The Birds and the Beasts Were There

by Margaret Millar

  When a major disaster is over, there are immediate estimates of losses in terms of dollars and cents. The Coyote fire, which contin­ued for more than a week, is said to have been started by a woman burning rubbish to avoid the admission fee to the county dump. She saved fifty cents. It cost the rest of us $20,000,000.

  The cost in wildlife was much more difficult to assess. The creatures given sanctuary by the Humane Society ranged from African goats to ducks and peacocks, but these were pets. Reports of actual wildlife, especially of birds, were few and vague. An account of birds flying up out of the burning trees and falling back into the flames, I was unable to verify—let alone check what kinds of birds and whether they were all the same and how many there were, and so on. The number of injured birds brought to the Museum of Natural History was no higher during and after the fire than before it.

  Bill Botwright of the Santa Barbara News-Press, describing his patrol of the fire area during the first night’s lull when the santana stopped, told of seeing “two large birds blundering blindly in the red glare.” He thought they were crows, but they could have been band-tailed pigeons which are only slightly smaller, fourteen to sixteen inches as compared with the crows’ seventeen to twenty-one inches. Dick Smith, of the same newspaper, who covered the rugged back-country regions in his triple roles of artist, topogra­pher and naturalist, told us that the only birds he saw actually fleeing the fire were quail running out of the underbrush, and that on dozens of trips into the area after the fire he didn’t come across a single carcass or skeleton of a bird. This doesn’t mean that no birds were destroyed, only that evidence of such destruction was reduced to ash. Bird bones are light and hollow; they can be, and often by accident have been, cremated in a backyard barbecue pit.

  In the absence of eyewitness accounts and even one corpusdelicti, we had to depend on circumstantial evidence as well as facts. The main fact was that before the fire we had feeding on our ledge every day a flock of approximately a hundred band-tailed pigeons, half that many mourning doves, one white-winged and one turtle dove, ten or twelve scrub jays; and feeding in and under the shrubbery around the house, a pair of house wrens. None of these birds reappeared after the fire. (Our last sight of the Vaux’ swift on the first night of the fire has been described in an earlier chapter.)

  A number of people have suggested that the disappearing birds sensed danger and flew away to a safer area. There are several reasons why I can’t believe this. If the pigeons, doves and jays took flight when danger was imminent, why didn’t the house finches, towhees, blackbirds, cowbirds, song sparrows, goldfinches, hummingbirds, thrashers, titmice, flickers and so on?

  You would also expect that when the danger had passed, the birds that had fled would begin returning. The feeding station was their home, as far as wild birds can have a home. There they ate their meals and met their neighbors, and sunned in the good weather and took shelter in the bad. Many of them had been brought to the ledge the first day they could fly and they accepted Ken and me and the three dogs, moving around on the other side of the glass or on the patio below, as part of their daily routine. I have previously described the tameness of the jays. As for the doves and pigeons, they had become so unafraid that it took sev­eral smart taps of a folded newspaper on the window or the porch railing to chase them away when I wanted to turn on the rainbirds. Even then an occasional juvenile would refuse to budge, and would stand glaring at me through the bogus rain with an expres­sion that clearly meant, who did I think I was—the owner of the ledge?

  If any of the missing birds had come back I would have recog­nized them instantly, not as individuals but as former freeloaders who knew their way around the premises. Newcomers arriving at the feeding station were easy to spot.

  A very small minority of these were stragglers too hungry, too exhausted or too sick to act in their normally cautious man­ner. The rose-breasted grosbeak which appeared on October 30, 1963, was a good example. This grosbeak, a bird belonging east of the Rockies, must have been somewhat flabbergasted to find him­self not only west of the Rockies, but west of the Sierra Nevada as well; in fact, right at the Pacific coast on our ledge. He ate almost continuously the first day, oblivious to the other birds and to the movements of people on the other side of the window, including a flock of birdwatchers who’d responded to the Rare Bird Alert I had put out as soon as the grosbeak arrived. On the second day he was considerably more skittish and his appearances on the ledge were so sporadic that one determined out-of-town birder had to wait two hours for a glimpse of him. By the fourth day, rested, well fed and in good health again, he was completely wild and independent, and that afternoon he was on his way.

