The Bluebird Effect

by Julie Zickefoose

  Throughout the waning days of July, Jeff hung around, his soft teeawee contact call sounding in the trees around my house whenever I emerged. To thwart the crafty catbird, I rigged up a portable metal stand with a food cup wired to it. I’d carry it and set it nearby as I worked in the yard, and the young grosbeak would land and feed unmolested by the somewhat shier catbird. But Jeff’s visits dwindled in frequency and duration. On Day 38, he came in with his dusky pink bill covered in wild cherry pulp, took three mealworms, and left.

  By Day 41, he was showing up at my bedroom window each morning at six. I’d obligingly pop out with a dish of mealworms and fruit. It was a routine I could get used to. I liked having daily contact with this lovely little brown-striped bird, liked knowing that he remembered where I slept and knew to call in the window, just as he had once pecked at my nose.

  I was called away on Day 44, and Jeff disappeared. Four days later, he showed up, landing on my arm, and accepted a feeding of mealworms. He showed up regularly for the next four days, though he was now fifty-two days old and well able to fend for himself. He left for a week, then returned, called, and swooped low over my head as I gardened. It was August 9. I was pretty sure that was a grosbeak’s way of saying goodbye.

  I knew I’d miss Jeff when he left for good. He’d been so companionable in his quiet way. Almost a month later, I was weeding the garden in the clear September air when a bird circled high over my head, spiraling lower with each pass. From the pinwheel white in its whirring wings, I could tell it was a rose-breasted grosbeak, and the bright salmon pink underwing feathers told me it was a young male. “Jeffy!” I called, and the bird swooped lower, circled a few more times, and lined out for the western border of the preserve. How good of him to stop by! It was one of the priceless rewards of raising orphaned songbirds—the check-in by a free-living, wholly wild foundling that confirms that you’ve done the soft release right. Migrating, wintering, finding a mate next spring if all went well—it was up to Jeff now, and that’s as it should be.

  In 1992, several years after Jeff and I parted ways, I moved to Appalachian Ohio, too far south to host breeding rose-breasted grosbeaks. I missed them and their rich, liquid warble echoing from the sugar maple canopy. I felt lucky to play delighted host to spring migrants when they’d pass through our backyard in the first week of May. I’d look out and spy something at the feeder that was large, black and white, and wasn’t a woodpecker. The bird would turn its head, and the stunning cravat of carmine would give him away as a male rose-breasted grosbeak. Sometimes there were three or more, and a brown-striped female, too. Oh, how I longed for them to stay, but two weeks later they’d all be gone to more northerly latitudes. Though they breed about one hundred miles north of us in Canton, Ohio, and in West Virginia’s mountains (even adorning that state’s enviable license plate), I was out of their range, too far south and too low in elevation. Or so I thought.

  In the waning days of May 2007, I was startled to see an adult male rose-breasted grosbeak clinging to a cylindrical mesh peanut feeder on our front porch. What on earth was a rose-breast doing here in the last week of May, eating peanuts? He should have been a hundred miles north at least, and nesting. The oddity didn’t stop there. He was missing half his tail, and his cravat, instead of being deep carmine, was the pale pink of a Carolina rose. More than that, he was ridiculously tame.

  My mental wheels started turning. Poor plumage and soft part coloration generally indicate an inadequate diet. Tameness can mean a lot of things. Sometimes it means illness or injury, and sometimes it means that a bird has prior association with people. Sometimes it just means that a bird is unafraid, for reasons we can’t divine. I began to wonder if this bird had been hand-raised. When a deep-forest bird hangs around your front door, perching freely on man-made objects, you have to wonder. When I popped out of the front door to refill the feeders, he flew to a tubular metal hammock stand, perched on the slippery, shiny surface, and sang a sweet melody. If someone really pressed me, I’d say this bird had been captive-raised and be pretty sure I was telling them the truth. But he’d have to have been captive-raised a year ago, as a nestling, to behave like this. Well, stranger things have happened. I didn’t think for an instant that Jeff had somehow found me in southern Ohio; that was eighteen years ago. I was simply delighted that another rose-breast had chosen Hotel Zickefoose for a stay.

