That same afternoon, Mrs. Troyer was being escorted by a new male, a sleek, young thing, traces of juvenile plumage lingering about his throat, snappy and boisterous in movement and song. How quickly she allowed her mate to be replaced! They were a pair the same day. I should be more like her, I thought, willing to fast-forward to the next act. I suppose if my allotted span were less than a decade, I’d be better at it, but we humans have time to mull and grieve and reflect on a life well lived, no matter how small. I had held him in my hand, helped his young through rain and cold, changed his nests when parasites threatened, fed him in bitter cold and snow, spoken to him nearly every day for seven years.
I thought about human intervention and the debates around bird feeding. I have colleagues who view bird feeding as the equivalent of turning wild birds into backyard pets. I know birders who have never opened a bag of sunflower seed. Knowledgeable bluebirders maintain that bluebirds don’t need a mealworm subsidy to thrive and raise young, and I know that, on the whole, they are right. When a week of cold rain hits in midsummer, soaking the adults and making it impossible for them to find food, many trail operators simply clean the starved nestlings out of the houses so the adults can start again. I, on the other hand, travel box to box with tweezers and mealworms, and feed the young birds through the hardship. It’s not easy, and it’s going overboard, I know, but I am compelled to do it, and I don’t apologize for it. I feel responsible for these birds who have chosen to nest in my boxes.
My thoughts jumped to the larger issue: where would bluebirds, as a species, be without human intervention? When the long-term decline of bluebirds became evident in the 1960s, the nationwide move to provide housing for them was the largest single-species conservation effort ever launched. Thanks to pioneers like Lawrence Zeleny, who worked hard to make their plight known; thanks to thousands of dedicated bluebird trail operators across the nation and to state and national outreach organizations like the North American Bluebird Society, eastern bluebirds have rebounded. Their upright silhouettes mark telephone wires and fencerows across America.
In my experience with Mr. Troyer, I created a microcosm of the larger picture. By waving our arms at one hawk, we’d unwittingly allowed fifty-three more young bluebirds into the world. I’d had the privilege of chronicling the long and productive life of a single bird, whom I’d never have recognized had he not been marked by the hawk. I’d learned a valuable lesson about nearly loving birds to death with too much of the wrong food. My little girl, Phoebe, had known the magic of providing for wild birds who would come to within an arm’s length when she called to them. We had intervened, and we were much the richer for it. One bluebird had made the world a more beautiful place for us, and his memory, a small azure flame, burns in my heart.
Tree Swallow
The Early Bird Wins My Heart
MARCH 23: He sits on the old phone line running into the house, the one I wouldn’t let the telephone company crew take down when they finally buried our line. Yes, it was unsightly and no longer necessary, but where would the tree swallow rest when he came back each spring? Where would the barn swallows line up to chatter like wind-up toys? Where would the bluebirds arrange their nestlings’ fecal sacs like a string of dubious pearls? I look up at the indigo and white bird on the wire. His small, flat head turns side to side as I walk directly under him, talking to him, congratulating him on another migration completed. He peers down and chirrups like a friendly parakeet. Our tree swallow is back.
I haven’t always been such a fan of tree swallows. As a nascent bluebird landlord in the early 1980s, I saw them as rivals for the few nest boxes I was able to maintain. I hated to see a pair, three, or even four tree swallows gang up on an eastern bluebird, driving it to the ground and sometimes even injuring or killing it. So ferocious was the competition for nest boxes that I had to pair them wherever I mounted them, lest the swallows outcompete the birds I really wanted. Such was the case in Connecticut, where tree swallows are abundant. I had to move to southern Ohio to realize how much I missed them. In 1992, we knew of only one location in our county where tree swallows nested, in a flooded backwater with lots of hole-riddled dead trees. Over the ensuing twenty years, tree swallows have dramatically expanded their breeding range, likely a response to the increasing popularity of bluebird nest box trails. They are now firmly established throughout Ohio and breeding as far south as the Carolinas. Not only that, but in 2006 they began to take advantage of Ohio’s longer breeding season to double-brood in my nest boxes, something that was unheard of in New England. The leopard may not be able to change its spots, but, given time, the tree swallow can push out two broods in a single season.
Everything in the tree swallows’ makeup seems to be geared to taking over scarce nesting cavities. They appear in March, inspecting cavities before flying insects may be widely available, clinging to life by eating things such as hard, waxy bayberries and even sedge and bulrush seeds. Still they rush to nest and lay eggs, and I worry about the adults when the temperatures dip below freezing. Sometimes tree swallows pile up together in nest boxes, sharing their body warmth, waiting out the cold in a torporlike state. And they will bask in periods of sunshine. But what will they find to eat? With years of observation behind me, I don’t fret quite as much now.
In southern Ohio, it’s fairly common for tree swallows to lay a full clutch of five or six eggs, then be forced to abandon them temporarily when the weather turns foul. Our birds head en masse to the Ohio River, where they subsist on aquatic insect hatches until the weather warms and their usual insect prey becomes abundant again. I’ve learned to trust them to return.
