The Birds and the Beasts Were There

by Margaret Millar

  By the time their turn came, there was usually nothing left but bread crusts and orange rinds and half-eaten grapes, so I decided to even things up a bit. As soon as the two adults had eaten and gone on their way, I would sneak extra food out to the youngsters, hard-boiled eggs, bananas, cheese, doughnuts, bread and honey. They caught on to this arrangement very quickly and I would find them waiting for me just outside my office door. When I opened the door they would put on a show of scampering away in terror, but it wasn’t very convincing. The young members of any species are bolder than their elders—or perhaps more trusting.

  With a house to run I couldn’t devote all my time to raccoons and I was sometimes late putting out the food. When this hap­pened they jogged my memory by rearing up on their hind legs and tapping on the windows. Every section of glass accessible from the porch or ledge bore the tracings of their delicate forepaws and the smudge marks of their wet little noses. In the beginning the dogs made a terrible racket when they saw the three black-masked faces peering in at them. Eventually a truce was reached and it became a nightly routine for the three dogs on the inside of the window, and the three raccoons on the outside, to stand and quietly size each other up.

  It seems a fairly safe assumption that neither group arrived at a very favorable opinion of the other. It must remain an assumption, however, since the two groups never met in the open as far as I know. When the dogs were let out in the evening they stayed on the front part of the property and the public road, as if they realized that after dark the canyon belonged to the night visitors.

  15

  Rainbirds on the Roof

  It was the first day of autumn, 1964. Those Santa Barbara residents who lived within a block or two of the sea woke up to a dense fog and the ominous warnings of the foghorn at the end of the breakwater. The rest of the city was awakened by the brilliant rays of a September sun and realized it was going to be a hot day. How hot none of us could ever have guessed.

  The summer that was ending had been one of drought, as usual. The last rain measurable on our gauge was a tenth of an inch in May. September occasionally brings some moisture—the hundred-year average is about a quarter of an inch—but it is better known for bringing our hottest and driest days. For us this is the month of santanas, the scorching winds that blow in over the mountains from the Mojave Desert, a vast area covering some 14,000 square miles.

  We are accustomed to sea winds and their ravages: tons of kelp strewn along the beaches, alive with tiny octopi and starfish and skate eggs that look like black plastic comb cases; boats escaped from their moorings, loose anchors and racing buoys, dead fish and sea lions and leopard sharks; battered sea birds, surf scoters and whitewings, all kinds of gulls and terns and cormorants, west­ern grebes and horned grebes, arctic loons and red-throated loons; and once—and only once, thank Heaven—the newly severed head of an enormous wild boar, brought to my reluctant attention by our German shepherd, Brandy.

  Sea winds may be violent and cruel, but in a coastal town they are a natural part of life. Santanas are strangers, intruders from the other side of the mountains. They are not polite or kindly stran­gers. We give them no welcome and they in turn come bearing no good will. One of them almost cost our city its life.

  A santana ordinarily arrives on a calm, quiet night. Some people claim it gives no warning, others sense its approach or “feel it in their bones.” Nothing psychic is involved, and no bones either, merely skin and mucous membranes reacting to a rapid lowering of humidity and rise in temperature. In southern California the temperature always goes down with the sun, and this rule is broken only by the arrival of a santana.

  On one of these calm, quiet nights in September, a person may become suddenly aware that changes are taking place. There is a rustle of leaves, the squawk of a gate swinging, the bang of a screen door. A gust of wind roars down the canyon, and the euca­lyptus trees begin to writhe. Leaves begin rushing past the win­dows like refugees fleeing the forest, and the hard little seed pods of the tea tree tap the glass like animals’ claws. If, at this stage of the game, all doors and windows are locked, drapes pulled, and the drafts of fireplaces closed tight, it won’t do much good. The dust seems to penetrate the very walls, and every flat surface in the house is soon covered with it. Skin is taut, throats parched, eyes gritty, tempers short. In a santana the milk of human kindness dries up like everything else.