  He came to the feeder every morning for four days, parking on it, threatening the cardinals and woodpeckers who stared at the colorful new visitor hogging their peanuts. He drank and bathed in the bubbling bird spa, and he bossed the resident birds around. He didn’t seem ill, just odd and much too tame.

  Messing around in my gardens, I was startled when all the mourning doves spooked from the feeders with a roar of wings. Urgent seet calls from the tufted titmice indicated a hawk was nearby. At almost the same moment, there was a hollow bonk on the studio windows, and I cringed, wondering which bird had hit. Crumpled in the flowers beneath the window was the grosbeak. Of all the birds to hit the window . . . He lay stunned in the cardinal flowers for a half-hour while I kept watch over him from the studio.

  Finally, he flew up, made a rocky landing on a low limb, and sat there for a while, gathering his scattered wits. I had to leave then, to take the kids to a softball game. When we came back, the grosbeak was perched attractively on the trunk of one of my potted bonsai trees, right by the front door. Oh, poor thing. Are you feeling shaky? Do you need help?

  I put some peanut bits and suet dough in front of him. He considered those for a few minutes, then launched in flight—straight into the foyer window. He didn’t hit hard, having flown only a couple of feet. I came to his rescue as he lay on the ground, and he hopped up on my finger like a tame parakeet. I froze, memories of Jeffy flooding back and filling the crevices in my heart. And then he was gone, flying strongly over the roof of the house.

  He stayed through June 4, eating peanuts, somehow avoiding further trouble, past the “safe date” for suspected breeding in Ohio. I doubted that there was a female rose-breasted grosbeak for one hundred miles around. I hoped he headed north, away from windows and houses, when he finally left. He was a gift, that’s all, and I still shiver with the remembrance of his strong, slate blue toes, clutching my fingers.

  A month passed with the heavy hum of summer on the land. On the morning of July 6, while watching a dozen barn swallows trundling happily out on the garage roof—where we strew baked eggshells for their calcium-boosting pleasure—I saw a newly fledged rose-breasted grosbeak hopping among them. Small tufts of down waved atop its head; it was a rank baby, right out of the nest. I must have looked like a wolf in a Tex Avery cartoon, my eyes briefly leaving their sockets to ogle this unaccustomed sight. For fifteen years I’d been watching everything that happened in and around these eighty acres, and I’d never seen a just-fledged rose-breasted grosbeak, in July or any other month.

  My mind flew back to my little spring gift—the pale male rose-breast who ate peanuts on the front porch for almost a week, past the rose-breast’s safe date of June 4, after which you can suspect the bird is a breeder in Ohio. I had convinced myself he was just a late migrant in questionable condition. He’d smacked himself hard on the studio window, shown up on the bonsai bench that afternoon, perched on my hand for a few golden moments, and I really lost hope that this peculiar little bird might be a viable breeder. I just hoped he’d live through it all.

  Later that morning, I heard the thin, sharp EEK! of a rose-breasted grosbeak. A pale, streaky brown bird flew over, white wing patches contrasting weakly against the sky. The juvenile grosbeak was still around. I leapt up and trotted around the corner of the house, following it, hoping for a snapshot to document the occurrence. I stared at the quiet line of trees bordering our meadow. Two cardinals, a white-eyed vireo . . . and a parti-colored bird flew out of the thick cherry leaves and teed up for a moment in a dead ash. Binoculars locked on him—and I thought I knew this bird. It was an adult male rose-bre
ast, with a little dash of white behind each eye. If he’s got a pink breast, it’s too pale to see in profile. He’s a bit messy. Yes. Maybe my little spring gift never left. And perhaps he had a mate hidden away, or where would that baby have come from?

  I trotted down the orchard after him when he flew. I stopped in the clearing, where I stood a chance of seeing him again. And then he sang, just one phrase of his liquid song, from the sugar maples. Thank you.

