We lost. By “we,” I mean the mourning doves, and those of us who enjoy watching and feeding them. There’s now a season on mourning doves in Ohio, as there is in most of the rest of the country. I watch the smooth brown birds moving across the lawn under my feeders, stuffing their crops with millet, sunflower, and corn. They pause now and then to jet their heads upward, as if making room for a little more seed. It’s an odd feeling to know that, alone among the twenty-odd species at my feeder, mourning doves may find themselves under fire just the next field over. If any of them do find themselves topping a cracker, I guess I’ll have done my part to make sure they taste good.
I have to admire mourning doves. They’re not nearly as dumb as they look. My foundlings proved themselves able to take the best parts of captivity—the unlimited food and the safe shelter—and use their association with me to their advantage as they slowly gained independence. Wild doves accept our handouts of grain and seed even as they dodge sudden blasts of birdshot in once-quiet fields. This uncomfortable dichotomy in humanity’s relationship with mourning doves doubtless bothers me more than it does them. They fill their bellies where they can, make more mourning doves when they can, and leave it to us down below to decide whether we’ll take aim or let them be.
Northern Cardinal
Stoking the Red Fire
IT IS SEPTEMBER. I look out the studio window and see seven northern cardinals in various stages of undress, festooning my feeder. There is an adult male, who’s lacking a crest; a juvenile male, painted in shabby shades of dull red and brown; a juvenile female, her bill still nestling black. The juveniles keep up a noisy pippering even as they shell their own seeds. They are only a couple of weeks out of the nest and already on the sunflower dole, my welfare subsidy for their little population explosion. Every one is molting. Every one looks terrible. I look at them with mixed feelings, wondering if they’re as healthy as they ought to be. Perhaps it’s moot to fret about their health and reproductive success. There are too many in my yard to worry whether they’ll prevail. They’ve already taken the place over.
I’ve been thinking lately about bird feeding, about what happens when I pump several hundred pounds of prime cardinal food into my backyard habitat each year. And then what it means to multiply that effort by tens of millions of backyards, and millions of cardinals. Cardinals aren’t the only beneficiaries of this largess, of course; there are titmice and doves, nuthatches and jays, sparrows of every stripe, finches of every color, woodpeckers who’ve laid off their honest carpentry for an easy handout; all of them stuffing themselves with sunflower seeds.
Any way you look at them, northern cardinals are something of an amazement. European birders visiting the States gasp in astonishment on first spotting them, these brilliant daubs of carmine that most Americans so thoroughly take for granted. The male is a solid scarlet bird with a huge orange bill, black mask, and expressive crest. Females are suffused with red over tawny fawn. The cardinal is a stunner, at least when it’s not molting. And it is almost ridiculously common, thanks in part to our providing it a continuous supply of artificial food throughout its range.
Cardinals seem to have unlimited reproductive capability, fashioning their shallow twig nests in low bowers of bramble hung with honeysuckle or grapevine. Clutch size varies from one to five eggs, with an average of three in most nests. I’d always wondered why cardinals seem to have small broods, usually seeing two or three young in the nests I’d peeked into. And I’d wondered about their long nesting season. The only other birds still feeding nestlings in our yard in September are American goldfinches, which nest late in order to exploit the flush of weed seeds in late summer and early fall; and mourning doves, which, being pigeons, come by their fecundity naturally and will nest in every month of the year, feeders or no feeders.
Was the persistent late nesting in cardinals a response to the intensive bird-feeding efforts in which I’d always indulged, or something that cardinals brought when they expanded their range into New England? Apparently, cardinals have always maximized their reproductive potential by nesting often and late into the season. A. C. Bent’s elegant Life Histories of North American Cardinals, Grosbeaks, Buntings, Towhees, Finches, Sparrows, and Allies cites this pattern in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, when bird feeding consisted of throwing a few bread and meat scraps out on the lawn, not the orchestrated barrage of cardinal-perfect seed that we deploy today.
