One Wild Bird at a Time

by Bernd Heinrich

  The huge numbers of tiny larvae and pupae brought to the nest at any one time should permit the flicker parents to spread the food to several babies in one trip. In most insectivorous birds, however, a meal consists of one large item, and the baby that receives the food is stimulated to release a fecal bolus, which the parent intercepts and removes. But when the food is spread around, the ability to synchronize feeding and defecating makes nest sanitation difficult; if a parent feeds several young in one nest visit, for example, how can it predict from which one to be prepared to intercept poop? I saw part of the solution: the young held it in, and the parent selected which one would poop, and when. It did so by gently touching the end of the chick’s tail with its bill. Apparently this touching is a signal for the young to defecate, whereas in most birds the voiding response is activated at the head, by contact with the food coming in, so that the parents can attend to the rear immediately after attending to the front. Sometimes the flicker parents also poked around under the young to search for additional feces before hopping back up to the nest entrance.

  My close-in observations from the comfort of my chair in front of the nest day after day in early July allowed me to see that when the male came into the nest he typically fed up to five different mouths, checked the bottom of the nest for feces, then left promptly. In contrast, the female usually fed ten or more mouths in any one visit, and she often lingered at the nest entrance for up to twenty minutes, during which time she sometimes reentered, inspected the whole nest, perched next to the young and looked at them closely, hopped back up to the nest hole, perched there a while longer, and then reentered the nest once more. After repeating such a sequence several times she perched just outside the nest hole on the cabin wall before eventually leaving. During one 2.5-hour watch the female spent seventy-three minutes at the nest, the male only eighteen. She did forty-one feedings, he fourteen. She made five trips, he three. For the brood, this averages out to about three feedings per nestling each hour. In another half-hour of watching I counted him making nineteen trips and her only thirteen.

  It might appear that the male had worked harder at nest provisioning than his mate, but she averaged three times as many feedings per trip to the nest than he did. Thus, despite his more numerous trips, she delivered seventy-six feedings to his forty-four. She appeared to be selective, first feeding one chick, then deliberately reaching over to feed another, in comparison with the male’s apparent random deliveries into any nearby open mouth. During the nest cleaning, in an interesting form of cooperation, he routinely looked for feces on the left side of the nest, she in the center and on the right. Each parent achieved at least some efficiency in their shared caregiving by combining “food in and feces out” with each nest trip.

  After a while I got to know one of the chicks. For identification here I’ll use male pronouns and call “him” Pipsqueak. He was the smallest and shrillest of the seven, the one that had been still thumb-sized when the largest already filled the palm of my hand. Pipsqueak never seemed to stop calling, at almost exactly once per second, whereas normally the still-naked and -blind young reached up to gape and beg loudly only when a parent blocked the nest entrance.

  Pipsqueak’s back heaved at each exhalation, with each call. Each time a parent approached the nest hole, Pipsqueak strained the hardest of them all to pop up and reach high on his spindly matchstick legs, wing nubs held over his back looking like arms with elbows held high and hands small and fingerless. He wobbled erratically in straining to stay erect and to hold his head high on his outstretched neck.

  By July 12, six days before fledging, the larger of the young were starting to cling to the entrance of the nest cavity to intercept the parents when they came to bring food. At this point the parents stopped entering the nest entirely. The largest of the young then appeared to dominate access to the nest entrance, and hence to get a large share of the incoming food. Pipsqueak was having an increasingly hard time getting fed.

  The nest interior looked more and more like a madhouse. The young fought in what resembled life-and-death struggles. Size difference would normally be crucial in combat, but the young flickers had something that mitigated a size disadvantage: a sharp beak. The biggest of them indeed at times occupied the nest entrance, but Pipsqueak too had a sharp beak, and he used it. I saw him jab a bigger sibling at the hole and drive it down, then nab both of the feedings the male parent brought. Sheer motivation was another equalizer. The hungriest were the most willing to stay at the entrance continuously despite having to fight and endure jabs to stay there.

