural activity of birds and animals who have energy left over after the necessities of living have
been attended to. The chief necessity is food and the kind of food a bird eats regulates the amount of foraging that must be done every day. The mourning dove, whose diet consists mainly of weed seeds, has to spend a great deal of time and energy getting the same amount of nourishment as a scrub jay gets from one meadow mouse or a few protein-rich caterpillars. How the scrub jay uses his consequent leisure is well known to every chronicler of mischief.

  All flying looks like fun to the earthbound, and so we must be cautious in singling out a particular action of a bird and calling it play. Yet in some cases play is unmistakable.

  One September, Ken and I drove with the Hylands up to Morro Bay to look for some of the birds that require a wilder and rockier coastline than our area provided—wandering tattlers, black oystercatchers, black turnstones and surfbirds. Sometimes a single rock in the Avila region will provide all four species, and one year a very rare American oystercatcher also took up residence there. Going along the bay we stopped to watch the tide coming in across the mudflats. A certain stream was running quite rapidly and on it were a dozen northern phalaropes having the time of their lives. They would ride down the stream for thirty or forty yards, twirl­ing around now and then like little toy boats caught in an eddy. Then they’d fly back up and start over. This was repeated again and again until the stream gradually slowed and stopped and the tide was in and the phalaropes settled down to the serious business of foraging.

  Helen and Nelson Metcalf witnessed a similar performance on one of the Columbia River rapids in Washington. The birds on this occasion were four white pelicans. They would rise in the air and fly single file to the head of the rapids, then ride four abreast all the way down to the quiet water. The Metcalfs watched for half an hour. When they departed, the pelicans were still riding the rapids. Brian Roberts has written an account of common eiders repeatedly riding a tide current in a fjord, and R.A. Stoner tells of an Anna’s hummingbird who kept floating down the stream caused by a gar­den faucet that had been left running. I wonder how many other species of birds indulge in similar games that are unseen or unre­ported.

 

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