Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Photo
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Introduction
SPRING SONGBIRDS
The Bluebird Effect
Tree Swallow
Speaking of Starlings
Chickadee
Barn Swallow
Carolina Wren
SUMMER WORK
Hummingbird Summer
Osprey
Nobody Can Cuss Like a Titmouse
Chimney Swift
Rose-breasted Grosbeak
Scarlet Tanager
The Summer of Phoebes
Piping Plover and Least Tern
AUTUMNAL REFLECTIONS
The Strange Case of the Companionable Grouse
White-throated Sparrow
Savannah Sparrow
Orchard Oriole
Touched by a Redtail
Ivory-billed Woodpecker
WINTER MUSINGS
Love and Death Among the Cranes
Mourning Dove
Northern Cardinal
Turkey Vulture
Chestnut-fronted Macaw
Epilogue
Notes
Index
About the Author
Copyright © 2012 by Julie Zickefoose
Foreword copyright © Scott Weidensaul
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhco.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Zickefoose, Julie.
The bluebird effect : uncommon bonds with common birds / Julie Zickefoose.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-547-00309-2
1. Birds—Behavior—United States—Anecdotes. 2. Bird watching—United States—Anecdotes. 3. Birds—Wounds and injuries—Treatment—Anecdotes. 4. Wildlife rehabilitation—United States—Anecdotes. 5. Human-animal relationships—Anecdotes. 6. Zickefoose, Julie—Anecdotes. 7. Naturalists—United States—Anecdotes. 8. Wildlife rehabilitators—United States—Anecdotes. 9. Birds—United States—Pictorial works. I. Title.
QL682.Z53 2012
598.07234—dc23 2011036692
eISBN 978-0-547-72742-4
v2.0414
For Ida Zickefoose. Thank you for your love of words, and for letting me bring those things into the house.
For DOD, who knew a little something about everything.
For Bill, my heart’s archer, and for Phoebe and Liam, sweet arrows flying.
Acknowledgments
A LITTLE PETTING ZOO at Maymont Park, Richmond, Virginia, perhaps 1964. I’m very young, barely able to reach over the woven wire fence. A large tom turkey stands on the other side, feathers raised into an enormous sphere, his fleshy red, white, and blue wattles and doodads fully engorged, wanting whatever a petting zoo turkey wants. Corn? A hen turkey? Me?
“There. Pet the turkey’s head. Feel how warm it is,” my father says. I still remember the jolt of pure empathy that coursed through me upon laying my hand on the bird’s bare head. To my surprise, he didn’t flinch, peck me, or turn away. The warmth of his skin awakened something deep and primal, a realization that, despite his bizarre appearance and feathered armor, there was someone in there, someone I could understand.
I thank my father, C. D. Zickefoose, for giving me that and countless other moments with birds, for knowing what to feed an orphaned dove, blue jay, grackle, or robin, and for leaving me to figure out the rest. Thanks to my mother, Ida, for letting me bring them inside, for letting me dream by myself in the woods and ride miles into the Virginia countryside on bicycle or horse-back. I know now, having my own kids, that you worried the whole time, Mom. Thank you for never clipping my wings. And thanks to my sisters, Nancy, Barbara, and especially Micky, for being incredible human beings, and for looking after Mom. And to my brother, Bob, for doing all the things Dad dreamt of doing.
Bird Watcher’s Digest has published my writing and art since 1986 and brought it to tens of thousands of kind and enthusiastic subscribers. I thank Elsa, Bill Jr., Bill III, Andy, and Laura—the entire Thompson family—and their editor emeritus Mary Bowers for helping me reach this audience. As my writing has matured from simply expounding on the beauty and wonder of birds to grappling with more complex issues of human-bird interaction, I thank BWD for continuing to grant me a voice.