  By July 15 the young were feathered, and there was almost always one at the entrance making kiah calls to a parent that often perched, seemingly indifferent, directly by the nest hole, or that sometimes vocalized in a nearby tree for minutes at a time. I suspected that the parents were trying to lure their young out of the nest, and that fledging could begin at any time. Wanting to see it, I got up very early for the next few days.

  July 17. Until now the adults had appeared at the nest entrance around 5:30 a.m. This morning as usual a chick was at the entrance at that time, and it kept yelling for three hours, but no adult arrived. At 8:30 a.m. a parent finally appeared, and as I watched I suddenly saw two flickers fly off. I had in the flash of the moment missed the details, but it seemed as if one of them had just fledged and maybe a parent had flown with it. To be sure, I checked the nest and found only six chicks. So one had indeed left, and it had flown very well on its first attempt—so well that I had almost mistaken it for an adult.

  I had a long wait at my post in the cabin before another one left, this time observing the second chick’s hind end as it stayed at the entrance for two hours. A parent came to the nest hole, but instead of offering food it just left again. The youngster kiahed even louder than before, then it too flew out and away.

  The remaining young were mostly hunkered down almost passively at the bottom of the nest. But on two occasions they suddenly jumped up, only to be viciously hacked at and beaten back down by the new top bird, who was a poster child for pent-up energy. At frequent intervals it stretched first one wing, then the other, then both at once. It leaned far out of the nest hole, pulled back inside, leaned out, and so on. Sometimes it vigorously pecked at its own chest and belly feathers, as if frustrated by not getting fed and yet unable to take the jump to escape the madhouse in the nest below it.

  When finally an adult landed at the entrance at 11:29 a.m., another chick jumped up and squeezed into the entrance beside the top bird during the instant when it could not jab to retaliate because its bill was receiving a load of ants. As the parent left, this same larger and ever-vigorous entrance-hog resumed making the kiah calls and did so for eight minutes as a parent remained conspicuously in view on a bare branch of a nearby maple tree. The madhouse scramble in the nest hole continued.

  There had been only five feedings that day by the time I left my indoor nest-watching post at 1:18 p.m. and went outside to continue a four-hour watch. During that time the female fed the young on five occasions, the male on three. At 6:50 p.m. she made an until-then record of twenty-two food transfers to several of the young. It appeared that the adults had finally relented and ended the enforced fast, perhaps as a way to keep the young in the nest hole for the night. A barred owl came to the woods nearby, perhaps attracted by all the noise. One parent went near the owl and kiahed, then the other joined it in mobbing this predator of easy pickings such as young birds.

  In the night I was awakened from a sound sleep by an incessant bedlam in the nest hole. However, from these older birds I heard no vocalizations but only physical tumult. I expected the remaining young to fledge that morning, July 18. The first parent to arrive in the nest vicinity was the male. As usual, he delivered food to two chicks, and also as usual the female made six to seven deliveries during her visit. Both also made trill calls during flight and some kekkekkek calls, and the third youngster finally fledged at 9:42 a.m.

  This exit from the nest l
ooked similar to a possible previous try an hour before. That time there were vocal exchanges of seven minutes in duration between adults and young. But although one of the young nearly fell out of the hole, it did not launch. The parents seemed to be making deliberate attempts to motivate their offspring to jump. But the youngsters had never before flown a wing beat, so how were they to know if and when they could fly? Their unwillingness to jump, and the parents’ attempts to overcome their reluctance, were not surprising.

  As I watched all day, trying to see every chick fledge in order to learn more about the process, I was unable to differentiate between the two adults except when they landed near the nest, when I could note the presence or absence of the black facial streak that identifies male adults (the young all have it also). The male and female parents visited the nest eleven and ten times, respectively. As always before, the male made only two food transfers per visit, the female five to fifteen. Both were still feeding the young mainly ant pupae and larvae, which they now often spilled because instead of using gravity to help drop the food into the mouths they now had to regurgitate upward to feed the young. A short-tailed shrew was catching the spill on the ground below.

