The Birds and the Beasts Were There

by Margaret Millar

  Almost all birds fly, but only a few aerial geniuses can soar—that is, rise skyward without wing-flapping, using only winds or thermal updrafts. The white pelican is one. These huge silent birds, which share with the California condor an enormous wingspread, more than eight feet, and a reputation for gentleness and quietness, are capable of fantastic feats of soaring. At the slightest invitation of the wind they will rise high in the air and put on a performance that looks not like mere play but like an inspired and exuberant romp of angels.

  White pelicans do not, like condors, cover great distances in the search for food, nor do they have the brown pelican’s habit of spotting a fish from the air and diving down into the water to catch it. They feed while swimming leisurely along the surface, finding small, delicate tidbits which their greedy brown brothers would disdain. It is the simplest and easiest way to forage and the energy they save can be, perhaps must be, used for the kind of activity we call play.

  Wood storks are masters of the art of soaring. These large shy birds are normally seen in flocks in regions where there is shallow fresh water like the Florida Everglades and the Louisiana bayous. In late summer, post-breeding dispersal brings a number of them to the Salton Sea in California where they stay for a limited time. They rarely appear as far north and west as Santa Barbara, but one individual threw the rule book overboard and came here to spend two consecutive winters.

  His time was divided between our main sloughs, Goleta and Sandyland. He was an excellent example of the way many birds will adjust quickly to such things as air and highway traffic, while remaining extremely wary of people on foot. At Goleta his favorite hangout was below a bluff between the airport and the busy road leading to the university. At Sandyland he stayed as far away from the beach houses as possible, which put him right next to the Los Angeles-San Francisco Freeway. At both sloughs he had for com­pany great blue herons and black-crowned night herons, snowy and common egrets, avocets and the occasional black-necked stilt. He was particularly attracted to the egrets, perhaps because they were white and most resembled his family and friends from whom he’d been separated. The attraction was not mutual.

  Wood storks are very gregarious birds and he obviously missed his own kind. In the early morning and late afternoon he foraged; when there were thermals to ride, he rode them. But the times between, when he had nothing to do, were lonely and hard to fill. It was then that he made his advances to the egrets.

  The grace and beauty of the wood stork was apparent only in flight. On land, with his naked grey head and neck showing, he took no prizes, but there was a certain awkward dignity about the great mute bird as he plodded earnestly across the mud toward the egrets. They invariably gave him a look-what-the-tide-brought-in stare and walked away. He followed, they walked away again. Often, after a series of overtures and rebuffs, he would spring into the air on his long black legs and begin circling around the slough, rising higher and higher until he was out of sight. Audubon had a peculiar notion about such flights: he suggested that they were intended to aid the bird’s digestion.

  All that winter the wood stork tried and failed to establish a relationship with the egrets. He left in early spring, destination unknown. The following October he returned, once again dividing his time between Goleta and Sandyland sloughs. Though he was still no beauty he looked glossier and whiter than the previous year, and his manner was somewhat more self-assured when he pursued the egrets. As Christmas approached I seemed to detect a slight softening in the attitude of the egrets: their rejection of him seemed not so swift or so final. But this may have been merely a subjective and seasonal piece of sentiment on my part. Peace on earth, including the wet haunts of storks and egrets.

  Aerial games are also played by albatrosses, frigatebirds, con­dors, ravens, vultures, kites, buteos, eagles, falcons, gulls, and terns. Some owls are well equipped to soar, but unable to do so because they are active at night when there are no thermals.

  Group play includes the formation flying of gulls and white pelicans and the berry-passing of cedar waxwings, so baffling to those ornithologists who used to demand a rational explanation for everything. (For a long time, play was considered no explanation at all, let alone a rational one.) The game of passing the berry is practically self-explanatory: a berry—toyon, pepper, eugenia, coton­easter, pyracantha, to name only a few varieties they eat—is passed along a line of waxwings perched on a telephone wire or the bare bough of a tree. In one such flock I counted over a hundred wax­wings, and my hat went off not so much to the birds as to the toyon berry which survived the perilous passage to the end of the line and back again. I have also seen a flock of waxwings chasing and catching snowflakes. Perhaps they were doing it for the moisture, perhaps they were doing it for the heck of it.