I’d always suspected cardinals are heeding a call to reproduce that may have less to do with their natural history than it does with the unnatural abundance we lay before them year-round. But Bent’s and other early accounts of their long nesting season, marked by multiple nest attempts, argue against that suspicion. Besides, cardinals feed their young protein-rich insects, not seed. It’s likely that smallish clutches and multiple nesting attempts have more to do with intense predation pressure on cardinal nests than with supplemental winter feeding. If your nest is likely to be wiped out by a predator, you probably shouldn’t lay six eggs.
However, the abundance of cardinals has to have something to do with the abundance of seed we provide. Winter feeding has been shown to enhance survival rates of black-capped chickadee populations; it might do the same for cardinals. Experiments with five supplemented and five nonsupplemented populations of blue tits in Ireland showed that birds that were fed all winter fledged more young come spring. Winter feeding may well have sped the dispersal of cardinals into the red-deprived northern tier of the United States, or at least encouraged the concentrations we see in backyards throughout the eastern half of the country.
The northern cardinal’s range has expanded dramatically since the early 1800s. At the turn of the twentieth century, cardinals were common in Pennsylvania and New Jersey but stuck only a toe into southern New York. Massachusetts’s first nesting was the year I was born (1958); Maine’s in 1969. (I note with interest that these range expansions predate the explosion in bird feeding that started in the late 1960s.) The Midwest’s invasion was faster; cardinals had flooded Ohio and colonized the Twin Cities of Minnesota by 1930; they reached Michigan’s Upper Peninsula by 1994. For now, only southern Ontario boasts cardinals. But the species has blanketed the entire eastern half of the United States right up to the Canada border.
I’ve been feeding birds since I was about eight, four decades of hauling buckets of seed to waiting flocks. But only now am I starting to think about the larger impact of such a seemingly harmless pastime. A good snowstorm here in Whipple, Ohio, concentrates birds around the feeding station. Have you ever seen seventy cardinals in one backyard, against snow? I expect that, met with that sight, a European birder would have to sit down and breathe into a paper bag. When resident cardinal populations (and those of other feeder birds) build up to such heights, is the vision really as beautiful as it appears? What about the migratory birds that don’t use feeders but still compete for the same resources? What about brown thrashers and gray catbirds, for instance, which spend the winter farther south, then return to northern latitudes to haunt the same shrubby habitat and eat the same crickets, grasshoppers, caterpillars, and moths that cardinals do?
What about common yellowthroats, yellow-breasted chats, and white-eyed vireos, also migrants that find themselves in competition with cardinals? Can it be good for migrant birds when our feeding programs flood their habitat with perhaps fifty individuals more of one species—a year-round resident—than might otherwise live there?
It’s January now, and I’ve been pondering these questions even as I trudge out each morning to refill the sunflower and peanut feeders, spooking a whirring wave of birds from the backyard. The late, highly respected, popular ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson thought about such things, too, but he seemed to have come to peace with them. Asked about the proliferation of nonnative house sparrows, European starlings, and mute swans in his home state of Connecticut, Peterson reportedly replied, “How can more birds be a bad thing?” I’ve been scratching my head over that one for
thirty years. Should I just sit back and thrill to the daubs of red dotting every tree and shrub in my yard? I’ve done my part to add to them.
In the summer of 1999, I took in a newly fledged northern cardinal that had been rescued from a cat-infested suburban backyard. The parents were nowhere to be found; the bird was flightless and unattended. The fledgling, a female, took to my kitten-chow-based, syringe-fed diet with alacrity, gaping lustily and growing visibly. Quiet and companionable, the little cardinal became a beloved companion to the then three-year-old Phoebe, who named the bird Meenah.
Meenah’s transition from cuddling under a preschooler’s chin to making her way in the backyard was surprisingly smooth; she took to the resident flock of cardinals, was courted by and mated with a wild male, and continued to visit her bowl on our deck railing through two succeeding winters for handouts of mealworms. Though she wasn’t banded, we could always tell when Meenah had arrived, because she kept a habit from her fledgling days of landing smack-dab in the middle of the mealworm bowl without even bothering to pause on the rim first. We were thrilled to see this member of our family master the vigilance and skills she’d need to survive in the wild, to transfer her gentle affection to another of her species. All songbirds should be so easy to raise and release. But then all songbirds aren’t quite as adaptable as the northern cardinal.