  Only three of the seven young had fledged in two days. But surely the other four would follow on this, the third day, July 19. They did, but not without some interesting surprises.

  The day’s first fledging was at 6:47 a.m. The male parent, which had been perching on a black locust tree at the edge of my clearing, flew to the nest entrance, back to the locust tree, and back to the entrance again, at which point the baby flew out and followed him into the maple woods in the same direction the others had gone.

  The next fledging was an hour later. As in the previous fledgings, I heard many kiah calls from the woods where the baby and parent had flown. The sixth chick left abruptly at 9:08 a.m., after a long silence.

  The departure of the one remaining baby, Pipsqueak, was protracted and tortuous. He appeared at the nest entrance only twenty minutes after the sixth had fledged. Unlike the others he was quiet, and he perched well inside the nest hole. No adult came for over an hour. How would they know that a chick was still in the nest, or where their other six young were? Would they remember the last, now silent, one?

  Pipsqueak ignored a sapsucker that came repeatedly to pick ants off the column traveling up and down the trunk of the birch tree in front of the nest hole. Like the other young, he also ignored robins and a mourning dove that flew by. He might not have been able to distinguish most birds, but he could tell them apart from flickers.

  No flicker came back until 11:10 a.m. And this one, the male parent, didn’t go directly to the nest hole. Instead, he perched for six minutes in the black locust tree. Pipsqueak saw him immediately and kiahed the whole time he was there. The parent made a few subtle calls, then left, coming back in ten minutes to trill in flight. Pipsqueak again piped up with kiahs, although they were neither loud nor frequent. I waited anxiously to see what would happen next.

  Pipsqueak stayed in the nest and got no food until 3:50 p.m., when finally the female landed at the nest entrance and fed him. Both parents returned at 4:26 p.m., when one of them flew to the nest but then instantly left without feeding him. This time Pipsqueak took the plunge: he jumped off, but only fluttered weakly as he planed down and landed in an impenetrable thicket of meadowsweet, fireweed, and tall grass. A parent circled over him once, but no flicker would enter such a tangle, and he fell silent as the parent left. It seemed this might be the end for Pipsqueak, because he would now be unable to see and signal to any parent that came near. To call continuously outside the safety of the nest hole would be to invite hawks and owls, and to stay silent meant to starve. So I went to find him, extracted him from the thicket, and carried him to the cabin. I put him into a wire cage and set the cage under the nest hole where he could see and be seen and fed through the wire. But no parent came, and when I checked on him that night he was lying on the cage floor and seemed unable to move.

  At 4:30 a.m. I woke wondering if the parents would come looking for him. He was to my surprise still alive. He had probably been in torpor—a hibernation-like state in which some birds drop their body temperature to save limited energy resources. Suddenly, at 7 a.m., the formerly silent baby erupted with loud kiah calls and repeatedly hopped against the cage wall that faced north. I saw nothing in that direction, but a minute later heard the flicker kekkekkek calls. One of the parents arrived, and a vocal exchange ensued, with Pipsqueak beside himself in eagerness. Might he now be able to fly and join the parent? It was worth a try. I tossed him into the air.

  Sadly he just fluttered weakly, planing down even more steeply than the day before into the grass. I picked him up and carried him into the woods, where the parent had continued to call. This time when I tossed him he at least landed on the ground where he would be seen, and where he could perhaps gain altitude in a tree by hopping from branch to branch.

  At first there was a long silence. But then his kiahs resumed, and there was an answer! I left him there. Returning an hour later to check on him, I found no sign of a flicker, only two robins, an adult and a recent fledgling. Sunlight filtered through the green maple foliage onto the brown and moldering dead leaves on the ground. There was silence. Then a hermit thrush sang its slow liquid song, and I returned to the cabin to examine the empty nest.