  In general, sea winds are fairly strong and steady, and desert winds come in gusts. Sometimes both are blowing simultaneously and between gusts of the desert wind the sea wind rushes in. Then there begins a tug of war between them with the city caught in the middle, a nervous referee for a battle of giants who haven’t read the rule book. Temperatures go up and down so rapidly ther­mometers haven’t time to register them accurately—and the range is wide, fifty or sixty degrees.

  By sunrise the battle is over, the friendly wind is resting, the stranger has fled, the cleanup begins. Branches and leaves, and the litter blown out of overturned trash cans must be picked up; trees and shrubs and flowers must be hosed down to remove the dust that clogs their breathing pores; damaged bird feeders must be fixed and rehung, and the dirt and debris cleaned out of the birdbaths. If we’re lucky, the stranger won’t come back the next night . . .

  The morning of September 22 was windless. The heavy fog that had blanketed the coastal area at dawn was burned off by the sun before nine o’clock and the mercury in the official temperature gauge, which is located at the shore, began to rise rapidly, up through the seventies into the eighties. Our area, at an elevation of about 550 feet, was a good deal hotter, a situation that was re­versed only on very rare occasions.

  I had watered heavily the previous afternoon, using the rainbirds on the roof in spite of the outraged protests of the scrub jays. We had had these roof sprinklers installed several years before by an off-duty fireman after the Montecito fire chief had urged all hill and canyon dwellers to be prepared for an emergency as the layers of brushwood grew higher and thicker and more dangerous. The emergency hadn’t occurred, but we used the rainbirds to cool the house and to water a considerable part of our property.

  Few people had taken the fire chief’s advice. Rainbirds on a roof were so uncommon that at first when we used ours, passing motorists would stop and stare, and one even inquired if we’d broken a water main. If the effect was peculiar from the outside, it was doubly peculiar to sit inside and listen to rain pounding on the shingles, to see it pelting the windows and gushing out of the eaves troughs, while just beyond the walls of water a brilliant sun shone from an unclouded sky. Ordering up a private rainstorm in the midst of a California summer is as close to playing God as I care to come.

  But the three rainbirds, even twirling full tilt, were no match for the September heat and drought. All traces of moisture had disap­peared by midmorning the next day, and the temperature was in the nineties and still rising. The birds coped with the heat in sev­eral ways. The yellowthroats napped in a sheltered spot down by the creek. Some of the English sparrows and blackbirds cooled themselves by breathing rapidly through open beaks. The hooded orioles and Anna’s hummingbirds drank nectar from the golden hearts of the trumpet flowers and the mockers crushed the ripening elderberries and eugenias. The wrentits kept in the shade, foraging in the dense poison oak that was reddening the canyon slopes. All half dozen birdbaths were in continual use, the champion bathers being the house finches, who looked like miniature rainbirds as they hurled water madly in every direction at once.

  None of our winter birds had arrived yet, though several species were due any minute—white-crowned sparrows, Lincoln and fox sparrows, pine siskins and Audubon warblers. Many of the sum­mer visitors had already departed—all the swallows, the warbling vireos, Bullock orioles, Wilson warblers, western tanagers and black-headed grosbeaks. (The two latter species were to return mysteriously at the beginning of December, stay a month, and vanish again.) Summer birds
still present included Vaux’ swifts, hooded orioles and the lone yellow-breasted chat who spent a month with us every year. We also had two interesting and unusual guests, a white-winged dove, normally a desert dweller, and a ringed turtle dove, seldom seen here in the wild but familiar to people who frequent certain parks in Los Angeles where the spe­cies has become well established. The white-winged dove had re­cently arrived, on September 3, the turtle dove had been with us since July.

  This, then, was the population of our feeding station on the morning of September 22, 1964. Elsewhere in the country the Warren Commission was still weighing the evidence against Lee Oswald; L.B.J. predicted tax cuts to the Steelworkers’ Union; Goldwater hit the campaign trail in Oklahoma; the Phils were 5 ½ games up on the Cincinnati Reds; and Napa County in northern California had been declared a disaster area by Governor Brown after a forest fire had burned ninety square miles and was still raging out of control. One section of it was traveling at a rate of more than a mile an hour.