  The thieving games played by Melanie, the raven described in an earlier chapter, are also played by her crow and magpie cous­ins, and part of the extracurricular activity of every red-blooded scrub jay and mockingbird is the teasing of dogs and cats.

  One of our mockers had a daily rendezvous on the roof with the neighbors’ ginger cat. The cat would stalk the bird around the chim­ney and through the overhanging branches of the oak tree until the cat tired and lay down to rest. Then it was the bird’s turn. He would swoop down on the sleeping cat, almost grazing its head, and repeating triumphantly, yah, yah, yah. In that yah, yah, yah, I hear echoing the voices of all the small bullied boys who are finally getting their say.

  Though the mockers and scrub jays occasionally pestered Brandy, our big German shepherd, and Rolls Royce, our cocker spaniel, it was John, the Scottie, built low to the ground and slowed by age, who was the prime target of their dive-bombing game. But John, canny Scott that he was, had figured out a means of protecting himself, using the principle of: If you can’t lick ’em, go where they can’t follow. Whenever he had to make a sortie into jay or mocker territory, he avoided the open spaces and stuck close to the dense, low-growing shrubbery where he was likely to meet only the occasional wrentit, brown towhee or golden-crowned sparrow.

  It is always amazing to me how birds and animals, and to a certain extent the young of the human species, can take faster and more accurate measure of each other than human adults can. Mr. Smith may require a year to discover that Mr. Jones is no friend of his, a fact that had been apparent to the Smith kids for 364 days. Birds learn very quickly not only the difference between a dog and a cat, but the difference between a hungry cat and a well-fed cat, and between a nervous dog and a calm dog. I have seen white-crowned sparrows, house finches, Audubon warblers and Califor­nia thrashers bathe no more than five feet from where Brandy lay chewing a marrow bone, and on one occasion he actually nudged with his nose a purple finch who was busy eating a doughnut. Wild birds do not accept stroking as a form of friendliness and affection the way domestic animals do. To them such physical contact means extreme danger or death, and so the purple finch, unafraid up to this point, at the touch of Brandy’s nose, went into a state of shock. Puzzled, Brandy picked the bird up and brought it over to me for an explanation. He carried it so carefully that when it recovered its wits a few moments later, it flew out of my hand without a trace of injury. I wish all large creatures could be so gentle, all small ones so confiding.

  We were still waiting, though with little hope, for the return of the phainopeplas which had nested in the large pepper tree in the adjacent canyon. The new crop of pepper berries had meanwhile been discovered by the young of the band-tailed pigeons, recogniz­able by their non-iridescent, unmarked necks. They ate like the cedar waxwings, greedily and in flocks, but they were, at about three-quarters of a pound apiece, considerably larger, so that the delicate, graceful boughs of the pepper tree hung low under the weight of several dozen bandtails.

  About this time two things happened which did nothing to raise my rather low opinion of the common sense of band-tailed pigeons and mourning doves.

  The first incident concern
ed a dove. Eight or ten of these birds had taken a special liking to a new hopper-type feeder Ken had hung in the Monterey pine outside the kitchen window. The feeder, which held some twenty pounds, was made of redwood with glass on two sides so you could see when more seed should be added, and it was filled through a hole in the flat roof. This hole was an oblong measuring 1 ½ by 2 ½ inches and the plug for it had long since gone with a wind.

  There are households where such small repairs or replacements are made immediately, but ours isn’t among them. One morning a hungry house finch arriving at the feeder and finding it completely taken over by doves tried to reach the seed through the hole in the roof and either accidentally fell in or purposely dropped in. I suspect the latter because he certainly didn’t panic, he just started eating, and when he had breakfasted he made his way out again without any trouble. Several of his friends learned the trick by watching him and we would often see two or three at a time feasting inside the glass walls. With their legs lost from sight among the seeds, they appeared to be floating on top of the grain like tiny sea birds.