My husband, Bill Thompson III, editor and publisher of BWD, is intertwined in these stories in myriad ways, whether he’s checking bluebird boxes, transporting an avian client, supporting me in baby bird season, hauling out the ladder for a hummingbird rescue, or suffering the stench of vulture vomit in the company van. He’s got my back when I drop everything to help a bird, and he has lived many of the stories in this book. For his love, his vision and guidance; for bringing me out to this splendid pocket of Appalachian Ohio and putting a roof with a bird-watching tower over my head; and most of all for giving me the chance to be a mother to things without feathers, I am forever in his debt.
Phoebe, fifteen, and Liam, twelve, my things without feathers, you give me hope for the world with your delighted appreciation of nature and empathy for the small and helpless. Phoebe’s helped me feed doves, waxwings, hummingbirds, chimney swifts, and phoebes; Liam has given our charges the love every young thing needs, and both have been troupers, growing up gracefully with parents of many interests. May you both eclipse your parents; may art, music, and insatiable curiosity be your shadows.
My editor, Lisa White, has been unfailingly kind, deft, subtle, and patient through the five years it has taken to produce this book. In an age when more and more of us read from screens, I am deeply grateful to see my paintings and words on pages, in the heft of a hardcover. I’m grateful to my agent, Russell Galen, who helped shape the book’s concept. And I thank my Web wizard, Katherine Koch, for giving wings to my online aspirations. Jeanne Saunders, as always, dwells in my heart.
National Public Radio, delightfully personified by the anchor Melissa “Bird Friendly” Block and my editor, Ellen Silva, has been generous in airing my stories on All Things Considered. Enormous listener reaction to the hummingbird and macaw stories helped convince me that there was a book here.
Because these stories span decades, I’m indebted to a small village of people who have helped along the way. In Connecticut, Robert Braunfield shared my love of birds, woke me to the everyday miracles going on in bluebird nest boxes, sharpened my artist’s eye, and supported me in a thousand ways. Susan Cooley, the last best boss I’ll ever have, gently launched me into conservation work. Richard and Esther Goodwin gave me shelter in a miraculous sanctuary, and the time and freedom to be simply a naturalist. Rufus and Charlotte Barringer did the same. I thank the dozens of volunteers who helped me post and patrol least tern and piping plover nesting beaches, but two stalwarts stood out: Andy Griswold and Tom Damiani.
For their insights about the great woodpecker will-o’-the-wisp, I am indebted to James Tanner, Nancy Tanner, Thomas Murray, Don Eckelberry (who also lent a mentoring eye to my artwork), Virginia Eckelberry, Clifford Shackelford, John Dennis, Dennis Garratt, and especially Jerome Jackson, whose naturalist’s skills and integrity I strive to emulate. Paul Johnsgard, Matt Mullenix, Paul Tebbel, Vickie Henderson, and Cyndi Routledge all informed my writing on sandhill cranes. I’m indebted to Alan Poole not only for his osprey observations but also for a decade of collaboration on my illustrations for the
Birds of North America project. Thanks to Paul Spitzer for encouraging me to enter osprey time. I fondly remember time spent with “Madame Osprey” Anne Gaylord and George and Nancy Terpenning of Old Lyme. Sylvia Halkin kindly reviewed the cardinal chapter. For his poignant turkey vulture story, I thank Charles Kennedy.
For gifting me with a Savannah sparrow and many boxes of Christmas pears, I’m grateful to Doreen Lammer. I thank Kandy Matheny and Sandy Fredenburg for the nestling phoebes, Don Noland for Libby the mourning dove, Lori Hall and Sherri Killen for the miraculous hummingbirds, and Rosetta Dalison and Gwen Kelby for the life-altering batch of baby swifts.
So many of the birds I try to help come to me broken, and I’m grateful for the friendship and incredible skill of the avian veterinarian Robert Giddings, who was willing to fix mine for nothing. The Ohio Wildlife Center, under the leadership of Dr. Donald Burton, takes in thousands of wild things each season, and I’m deeply grateful for the dedication and compassion of Lisa Fosco, Kristi Krumlauf, Stormy Gibson, and OWC’s two hundred volunteers. Along with OWC staff, the avian rehabilitators Astrid MacLeod and Connie Sales have enlightened and guided me in caring for tough cases.