  For some time Ken and I had been planning to buy an acre or two and eventually build a house. Every now and then when a new parcel of land came on the market we would make arrangements through a real estate agent to inspect it. That morning at eleven a young man took us out to see three acres in the foothills at the opposite end of Montecito. The owner, John Van Bergen, an arch­itect, lived with his wife on the adjoining property in a house he’d recently designed and built himself.

  We admired the Van Bergen house and its magnificent pano­rama of miles and miles of coastline. The region was somewhat higher than where we were living—which meant that it was more than somewhat hotter and dryer—and the terrain was steep. But my main objection to the place was the fact that it would not support an abundance of bird life. There was no source of water nearby, and the vegetation was limited to those native plants which could tolerate prolonged periods of drought, various types of shrubs which are usually grouped together under the name chapar­ral, and a few small live oak trees.

  I had another objection. The climate, in conjunction with many years’ accumulation of underbrush, made the place an even greater fire hazard than a wooded canyon like ours. If the Van Bergens, newcomers from Chicago, realized this they didn’t show it. Neither did the insurance companies. In response to my question Mr. Van Bergen said they paid the same insurance premiums as anyone else, though certain precautions against fire had been built into the house, such as a flat roof which held a three-inch layer of water.

  It was one o’clock when we left the Van Bergens. We drove down to the beach club, had a cold lunch and headed for the surf. On the ramp to the beach I was detained by a friend who wanted to ask me a bird question, and it was here that one of the life­guards from the pool caught up with me. A message had just been received in the office from Richmond Miller, the young, newly elected president of the Santa Barbara Audubon Society. Rich, failing to reach us at home, had called the beach club to leave word that a fire had been reported on Coyote Road below Moun­tain Drive. He didn’t know how big a fire it was, but in that area, in that weather, even a glowworm was dangerous.

  I thought of the fire raging through Napa County, traveling more than a mile an hour; the intersection of Coyote Road and Mountain Drive was half a mile crows’ flight from our house. From where I was standing I could see the smoke rising in the air, black and brown and grey, changing color with the fire’s fuel. I asked the lifeguard to call Ken in from the sea and tell him we had to go home.

  At 2:02 p.m. smoke had been reported in the Coyote Road-Mountain Drive region by an unidentified woman. A minute later an off-duty fireman living in the area confirmed the report and the Coyote fire, as it came to be known, officially began its long and dreadful journey.

  Its initial direction was up. At 2:23 it jumped Mountain Drive and the first houses in its path began burning. By 2:30 two planes were dropping fire-retardant chemicals. On the way home we could see the stuff falling like puffs of pink clouds out of a technicolor dream. Fire Retardant Pink was to become, in certain parts of Santa Barbara, the fashionable shade worn by many of the luckier houses, garages, cars, boats, corrals, horses, burros, dogs, cats, people, and at least one highly indignant peacock. The reddish color, by the way, was deliberately added to the formula to make hits and misses more apparent.

  When Ken and I pulled into our driveway we met Bertha Blomstrand, the widow who lived across the road from us. She’d come over to check the whereabouts of our dogs in case they might have to be released, and to turn on the rainbirds. Bertha’s action was the kind that typified people’s attitude toward the fire right from the beginning: it was going to be a bad one and we were all in it together. The three of us stood watching the blaze and the smoke half a mile away, and listening to the shriek of sirens, the rhythmic clatter of the rainbirds and the roar of the borate bombers as they followed the sporty little yellow lead plane that showed them where to drop their loads. It was to be some time before the ordinary quiet sounds of an ordinary day were heard on our street again.

  From our living room we saw houses on Mountain Drive burn­ing unchecked. Wind-driven sparks landed in a large grove of euca­lyptus and the oil-rich trees virtually exploded into flames. One of the houses in the direct path of the fire had been built by a local writer, Bill Richardson, for his family. It seemed certain to be destroyed, but at the last crucial moment a borate bomber scored a miraculously lucky hit and the place was saved along with a pet burro, four dogs and all of Bill’s manuscripts.