  The hole-in-the-roof trick was a good one, but like many good tricks its success depended on timing. In the early morning when the feeder was full to the top, the finches came and went as they pleased. As the seed level dropped throughout the day they had increasing difficulty getting out, and by late afternoon any finch foolish enough to enter, had to be rescued. Quite a few of them spent the night inside the feeder before we learned to check it every evening at dusk and make sure it was free of uninvited guests. If it wasn’t, rescue operations were started.

  These rescues were complicated by the fact that the feeder had been placed fairly high in the pine tree and the ground underneath was sloping, and if there was any moisture, extremely slippery like all adobe soil. But the chief difficulty turned out to be the feeder itself, which we had bought because it seemed sturdily built. Stur­dily built it was, alas. The roof had been put on to stay on, through Atlantic coast hurricanes, Midwestern tornadoes or California earthquakes, and the glass walls had been set in more firmly than our plate-glass picture windows. Faced with our initial rescue, we thought of using a pair of tongs to take hold of the finch and pull him up through the hole in the roof, but the hole was too small, or the tongs too big. Nor was any bird likely to cooperate in such a maneuver.

  It was Ken who conceived the idea of reversing the procedure that had caused the trouble in the first place. A bird that had been trapped by the falling of the seed level could very likely be un-trapped by raising the seed level again. And so it came to pass, on a dozen occasions or more, that the twilight scene I saw from the kitchen window included a large man slowly and carefully pouring seed into the roof hole of the feeder while inside the glass walls a small finch gradually rose higher and higher, with a kind of stately dignity that reminded me not of a bird at all, but of a ship passing through one of the locks of the Panama Canal. It seemed to take about the same amount of time, too, especially if I had dinner waiting on the table and Ken had an eight o’clock meeting to make.

  People familiar with these nervous, fidgety finches will be puz­zled, as we were, by the fact that they didn’t panic. Perhaps they were sodden with food, I don’t know. I do know that four of the rescues involved the same finch, a male easily identified by the peculiar mustard color of his head and chest.

  The Panama Canal system was fine for rescuing finches. One afternoon, however, I looked out and saw a most improbable sight—a mourning dove sitting inside the glass walls of the feeder, contentedly pecking away at the seeds. He had managed to squeeze his corpulent twelve inches into an opening that measured 1 ½ by 2 ½ inches, a feat that surely made him the chief contortionist of the dove coterie.

  I called Ken and he went out immediately and started pouring more seed into the feeder. It soon became obvious that this method wasn’t going to work. Even when the bird was raised to the level of the roof hole he just sat there, lacking the same induce­ment to squeeze himself out that he’d had to squeeze himself in. The sun began to set and still he gave no indication of wanting to depart. Perhaps he recognized the sound construction of the feeder and thought it was a good place to spend the night, in spite of the man rapping on the glass walls and exhorting him to leave in language that would have been clearly understood by any creature on earth except that symbol of purity and innocence, the dove.

  There are times in every marriage when it behooves a wife to walk away, stay out of sight and not answer when her name is called. When I walked back again, half an hour later, the feeder had completely disappeared, the dove was recuperating on the ledge, smoothing his ruffled feathers, and Ken was sweeping off the patio. He glanced up when he heard me coming.

  “Funny thing about that feeder,” he said calmly. “It wasn’t as sturdy as it looked. We should try one of the new plastic kind, don’t you think?”

  I thought.

  Shortly afterward, another event lowered my opinion of the common sense of the dove family. Ken was working one evening in his study when he heard from the adjoining lanai a noise that sounded like the fluttering of wings. We’d had birds in the lanai before—Brandy could open any door in the house and never both­ered closing them again—but when Ken went to investigate, there were no birds in sight and the noise had stopped. The same thing happened twice the next morning. By this time Ken was sure that the noise was coming from the chimney of the fireplace. When he looked up the chimney, however, all he saw was a patch of blue sky.