Scott Weidensaul continues to set writing standards to which I can only aspire, and is a true friend besides.
For bringing real jazz to my life, in both human and musical form, I thank my late father-in-law, Bill Thompson, Jr.
I thank Bill Thompson III, Wendy Eller, Jeff Eller, and Craig Gibbs of the Rain Crows for musical nourishment; and Chet Baker, Boston terrier, for unwavering love. Most of all, I thank the birds: foundlings and teachers both.
JZ
May 28, 2011
Foreword
FOR LITERALLY as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by birds. Some of my earliest memories are of watching the cardinals and nuthatches at our winter feeder, being dazzled by their colors and sounds.
It’s a fascination I never outgrew, and although my job as a writer and a researcher has taken me to distant corners of the world and given me the opportunity to see some of the most exotic birds on the planet, the allure of those backyard birds has never waned.
If anything, I’ve come to understand how little we know about even the most common birds—not only how they live, the migrations they make, the social fabric in which they exist, but also, at an even more mysterious and fundamental level, how they perceive the world around them. I’ve also wondered, more than once, how a wild bird perceives us, we strange bipedal primates that have reshaped every aspect of their landscape.
But few of us—even those of us who spend our days and devote our lives to the study of birds—interact with birds in quite the way that Julie Zickefoose does. Zick’s avian experiences are not the run of your typical mill. Although I’ve handled and banded thousands of hummingbirds, for instance, I have never had one snake its long exploratory tongue up my nostril. Throughout her life, Julie’s been dealing with birds on a much more direct, sometimes startlingly intimate level than most people—as a biologist, rehabilitator, artist, and conservationist.
The result is a trove of stories, stretching back decades, through which she explores the relationship between human and bird. Some of these relationships were intense but transitory, like a cat-injured sparrow brought back to independence by grit and daily massages, while others have occupied her life for longer than her husband and children. For twenty-three years, Zick was the owned—at least as much as the owner—of a chestnut-fronted macaw named Charlie. I am proud to say that I was nipped by Charlie (and happy that he didn’t draw blood), and I can attest to the deep, strange, tightly entwined bond between those two.
In The Bluebird Effect: Uncommon Bonds with Common Birds, Julie lays out the ways in which her life and those of many birds—swallows and swifts, wrens and chickadees, woodpeckers and raptors, and many others—have intersected. By and large, these are not glamorous, rare species but the kinds of common backyard birds the rest of us see every day—cardinals and titmice, ospreys and robins—and to which we usually pay little more than passing attention.
To Julie, however, these daily encounters are windows into a sovereign principality—a world that overlaps ours but which is strikingly different, at once alien and familiar. They illuminate the grip that birds hold on her own life, and her attempts to reconcile our own connections and responsibilities to birds—from tiny plovers that nest on the same beaches where we sunbathe and play volleyball, to huge cranes that some people see as majestic symbols of American wilderness, and others as “sirloin on the wing.”
In the pages that follow, you’ll also find hundreds of Julie’s incredible watercolors and pencil sketches. More than almost any other contemporary artist, Zick has the ability to capture the spark of a living creature—the gift for translating motion and color into line and form, while retaining the essence of the bird.
What you won’t find in this book, thankfully, is the kind of soupy, woollyminded treacle that tends to bubble up when someone is speculating on the emotional lives of birds. Zick is commonsensical, viewing her avian subjects with the pragmatic and unsentimental eye of the naturalist, even when what she sees is keenly moving.
She remembers what we often forget: that much of what underpins our passion for birds is a one-way street. Just because they can raise us to heights of joy and transcendence—by the glint of morning sun off the brassy hackles of a golden eagle in flight, through the ringing harmonics of a hermit thrush’s song at daybreak, or the explosion of sound and motion as ten thousand snow geese leap simultaneously into the air—we are mere observers, watching from the wrong end of the binoculars.