  The rose-breasted grosbeak had reversed the usual behavior pat­tern. Normally a new bird arrives shy and wild and gradually becomes tamer. The first Brewer blackbird, for instance, ap­proached the feeding station quietly and by himself. From an un­obtrusive perch in the loquat tree he studied the proceedings for more than a week before he flew down with the other birds, at first on the lower terrace, eventually on the ledge.

  The most extreme case of wariness was the crow. He spent an entire winter watching the place from the tops of the eucalyptus trees and the Monterey pines. The opening of a door or window, the turning on of a sprinkler, the slightest movement that was unexpected would send him flying off, squawking invectives at us and warnings to his friends. Only when there were babies to be fed did he come down for food. He was so quick and quiet about it that I didn’t even suspect he was responsible for the whole dough­nuts disappearing as soon as I put them out in the wooden dish outside my office window. Though I had no evidence against the scrub jays, I blamed them, on general principles. Then one morning when I went into my office to begin work, a black flash crossed the corner of my vision and the thief was identified. I duly apologized to the jays, who are blamed by nearly everybody for nearly every­thing.

  The crow and the rose-breasted grosbeak provided good exam­ples of the two types of behavior which made newcomers to the feeding station easily recognizable.

  The first band-tailed pigeon to arrive after the fire showed no signs of familiarity with the place. He perched, just as our initial bandtail had done years previously, on a eucalyptus limb over the drip birdbath. When I went over to the window and raised my binoculars he flew away. Shadows on windows couldn’t be trusted and binoculars were weapons that might be used against him. He was a stranger. So, too, was the first scrub jay after the fire, and the first mourning dove. No white-winged dove, turtle dove or house wren appeared again at the feeding station.

  What had happened? We can never be completely sure, but there seems little doubt that the missing birds were destroyed while they were asleep. Once birds are settled for the night they are hard to disturb. Eyes closed, heartbeat slowed, head tucked under wing and claws locked in position, the sleeping bird is practically oblivi­ous to noise, light and movement: airplanes, sirens, searchlights, high winds, cloudbursts, auto horns, band concerts—and fire. The odor of smoke, a cogent warning of danger to so many furred creatures, is lost on the feathered ones. Sense of smell is poorly developed in birds since there is little need for it in their atmo­spheric environment.

  The band-tailed pigeons, I had learned, used an old Monterey cypress at the head of the canyon as their favorite roost. It seems likely that when the sun set the first evening of the fire, some of the doves and pigeons were roosting in the same cypress, or in the oaks and pines nearby. At nine o’clock the santana began, and in the course of the night the entire area was overrun by flames. The oak leaves burned like paper, the cypress and pine needles like oil-soaked toothpicks.

  There were no reports of scorched doves or pigeons, or of smoke-blackened jays. I would like to believe that the birds were lost only to us, that they fled the fire in safety and found food and water and shelter in someone else’s yard. Perhaps they did.

  It is difficult to tell what events were t
he direct result of the fire and what might have happened anyway. In the case of the house wrens, for instance, many of these birds desert the inhabited areas in early fall and spend the next six months in the brush-covered hills preferred by the Bewick wrens and wrentits. Their disappearance on the day the fire started, September 22, may simply have been a coincidence. Perhaps the palm warbler which came on September 25 would have come, fire or no fire; it provided us, however, with the first record of this species in Santa Barbara.

  Members of the Audubon Society were asked to be on the look­out for unusual birds, and for noticeable increases or decreases in the number of the ordinary birds. Those who expected disastrous changes were pleasantly surprised by the normal pattern of the migrations:

  The white-crowned sparrows arrived for the winter on schedule, on September 24, while the fire was still raging.

  The Audubon warblers appeared the next day.

  On the 28th, the hooded orioles left for Mexico, the Nashville warblers passed through on their way south and the last of the yellow warblers of the season were observed. On that day, too, the Oregon junco returned.