  I still don’t know for sure whether it was the same bird who visited my peanut feeders in the first week of June. Chances are that it wasn’t. But it was an adult rose-breast keeping company with a freshly fledged juvenile in early July, and that’s good enough for me. This is what is so compelling about bird watching; this is what keeps my nerve endings firing, my ears perked for the slightest eek! or teeawee. One of my favorite birds of all, and a well-marked, distinctive individual at that, never before (to my knowledge) recorded breeding in my county, comes to my yard, perches briefly on my finger, then raises a baby practically on my doorstep, and it takes until mid-July for me to find out about it. You never know the whole story about a bird. Not even close.

  I hum a little Appalachian tune, a secret smile spreading over my face.

  Where’d you come from?

  Where’d you go?

  Where’d you come from, Rose-breasted Joe?

  Scarlet Tanager

  A Voice in the Canopy

  “YOU HEAR THAT?” my sister Micky asked urgently. “It’s saying, Chip-BANG! Chip-BANG!” And dimly, over her cordless phone, held up to the tall pines and hornbeams in her Connecticut backyard, I did. “It’s a scarlet tanager! Try to see it! Grab your binocs and get out there!” I urged. But the bird remained hidden, chip-banging its alarm call in the canopy. I desperately wanted Micky to be able to see such a lovely bird in her own backyard. So many encounters with scarlet tanagers are like that—auditory only. In a given spring, I generally count myself lucky to see a handful of males, vivid blots of vermilion, so bright in the rusty haze of buds, on a spring migration. After the leaves emerge, they’re back to being disembodied voices in the treetops. I don’t catch up with them again until fall, when the olive-drab, immature birds flood through southern Ohio, chasing each other in gleeful loops through our old orchard.

  I don’t know by what provenance we in the United States came by our four species of Piranga tanagers. We almost missed them completely. Tanagers are otherwise solely Neotropical and are among the most recently evolved taxa of songbirds (hence their position near the back of the field guide). In the New World tropics, tanagers’ adaptive radiation has resulted in a dazzling array of genera and species: hooded, spangled, streaked, daubed, and painted with every shade from gold to violet, scarlet, acid green, seafoam, silver, yellow, black, and red. One, the paradise tanager, is called sete cores (seven colors) by Brazilians, and it’s got them all. When our scarlet tanager overwinters in northern South America, it tends to flock and feed in fruiting trees with paradise tanagers. I would, too, just for the pleasure of gazing at them.

  Our scarlet tanager sneaks down to South America wearing olive drab, changing back into radiant red beginning in January. By March, he’s glistening scarlet and ebony, and ready to head north again. Doubtless these winter weeds he wears help keep him safe from sharp-shinned hawks on the fall trip and from forest falcons on the wintering grounds.

  There are other adaptations to the scarlet tanager’s tropical time-share. That heavy, toothed bill works well to subdue fast food—katydids, grasshoppers, cicadas, and other orthopterans—which are generally supersized in tropic climes. Back on the breeding grounds in North America’s moist forests, almost any insect that crawls or flies is game for the scarlet tanager. Tanagers hover, glean, hawk, and even root for insects on the ground. Even bees and wasps are beaten and eaten. Spittlebugs, aphids, cicadas, and dragonflies find themselves in the tanager’s firm clutches. But lepidopteran larvae are the tanager’s favorite. In gypsy moth infestation years in New England, I picked up a number of road-killed scarlet tanagers—hit while they were bashing the hair off gypsy moth caterpillars on the asphalt surface. Wide-scale spraying for gypsy moths, which kills most nontargeted lepidopteran larvae as well, forces scarlet tanagers to scrounge for fruit, beetles, spiders, and whatever insects survive the spraying.

  Late-summer fruits and fall berries, even the waxy white fruits of poison ivy, help sustain tanagers on their southward flight. They pass through surprisingly late—sometimes well after the first frosts of October—with fruit as fuel. They’re night migrants, and the first warmth of fall mornings finds our orchard loaded with refueling tanagers, bickering and cartwheeling against a quiet backdrop of dewy leaves.