In the summer of 2004, a pair of cardinals chose to nest in a sprawling forsythia bush that hangs over our paved driveway. I could see the nest through the thick foliage as I stood on the cement. It was an ideal situation from which to observe the birds without disturbing them. Our scent was all around the driveway, so a potential nest predator would find nothing unusual in my presence there. I could stand on the pavement, lean over, and get a good view of the nest without touching the forsythia bush and leaving further scent clues.
On our eighty-acre sanctuary, we have a zero-tolerance policy for feral housecats, which inevitably are attracted to the throngs of birds in our yard and garden. Gray and fox squirrels, which will eat eggs, are rare, since our neighbors here in Appalachian Ohio eat them. Eastern chipmunks, avid egg and chick predators, are kept in check by our Boston terrier, who catches all the dumb ones and regularly routs the smart ones. Black rat snakes take perhaps the highest toll of songbird eggs and chicks here on the sanctuary. We host several large rat snakes in our garage all summer, where they help control the white-footed mouse population. In nesting so close to the garage in an easily climbed forsythia, the cardinals were highly vulnerable to snake predation. I peered into the forsythia, meeting the stoic gaze of a female cardinal pressed deep into her nest, and promised to do my best to protect her young. Did she know that nesting so close by my car might afford her an extra pair of eyes and swift action should a rat snake approach her nest? I’ll always wonder.
The nest, supported by a shallow twig platform, was beautifully fashioned of purple-brown grape bark, fine twigs, dry straw, and grasses. The inner cup was tightly woven pine needles and fine blond grasses, and I marveled that the cardinal’s heavy orange bill could loop, thread, and weave these diverse materials with such precision. In fact, the female masticates the twigs in order to bend and weave them as she wishes. No wonder cardinal nests withstand the worst winds of winter, as frost and leaf drop reveal them perched in multiflora and honeysuckle tangles. I found the nest when the last forsythia flowers were falling from the twigs in mid-May and peeked over the course of a week while the female cardinal finished her clutch of three rufous-speckled, greenish white eggs. I checked only when she was off the nest, keeping my promise to protect her as well as I could and disturb her as little as possible.
One golden-slanted afternoon, I found the nest unattended and peeked to find a newly hatched nestling where an egg had been. Only twelve days of incubation had passed; I was amazed to think of the rapid developmental processes within that egg. Coral pink, with long, fine gray down, the grublike nestling raised its head and gaped, revealing pale yellow flanges around a red mouth lining. I quietly withdrew, smiling broadly to see that they’d made it this far without falling prey to a snake or chipmunk. By the next morning, a second chick had hatched. The third egg was infertile. Their growth was nothing short of stunning. Pinfeathers began sprouting, and by the time they were a week old, the twins looked like half-naked porcupines, with blood-filled blue quills bristling over their bodies, wings, and heads.
By Day 9, these quills had burst to reveal soft cocoa brown feathers, but their heads remained comically spiked with quills, with their bulging eyes giving them a froggy aspect. One chick left the nest on Day 9; the other was still crouched there on the afternoon of Day 10. My next check revealed it perching proudly in a gap in the forsythia foliage, looking out at its huge new world. I’d have to bid it, and my voyeuristic enjoyment of cardinal home life, goodbye.