  On October 3, our pair of Lincoln sparrows came back at the same time as the first dozen golden-crowned sparrows, always a week or two later than the white-crowns.

  On October 8, the yellow-breasted chat concluded his yearly late-summer stay with us. I don’t know where he went but I’m willing to wager it was a banana-growing region. He was the only wild bird at the feeding station who always showed a distinct preference for bananas.

  October 24 marked the return of two myrtle warblers a month later, as usual, than their look-alike cousins, the Audubons.

  On November 17, a slaty fox sparrow arrived, followed three days later by one of the rusty subspecies. This was exactly on schedule as far as the feeding station was concerned. Fox sparrows are reported to reach southern California in mid-September and have been seen in Santa Barbara as early as September the 1st, but my records show only one arrival even close to that, on September 28, in 1961; the others have all been in November.

  November also brought a burrowing owl, the first of this species to visit us, and he was duly recorded as home visitor No. 106. It’s possible that his appearance was indirectly caused by the fire since this species is not normally seen in canyon areas like ours. How­ever, these birds aren’t always predictable. According to a report in Audubon Field Notes (Volume 19, No. 1), a burrowing owl had, during the previous month, come aboard a ship about sixty miles south of San Clemente Island.

  What, then, were some actual results of the fire and what birds were affected?

  As might be expected the birds suffering most heavily were terrestrial species poorly equipped to escape by flight. The num­ber of quail found on the Christmas count three months after the fire was 170, compared to 604 found the previous year, and the number of California thrashers was 19, compared to 41. Fringe areas of the fire, such as certain sections of the Botanic Garden, demonstrated an apparent increase in wrentits. These retiring little birds were not only more numerous, they acted bolder than normal and were consequently easy to observe. The overall picture turned out different, however. The 85 wrentits reported on the Christmas count showed a 50-percent decrease from the previous year. It seems more than likely that these three species, quail, thrashers and wrentits, suffered considerable losses in the fire.

  Another ground dweller, the Oregon junco, showed an apparent increase because many flocks took to foraging in the burned-over areas and were easy to see in the absence of vegetative cover. Almost a thousand were reported on the Christmas count, double the previous year’s 474. The following year, when the ground vegetation was just about back to normal after a vast reseeding program, the number of juncos also returned to normal, 430; but wrentits remained at a low 84, thrashers at 24, and quail at 330.

  Our most personal loss could not be attributed directly to the fire, yet I think it played a part. Johnny, our Scottish terrier, was thirteen at the time and his two wild nights as a refugee did noth­ing to lighten the load of his years. Up until then he’d been in good health, though his muzzle was long since grey and it had become increasingly apparent that either he was getting lower or the ground was getting higher.

  His deterioration after the fire was very rapid. He began losing his hearing and his teeth, and an infection in his nose and eyes proved resistant both to all kinds of antibiotics and to cortisone. He also developed a heart condition which required a digitalis pill twice a day.

  The usual technique of administering pills to animals involved a kind of force-feeding most unsuitable to a dog of Johnny’s ad­vanced years and enormous dignity, as well as tender jaws. We therefore spent a considerable percentage of our time devising ways and means of concealing the pills in food. They were served buried in hamburger, wrapped in bacon or bologna, smothered in cottage cheese and scrambled eggs, hidden in chunks of cheddar, inserted in cunningly slit pockets in steak or wedged into frank­furters or liver sausage. After the cheese, steak, liver sausage, etcetera was consumed, we’d often find the digitalis pill on the floor. When this happened I thought of Bushman, the massive go­rilla who was the star of the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago in the days before tranquilizers and tranquilizer guns eased the difficulties of medical attention for larger animals. Bushman died of pneu­monia because he couldn’t be fooled into swallowing the drugs hidden in his food.