  In our heavily agricultural part of southeast Ohio, we find scarlet tanagers breeding rather sparsely. The woodlands are too fragmented, the pressure from predators and brown-headed cowbirds too great. We have to go to large contiguous patches of national forest to hear the tanager’s burry song with any frequency. Ten to twelve hectares (twenty-five to thirty acres), in fact, is the minimum size forest patch that can support breeding scarlet tanagers. With so much forest fragmentation, it is a pleasant surprise to find national Breeding Bird Survey data since 1966 showing fairly stable populations of scarlet tanagers. Declines are occurring mostly in heavily agricultural areas, which do not produce enough young birds to replace the loss of breeding adults. Ornithologists believe that fragmented woodlands actually draw birds from more productive areas, acting as population sinks. Clearly, the species depends on the preservation of contiguous forest tracts for its survival. In Michigan, selective logging—an innocuous term for a practice that can foster wholesale destruction of breeding habitat for many forest songbirds—eliminated scarlet tanagers from affected tracts.

  Declines in tanager populations are in part due to the nest-parasitizing brown-headed cowbird, which ejects a tanager egg, replacing it with her own. The open-country cowbirds gain access to tanager nests along edges of fragmented forests.

  Though most people assume that young cowbirds outcompete the remaining “host” young in the nest, this does not appear to be the case with scarlet tanagers. The presence or absence of a cowbird nestmate does not affect the fledging success of the scarlet tanagers remaining in the nest.

  It is interesting that there are no subspecies of scarlet tanagers, nor is there appreciable geographic variation in the species throughout its range. There are some measurable differences in song type across the country but not in physiognomy. Does this perhaps mean that scarlet tanagers are relatively recent colonists of North America? Are the young birds long-distance dispersers, spreading their DNA far and wide, making for a homogenous gene pool? There is so much we don’t yet know about scarlet tanagers.

  Tanager lives—and their secrets—are shrouded, quite simply, in leaves for most of the season. By the time they arrive in southern Ohio, it’s the end of April and we have a narrow window of time in which we can enjoy them before the leaves are bigger than they are. Males arrive a week or so ahead of females on spring migration. It’s hard to believe they’re North America’s smallest tanager (well, we have only four Pirangas to choose from) when you pick a male out against a filmy spring sky.

  He sits in the topmost twigs of an emergent tree, wings conspicuously drooped, rump feathers poufed, a startling blotch of brilliant red. Turning his head from side to side, he forces out his hurried, rasping song, which is often likened to that of a robin with a sore throat (and an appointment to keep). Approached by a female, he’ll turn his back on her and stretch his neck, his ebony wings and tail making a frame for the brilliant scarlet rectangle of his back.

  Tanager nests are slim affairs, shallow saucers of fine twigs, bark strips, and grasses that defy gravity, set atop forks, amidships on long, slender limbs. Flimsy nests and rather low clutch size, as well as single brooding, are characteristics many tropical birds share. The average number of eggs in the scarlet tanager’s single clutch is only 3.8. Eggs ar
e incubated solely by the female, which makes sense in a species with such marked sexual dimorphism. A male tanager motionless on a nest might as well be lit with neon for aerial predators like sharp-shinned and Cooper’s hawks. The female’s olive plumage, on the other hand, blends perfectly.

  Young tanagers stay in the nest an eye-popping average of only ten days. They go from blind, almost-naked, pink squirmers to fully feathered youngsters capable of short flights in a mere week and a half! Thus do tanagers race through the most vulnerable time of their lives—the nestling period. Odd as it seems, they’re far safer scrambling through the leaves, being fed by both parents, than huddled together in the nest.

  Fall is my favorite time to watch tanagers, as they pour through our old orchard, eating poison ivy berries and sluggish katydids, chasing each other and the myriad red-eyed vireos, cedar waxwings, and warblers also passing through. They’re abundant migrants, easy and fun to watch. Chasing seems to be a fall contact sport for them. There’s a fair amount of it in late summer, too, when young birds are dispersing.