It was hard to believe that the chicks’ nestling period was over, only ten days after hatching. It’s the enormous pressure from predators, in part, that so truncates cardinal incubation and nestling periods. It’s this same pressure that causes nest failure for so many attempts, that keeps cardinals nesting and renesting into late August. Their low, open-cup nests are so vulnerable to snakes and rodents that the shorter the time they’re occupied, the better. As soon as the cardinal young are able to perch and clamber, they vacate the scent-saturated nest. They’re not truly mobile for another eleven days, sitting and waiting in the vicinity of the nest while their parents shuttle insects to them an average of eight times per hour. Even when the young begin to fly, they’ll receive food for twenty-five to fifty-six days after fledging, mostly protein-rich insects, cut with increasing amounts of vegetable protein as they get older. It’s then that most of us notice them, for their insistent pipping twitter becomes a constant background noise wherever cardinals are raising young. I’ve been known to shout, “Don’t you ever shut up?” to the never-ending succession of cardinal fledglings in our yard as I weed and water the withering gardens of July and August.
And from early November until April, I keep toting seed, keep stoking the red fire. And I search for balance in the imbalance I have created. I laugh at myself, at the codependence I’ve created. For I depend on this oversize flock of backyard birds just as they count on me. They bring life and color and song to my habitat; they give me a reason to put on my coat in the morning, to glance, dozens of times a day, out the window to see who’s visiting now. I willingly put on rubber boots and parka over my flannel pajamas, gladly haul heavy buckets of seed and smear my hands with suet, to welcome them into my yard and my life.
Lately, there’s been a new visitor. He has blazing orange eyes and a sharp, hooked bill; knobby yellow feet tipped in ebony blades. Barely bigger than a blue jay, the color of rain clouds, the little male sharp-shinned hawk has a taste for cardinals—male cardinals. Five times this winter we’ve seen him slice through the air, execute a breathtaking jag and a loop or two, and neatly snag a redbird in midair, picking it up as if his talons were sticky with molasses and the cardinal were a floating feather. He corrects his course and swoops low into the woods, his crimson prize already limp in his grip.
He’s part of a trend, one that follows the arc of bird feeding, too. Charles D. Duncan, a Maine ornithologist, looked at the precipitous drop in the number of sharp-shinned hawks counted migrating past Cape May, New Jersey, since 1980, and wondered if these hawks were disappearing or simply choosing not to migrate. He looked at eighteen years’ worth of Christmas Bird Count data from New England for the answer. “Overall from 1975 to 1992, sharp-shinned hawks wintering in New England increased by more than 500 percent,” Mr. Duncan wrote in the Journal of Field Ornithology. And why would those hawks choose to stay in New England? Anyone who’s ever seen a yardful of birds freeze and then explode into flight, their peaceful flock shattered by a feathered bullet, knows why.
Like it or not, we’re feeding the sharp-shinned and the Cooper’s hawk from our feeding stations, too—they’re getting seed, metabolized int
o blood, bone, and feather. Seventy cardinals festooning a single backyard is an undeniably beautiful sight, enough to make a seed-toting bird waitress proud. But that’s a whole lot of cardinals in one spot, and it’s anything but natural. Except for the seed I put out, they’d likely never congregate here. The quick talon, the appraising mind, the hard yellow glare of the sharp-shinned hawk; the rush of panicked songs and the drift of plucked feathers beneath the birch: that’s natural. It’s ours to accept, a balance to the imbalance we cheerfully create.
Turkey Vulture
The Unlikely Totem
THEY’RE BACK, circling the white sky of a gray March day, back from wherever they go all winter—to the chicken charnel houses of the Delmarva Peninsula? To the narrow passageway of Veracruz, Mexico, and then on into Central America? Turkey vultures are mysterious to me. I squint up at them and smile, always smiling when I see them. Like sun sparkling on water, these carrion-eating, conventionally ugly birds in their dark mourning jackets make me happy.
Along about 1981, when my life was in turmoil post-college and pre-commitment, I developed the habit of walking outside and looking to the sky for answers. And when I was at a crossroads, lost enough in the meanders of my own decisions to look heavenward, there would often be a turkey vulture overhead, looking down at me. Perhaps it was mere chance. Perhaps it’s because they’re common where I live. But signs, I think, are what you make of them. If I look to the sky for answers and usually find a turkey vulture looking down on me and take comfort in that sight, is that significant? Turkey vultures bring me solace, and I can’t say why.
The Bluebird Effect Page 23