The mysteries locked in the heads of swallows, in their pearly pink eggs, are greater and deeper than we can fathom. I’ve seen this scenario time and time again. A pair of tree swallows arrives in March, builds a nest through April, then lays eggs in May. Cold, wet weather arrives, the flying insect supply dwindles to nothing, and the birds vanish, leaving their partially incubated eggs cold in the nest. My first instinct is to remove the nest, to allow the birds to start over. And yet, knowing something of swallows, I hesitate and leave the clutch. A week goes by; the eggs lie cold. I envision the squirming embryos stilled, killed.
But a clutch of tree swallow eggs, partially incubated, then left untended for a week, will still hatch. Not all may survive, but most of them will hatch. The tree swallow knows that; the bluebird knows it, too. I’ve documented it on our farm time and time again: the “abandoned nest” with its stone-cold eggs suddenly re-claimed when sunshine and warm temperatures return. It defies reason, and yet it happens. First, do no harm: I caution people who call or write with questions about their nest boxes to trust the birds to know what they’re doing, no matter how screwy it seems to us. So many well-intentioned landlords throw out cold eggs, unaware of the birds’ greater plan, and thinking, as humans usually do, that we know best. Only occasionally is that true.
And so I reflect on my tree swallow wars—when I favored bluebirds over them, when I thought I knew what was right—with a tinge of shame. It has taken me years to realize that in only two instances can I justify species discrimination, and that’s when European starlings or house sparrows (both invasive exotic birds) take over a nest box meant for native species. Deciding, on the other hand, that a bluebird should take precedence over a tree swallow is like stating that a tulip is a better flower than a daffodil. It’s an arbitrary choice and has no basis in reality. Living without tree swallows, I came to miss them terribly, and the turtlelike head of a swallow, poking out of one of my nest boxes to watch me as I walk up, always splits my face in a grin. Each spring, we buy bags of white chicken and goose feathers from craft stores, tossing them up into the mild air, listening for the snap of a swallow’s bill as it snatches the prize from the sky. Our tree swallows have lavishly lined nests, and studies in Michigan have shown that the more feathers line a tree swallow nest, the more young fledge from it. Insulation is the key to survival if a bird would nest
in cruel April.
The swallows come to know us, some even to trust us. Sometimes a female won’t budge off her eggs after I open the box, and I can gently move her with my finger to get a count, then close the box and leave her still sitting. Their liquid twitters, like paper clips being shaken in a little tumbler, define early spring just as much as clear light and bursting buds, periwinkle skies and high, hazy clouds. Skies with tiny triangles swooping, twittering, jingling—skies graced with tree swallows.
Tree swallows have taught me that birds, their distribution and behavior, are much more fluid than we realize. That a species’s range can expand many hundreds of miles in a few years; that the incubation period of their eggs can fluctuate from twelve to twenty-two days, depending on the weather. That almost nothing where birds are concerned is set in stone. They are creatures of change, creatures of air, their only charge to adapt to a capricious environment in the best way they can.
Speaking of Starlings
IT’S TEMPTING to dismiss the European starling as a nuisance; a greedy, filthy pig of a bird, known only for the myriad ways in which it inconveniences or disgusts us. In winter, when they’re gobbling down the suet dough I mix up for the birds I want at my feeders, I think of a starling as nothing more than a capacious digestive tract propelled by a set of triangular wings. Input, output; they wolf down my homemade bird food, process it, and deposit it seemingly seconds later all over my porch.
And yet . . . catch a starling in spring sunshine, glowing with oily green and purple, tiny buff stars (the “starlings” of its poetic name) running down its back and under its tail. Look for the turquoise glow at the base of its corn yellow bill. And as soon as it perceives that it is the focus of your interest, it will be gone. If starlings know anything, they know how we despise them. There is a mind under that sloping forehead, behind the small, glittering eyes set low by the corners of its bill.
On a busy street in Marietta, Ohio, only a block from the Bird Watcher’s Digest office, I stop for a red light and watch a starling on the wire overhead. It is flying repeatedly down to a spot in the middle of the intersection. I wonder what food could so entice it to dodge traffic again and again. Drawing closer, I see it walking tight circles around another starling, just killed. It steps aside as the cars roar past, then returns to the dead bird’s side. It can only be the starling’s mate. An hour later, I see the bird, still sitting on the wire, still watching what is now just a paste of feathers, unrecognizable to any but its mate.
In the course of painting the development of a nestling, I spent two weeks regularly raiding a starling nest in a plastic martin gourd in our yard. I’d take the baby out at the same time each morning, sketch and paint it from life, then replace it in its nest. I was impressed with the sheer heft and size of the nestling, compared to all the other birds I’d worked with. It had a strong, rank, horsy odor, and I wondered at the reports that starlings make good eating, making a mental note never to try one. But what impressed me most was the palpable intelligence in this creature as it changed over the course of two weeks from a formless blob of pink protoplasm to a feathered youngster. One eye slit opened on Day 7, and the bird turned its head from side to side, taking in its surroundings and acting on the information it was able to collect. Unlike any other week-old bird I’d worked with, it seemed to be hatching a plan to escape, its mind well ahead of its still-helpless body.