  The next afternoon he heard the fluttering sounds again, and again he checked the chimney and found nothing. In spite of his insistence that it was a bird, I said it had to be something else, a bat for instance, since no bird could survive in that chimney for two days and nights without food or water.

  I myself could probably survive for a month on the words I’ve had to eat, the preceding statement being a good example. By the use of a flashlight and a few acrobatics Ken discovered the bird hidden in a kind of small alcove inside the chimney. It was a young band-tailed pigeon. The ordeal had left him frazzled and blotched with soot, but he was still strong enough to fight his rescuer and peck him vigorously on the hand before flying off toward the adja­cent canyon.

  The visit of our uninvited guest raised many questions. Had he gotten into the chimney accidentally or on purpose? If on purpose, what reason could he have had? Was he escaping from something? Birds normally avoid going into any place unless they’re certain of an escape route; and the only local predators I’ve seen attacking bandtails are the sharp-shinned hawks who had gone north two or three months previously. Why didn’t the pigeon simply drop down into the fireplace—less than a yard separated the alcove from the firepit—and try to escape via the lanai? And after he was rescued what did he do first? Eat? Search for water to drink and bathe? Fly as fast and as far away as possible? Attempt to find his friends? Settle down to roost for the balance of the night?

  Only one conjecture seems sure to be correct: after two days in a chimney, life in the pepper tree must have looked very good indeed. The small rose-red berry of the California pepper tree consists of a seed surrounded by an almost paper-thin layer of fruit which affords little taste or nourishment. Yet it is a favorite among birds. Some, like the phainopeplas, waxwings, mockingbirds, jays, magpies, blackbirds and finches, eat the berries right from the tree. Others, like the thrushes, thrashers, towhees, white-crowned and golden-crowned sparrows, sometimes even flickers, wait until the berries fall and eat them from the ground.

  Visitors occasionally ask if the seeds of the California pepper can be processed and used as a food seasoning like the seeds of South American peppers. They aren’t, but I’m not so sure they can’t be. I know of an instance when an attempt was made, though I wasn’t informed of the results. Every autumn the Botanic Garden offers the public a course on “Trees About Town,” conducted by its learned and lively director, Katherine Muller. At one of these classes I met a wom
an who was engaged in processing California pepper berries which she intended to experiment with as a condi­ment. I never saw her again, a fact which I prefer to think of as coincidental rather than consequential.

  People who intend to plant a pepper tree to attract birds must be sure they purchase one that will bear. For three years Ken and I nurtured a pepper tree in the hope of eventually attracting another pair of phainopeplas. It thrived but produced no fruit. When I contacted our nurseryman about the situation he said he thought he was doing us a favor by selling us a male tree “which wouldn’t clutter up the yard with those messy berries.”

  Of all the baby birds that spring and summer, the most endear­ing were the black-headed grosbeaks. The first male grosbeak had arrived on March 23 in full breeding plumage, cinnamon and black, with a lemon patch in the center of his belly and under each wing. A week later there were half a dozen males in the neighbor­hood and two females, more modestly clad than the males, but still vivid with their striped heads and peach-and-coffee bodies. The birds were quiet at this time. There was no singing or sexual display or territorial fighting. They seemed to be calmly sizing up the situation and one another. By what mysterious means they came to an agreement among themselves, biologists will perhaps never know. But a decision was reached: six of the grosbeaks departed, leaving one male and one female.

  Then the singing began. There are people who sing and there are others who can be called songsters. And so it is among birds. G-man, our grosbeak, was a true songster. He sang for love and wonder, for pride and joy and to serenade a sunny day, greet a rain, welcome a wind. He sang so often that his lady love was moved to respond with a song of her own, and it was difficult to tell who was singing to whom about what.