  It contained a layer of pasty, semi-liquid black muck several centimeters thick: decaying feces reeking of ammonia and crawling with maggots. I cleaned it out, hoping for a re-nesting the following spring.

  On May 2 the next year, I heard the first flicker of the spring back from migration. I rushed upstairs and pulled off the wood panel that covered the nest cavity. Seeing all in order, I replaced the panel and went downstairs. Several seconds later I heard a tapping that sounded just like a flicker’s. I went outside and indeed saw a flicker taking off from the nest entrance. And yet no pair returned to it.

  Instead, I soon observed a flicker hammering out a nest hole in a rotting red maple tree about two hundred meters from the cabin. No young were raised there, either—that spring most of the bird nests I examined failed because of continuous cold rains. But the following winter the hole in my cabin contained some chewed remains of red acorns plus one black and several small white feathers. It had probably been temporarily used for food storage by a white-footed mouse and for a sleeping shelter on cold nights by a white-breasted nuthatch. A flicker had stayed around the clearing throughout the summer and into late autumn, feeding along with the robins on the chokecherries as they ripened, and a couple of times I had thought I heard a faint scratching noise at the nest hole at nightfall.

  2

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  A Quintet of Crows

  A CORRESPONDENT OF MINE, THE BIRD CARVER LANCE Lichtensteiger, was so enamored of his pet crow that he described it to me as “The most loving animal—I never imagined.” He had adopted the crow when it was a baby, after it fell from a nest when a sharp-shinned hawk killed its siblings. At the time Lance already had a gray parrot, which had a vocabulary of over seventy-five words and could sing the first stanza of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” The crow, Lance told me, “learns in minutes, what took years for the parrot.” The crow stacked quarters on top of one another and then hid the stack in a crack in the couch. And “when I put my ear to the ground as if to try to hear something, she comes over and does the same—she understands.”

  In various stages of growing up, I have had three different crows as hand-reared but free companions. I got them as babies from nests that I found in the woods through long observation of the adults and by climbing usually very tall trees to reach the nests. As is necessary and also the chief delight in any bird adoption, I spent hours for and with each crow every day. We became companions. They followed me as they follow one another, and when they were nearby on their solo flights I would sometimes call to a crow in the sky and it would respond by diving down and landing on my shoulder. Some would say they were
imprinted on me. I would deny this. It was simply that, given the situation, they had choice, and we were friends. My childhood dream for when I grew up was to live with my crow in a cabin in the woods. If I were to choose now, crows would still be my first choice. I wish every child had the chance to be as privileged as I was.

  Perhaps it will happen. There has been a shift in our attitude toward corvid birds. Crows are becoming more suburban, and there are reports of crows leaving objects that seem to be thank-yous to people for feeding them. For example, an eight-year-old girl named Gabi Mann regularly received trinkets such as buttons, jewelry, and bits of colored glass. Her online story inspired readers to post details of their own experiences with crows and to write comments such as “We love our crows,” “I fell in love with this beautiful and intelligent creature,” and “I treasure the connection.”

  Unfortunately it is illegal to take a live crow, although it is perfectly all right to take dead ones, after shooting them on sight for target practice. But what is legality, if it is legal to torture a goose or a duck by putting it in a cage where it can’t move, shoving a tube down its throat, and force-feeding it to make its liver fatty in order to make foie gras for people to spread on crackers? The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 applies to crows because some of their populations migrate. But the treaty provides that a species under its auspices may be hunted under regulations preventing detrimental effects on the overall population if there is good cause. Crows are exempted from the act’s protection when they “harm livestock” by eating corn. So American crows, Corvus brachyrhynchos, are considered great for target shooting. There is no bag limit. There used to be a specific crow-hunting season, beginning in September in some states. But in my state of Maine you can now shoot crows in any number at any time, except on Sundays. Migratory woodpeckers, such as the northern flicker, in contrast, are as far as I know not fair game even when they are damaging a home. And I think that is fair and reasonable.