Roger Tory Peterson once noted that love is probably the wrong word to use for our connection with birds, since love is a reciprocal emotion—and birds don’t repay our feelings. But what makes The Bluebird Effect such a rare and important book is how Julie provides from her own unusual life plenty of examples of times that birds do reciprocate—the “uncommon bonds” of its title, when birds appeared to repay her passion and concern with, if not love, then trust and what may even be gratitude.
Birds are not little automatons. The notion that they are merely feather-clad bundles of stimulus/response programming, which has long been the view of science, shortchanges the complexity that biologists like Julie observe in avian lives, and which research is beginning to unveil.
But if birds are not rigidly coded robots, neither are they little people. If Julie’s stories illuminate the fact that birds have a richer, deeper, more nuanced emotional life than scientists had long been willing to credit, her experiences also show very clearly that birds do not always (or even often) react to the world in ways we recognize as “human.”
In the end, birds and people are both profoundly similar and profoundly different. With its lyrical words and lovely images—all backed by Zick’s observant eye, biologist’s instinct, and nature geek curiosity—The Bluebird Effect helps, at least a little, to bridge that gulf.
Scott Weidensaul
August 2011
Introduction
ITHACA, NEW YORK, is cold and gray through much of the winter and early spring, and the spring I came to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to give a talk was no exception. As a child who staggered out of the Henrico County Public Library with head-high stacks of bird books, I thought—no, I knew—I’d attend Cornell, to trace the hallowed footprints of Louis Agassiz Fuertes, Arthur Allen, and Fredrick Kent Truslow, the men who’d written the words I committed to memory. Alas, in my Cornell interview, I was told that my math SAT scores weren’t up to par to be accepted as a biology major, that I should probably be a journalist or a writer instead. So, being a pliant yet obstinate high school senior, I didn’t even apply.
At Harvard, I couldn’t compete with premedical students in biology, so I declared a major in biological anthropology and figured out how to take independent studies on bird behavior without having to take (flunk) organic chemistry. I wrote my way through college. I wanted so bad
ly to become an ornithologist, but by all standard measures my brain wasn’t organized right to fulfill what I’d thought was my destiny. I didn’t want to cut birds up, measure them, or reduce them to mathematical equations (the trend in ornithology at the time). Heck, I couldn’t do that. Five years later, I didn’t want to be in academia anymore. I wanted to be in the field, to work with birds, to save them when they needed saving. I wanted to do something with them, to understand them, and the best way to do that seemed to be by helping them, watching them, sketching them, and writing down what they did. The writer Alice Sebold said, “It’s very weird to succeed at thirty-nine years old and realize that in the midst of your failure, you were slowly building the life that you wanted anyway.”
So thirty-two years after leaving the Cornell University admissions office with my head hanging, having since parlayed a passion for birds into a crazy quilt of a career, I’m staying in Ithaca with my friend Alan Poole, a real ornithologist, and he’s arranged for me to speak and show my paintings at the Lab of Ornithology, which is about the most exciting thing I could think of, having all this ancient, stored-up emotion about the place. He’s on the telephone in the other room, trying to tell his daughter what I do. He starts off on a couple of different tacks and finally says, “She’s a storyteller. That’s what she is.” And it’s true.
This book is many things—a sketchbook, a journal, an attempt to understand other beings—but it is not a dispassionate recitation of scientific truths about birds. It’s a series of stories that I hope will pull back a curtain on their minds. I’ve worked with many species of birds in many capacities in my life as a naturalist, bird painter, and songbird rehabilitator. I included only those birds for which I had a satisfying story to tell. Each species has its own chapter. In order to be one of the twenty-five, a given species needed to come into my sphere several times, or in a particularly meaningful or instructive way. Many of the birds I write about came to me orphaned or injured. Others I’ve spent time studying and sketching in the wild. Some are ones that I’ve worked to manage, like piping plovers, least terns, and eastern bluebirds. One is Charlie, the macaw who is sitting on my shoulder as I write, who has been preening my eyelashes and sticking his rubbery tongue in my ear for twenty-three years. And one is just a will-o’-the-wisp, a giant woodpecker with its powerful ivory bill sunk deep in my psyche.
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