  By December, Johnny, blind, arthritic and deaf, had become almost completely dependent. It was a strange fate for this sturdy, self-reliant little creature, this most unlapdog of dogs. He had to be lifted in and out of the red leather chair where he slept, and carried up and down stairs. He could be let out alone in the fenced yard where he knew every plant and weed and blade of grass. Else­where, in the field next door, on the path down to the creek, or up the road to the neighboring houses, I went with him, keeping a tactful distance behind so as not to disturb his Scottish pride.

  On a foggy evening shortly before Christmas a delivery boy left the fence gate open and Johnny disappeared. We roused the people next door and there began a frantic search by flashlight for a small black dog in a large black night. Eventually he was found on the other side of the circle, sitting calm and composed in a yard once occupied by his girlfriend, also a Scottie, named Annie Laurie. She had long since left the neighborhood, and perhaps life itself; but Johnny was dreaming of happier times, bright days, fast runs, fair ladies.

  One morning in mid-February he began hemorrhaging, and at noon he was put to sleep.

  The Coyote fire had taken a heavy toll. But for some people who lived far from the fire’s perimeter and never gave a thought to its effect on them, the worst was yet to come.

  17

  Death and Life in the Forest

  The winter weather began on November 9 with an inch of rain, followed after a short pause by another three-quarters of an inch. This made a modest total of less than two inches. Yet it was enough, falling as it did on denuded hills and mountains, to cause severe flooding. Streets near creek beds were buried under four or five feet of mud, and boulders that looked too big to move washed downstream like pebbles. Tons of water-driven debris crushed houses and bridges and retaining walls in its inexorable journey to the sea.

  The beaches were strewn with wood, some burned or half burned, some barely scorched, some as big as telephone poles, some small as palm fronds, pine cones and eucalyptus pods. For driftwood collectors it was a paradise, for swimmers, surfers and skin divers, a nightmare. In addition to the serious hazards of floating lumber there was the fact that for several hundred yards beyond the surf the water was as muddy as the lower Colorado River. This brought up another problem: fish can’t see any better in muddy water than humans can in a blizzard or dust storm. When Ken swam his usual half mile on the first day of the flood, he had thirteen encounters with fish. Whether he bumped into them or they bumped into him is immaterial. Among our friend
s in the wet set, not a particularly scientific group, this became recog­nized as a way of measuring the ocean’s visibility—how many ichthyoid contacts Ken made on his daily swim.

  Little good comes from a flood. Reservoirs silt up, and topsoil is washed away, carrying with it the seeds necessary to reestablish watershed vegetation.

  Fire, on the other hand, is a natural condition of life in the chaparral regions of southern California, and an essential condi­tion if vegetation is to remain young and vigorous. Without an occasional clearing out, the underbrush gets so thick and high that deer and other mammals can’t penetrate it and ground-dwelling birds have trouble foraging. When this happens the chaparral, normally rich in wildlife, becomes incapable of supporting its usual share. Fire occurring at twenty-to twenty-five-year intervals is a benefit, a cleaning-out of dead and diseased wood and ground cover. (Before any nature lover sets off into the hills with a pack of matches, it should be noted that more frequent fires result in the destruction of chaparral, and its conversion to a different and less interesting type of vegetation.)

  Some forty or more plant species are grouped together under the name chaparral. Chaparro is the Spanish word for scrub oak; it also means a short, stocky person, and perhaps this gives, to some­one who has never seen it, a better idea of chaparral. Chaparral is short, stocky, tough vegetation, capable of withstanding a yearly drought of six months or more.

  Throughout the centuries a number of ways have evolved for chaparral plants to survive burning. Some, like green-bark ceanothus, sprout new leaves directly from the “dead” stumps. Some have woody crowns or burls at ground level, like toyon, or under­ground, like Eastwood manzanita, which is back to full size in a few years. Others have seeds with a hard coat that must be split open by fire, or else soft-coated seeds which need very high tem­peratures to trigger their internal chemistry. Among the plants with seeds requiring fire in order to germinate are some of the most dominant and important in the chaparral group of this region— chamise, big berry manzanita, laurel sumac, hoary leaf ceanothus, big pod ceanothus, sugar bush and lemonade bush. All but cham­ise are frequently used in cultivated gardens.