On its eighth day, the nestling figured out that I’d feed it as I worked, and it gobbled down moistened parrot chow, snuggling into my hand for warmth. On the ninth day, it shivered pitifully, for it was still devoid of feathers, just a large pink dollop of guts, topped by enormous yellow clown lips. The drawing stage of the portrait finished, I cradled it to my chest as I painted its likeness. It stopped shivering and asked for food. It would have been easy to fall for this creature, as homely as it was, for the consciousness that glimmered behind its eyes. Mozart kept a pet starling that could whistle parts of his concertos, with its own improvisations and additions. When it died, three years later, he held a funeral, with invited guests in full mourning dress. His eulogy speaks of the composer’s sense of loss:
A little fool lies here
Whom I held dear—
A starling in the prime
Of his brief time
Whose doom it was to drain
Death’s bitter pain.
Thinking of this, my heart
Is riven apart.
Oh reader! Shed a tear,
You also, here.
He was not naughty, quite,
But gay and bright,
And under all his brag
A foolish wag.
This no one can gainsay
And I will lay
That he is now on high,
And from the sky,
Praises me without pay
In his friendly way.
Yet unaware that death
Has choked his breath,
And thoughtless of the one
Whose rime is thus well done.
—June 14, 1787
I kept a starling for several weeks, having agreed to release it for a friend who, with a little instruction from me, had hand-raised it. (I had decided to devote myself to a robin and a catbird instead.) Einstein, as she named it, enjoyed riding on my shoulder as I moved around the house and yard, and I liked the bird, even when it would suddenly insert its closed bill into my ear canal or (worse) my nostril. It would then gape widely, turning its bill into a miniature but very powerful speculum and eliciting a startled yelp from its caretaker. This is the same behavior starlings employ when looking for grubs in a lawn: stab, gape, gobble; stab, gape, gobble. I’m not sure what it was looking for in my nose and ear; perhaps simply the drama of my reaction.
Einstein’s release was a fairly swift endeavor, compared to those of other songbirds I’d raised. The starling set to poking about in the lawn with gusto. On its first full day outside, I heard a tap on the studio window. Einstein was standing on the windowsill with a shiny nickel in its bill. When I emerged from the house with my palm full of mealworms, Einstein dropped the nickel into my hand. Though the nickel didn’t go far in paying for the fifty thousand mealworms it took to feed the young starling, I certainly felt richer for my brief contact with this brainy bundle of fat and feathers.
Starlings invest a great deal of care in their broods, and they are not as prolific as their numbers might suggest. In Ohio, they are single-brooded, laying eggs in April and investing all their time and attention in the young through the end of May. Comparing notes with purple martin landlords, who spend much of their time battling interloping starlings, I learned that if an Ohio starling has not laid eggs by June 1, it is not likely to attempt nesting at all that season.
I found their strategy interesting in its contrast to that of most other garden birds I’d studied. While open-cup nesters such as field and chipping sparrows leave the nest at the impossibly tender age of one week, and robins stay as long as fourteen days, cavity-nesting birds such as bluebirds remain in the nest for an average of eighteen days. Starlings hang on for as long as twenty-one to twenty-four days—longer even than tree swallows or purple martins. Why should this be? The answer seems to lie in their post-fledging behavior.
Young starlings, in sharp contrast to sparrows and bluebirds, burst from the nest completely feathered, with substantial tails, and flying well. From that moment on, they accompany their parents as the adults forage. While sparrows, warblers, robins, and bluebirds “stash” their offspring in thick cover, returning to feed them dozens of times a day, starlings take the kids along. It’s easy to see them in June, soot gray fledglings trundling behind their parents on emerald lawns, voicing a harsh and insistent krrrr! Such early mobility in the young birds heralds an unusually short juvenile dependency period—as little as one day, or as long as twelve days—when the parent birds feed their young, gradually decreasing the subsidy until the fledglings are on their own. At this point, juvenile starlings
gang up in flocks, presumably learning about food, predators, and life as they go. Could this aspect of their biology be an Achilles’ heel?
Inconceivable as it may be to those of us who wave flocks of starlings off with a broom as they denude a suet feeder or a fruiting dogwood, starlings are declining across much of Europe and are red-listed (designated a species of highest conservation concern) in the United Kingdom. Changes in the survival rate of first-year birds seem to be the single greatest factor in the decline, with food availability a major contributor. Since starlings so closely follow human-altered landscapes, using artificial structures as nest sites and lawns as feeding grounds, things as simple as changes in turf management, new pesticides, and watering regimes could have a large impact on starling foraging success.
There are many in North America who express the desire to see the starling exported back to its native Europe by the container load on a slow boat. We still have far too many. But the species’s precipitous decline in Europe could herald an ecological change that as yet escapes our perception. I’m of two minds on starlings; half of me respects their rough-and-tumble spunk and their piercing intellect, while the other half bemoans their negative impact on native nesting birds like flickers, red-headed woodpeckers, and bluebirds, whose cavities they usurp every spring. It would be ironic should starlings be decimated in their native land, leaving North America as their population stronghold. Are we ready to be the global keepers of a species we despise, a bird we poison and roust wherever it attempts to roost?
The Bluebird Effect Page 3