  It was three o’clock.

  During the next hour men who’d served in World War II were surprised by the sudden appearance of an old army buddy, a B-17 Flying Fortress which had been sent down from Chino in northern California carrying 2000 gallons of fire-retardant fluid. By this time half a dozen other planes had arrived from Los Angeles as well as some helicopters, each capable of carrying 50 gallons of the fluid. A combination heliport and firecamp was set up on the athletic field of Westmont College, a private coeducational institution whose prop­erty line was two hundred yards from our own.

  Late afternoon also brought the first carloads of sightseers, the first wave of telephone calls and the first outbreak of contradictory rumors:

  A storm front was heading our way from Oregon and rain would start any minute. No rain was in sight for a week.

  Firefighters were coming from every part of the southwest, in­cluding the famed Zuñi Indian crews from New Mexico, and the fire would be under control within a few hours. No firefighters could be spared because so many other areas were highly flamma­ble, and the entire city of Santa Barbara was doomed.

  Every householder was to soak his roof, walls, shrubbery and trees. Water was to be conserved to keep the pressure from dropping.

  We were spared a great many rumors because our only radio wasn’t in working condition. This lack of communication proved to be a blessing in disguise. There was an advantage in not know­ing exactly how bad things were until after they were over.

  As for the phone calls, it was gratifying to receive so many offers of sanctuary, some from people we hadn’t been in contact with for years. Yet, as the hours passed and the phone kept ring­ing, we began to look on it as an insatiable monster demanding our continuous attention. The news it gave us in return was mostly bad—the fire was still going up the mountain, but it was also moving rapidly southward, in our direction, and two hundred acres were burned, including the houses of several people we knew. The only piece of good news was the information about the borate bomber saving Bill Richardson’s place with a direct hit of fire retardant.

  As soon as the roof and the plantings around our house were thoroughly soaked, I turned off the rainbirds. The scrub jay, who’d been squawking ever since they were turned on, left his griping post in the pine tree and came down to the ledge to remind me that all the food had been washed away. I put out more and the other regular customers began drifting in, the mourning doves with their
two uncommon cousins, the turtle dove and the white-wing, band-tailed pigeons, cowbirds, blackbirds, the hooded orioles and the lone yellow-breasted chat, towhees, house finches, song and En­glish sparrows. The birds were perhaps fewer in number than usual, and one oriole and some of the English sparrows showed heat reaction, increased respiration through open beaks.

  As the afternoon wore on and workers began leaving their jobs for the day, the stream of cars on our narrow little road increased. What kind of people were in these cars? I will quote one of them and let the reader judge for himself. A young man pulled into our driveway and shouted at Ken who was on the roof readjusting a rainbird:

  “Hey, how do we get to the houses that are already burning?”

  Darkness fell. At least it should have been darkness, but on the mountains a strange, misplaced and molten sun was rising and expanding, changing the landscape into a firescape. Instead of the normal quiet sounds of night there was the constant deafening roar of helicopters landing and taking off from the camp on the Westmont College athletic field. The borate bombers had stopped at dusk because they couldn’t operate over the difficult terrain in the dark, and without chemicals to impede its progress the fire was spreading in all directions at once.

  I took the raccoon food out to the ledge as usual. The coton­easter tree remained still and silent, and no moist black noses pressed against the window beside my chair, no dainty little paws tapped the glass. The raccoons’ absence emphasized the eeriness of the night. It was the first time in many months that they had missed us and we didn’t know whether they’d fled the fire or were simply lying low because of the noise and confusion. Raccoons are not particularly shy but they’re sensible enough to want to avoid trouble. Every year on the last night of October, for instance, they stayed out of sight until every witch and ghost and skeleton and every pirate, clown and Batman had gone home to count his loot, and all the neighborhood dogs had finished their Halloween bark­ing binge. For the raccoons, was this a flight for survival, or just another Halloween?