The Birds and the Beasts Were There

by Margaret Millar

  The female, having no black mask to hide behind, is more cir­cumspect. We don’t see her as frequently, and when we do she is seldom on the ledge. She prefers less open, less obvious places, like under the floorboards of the porch, or the shrubbery around cer­tain bird baths, or the bottom parts of the privet hedge and the bougainvillea vines.

  Beginning birders, on catching sight of the female yellowthroat, are inclined to mistake her for other warblers of our area, espe­cially the orange-crowned and the yellow. She is much more wren­like than either of these, both in profile—her head is flatter and her bill longer and somewhat downward curved—and in habitat, pre­ferring the ground and low shrubbery rather than trees. The yel­lowthroat was, in fact, formerly known as the tule wren and the scientific name for the species, Gcothlypis trichas, means a bird that’s confined to the ground.

  When disturbed, both the male and the female will utter the protest sound, checK, or, if you prefer, wzschthub. But only the male has the ability to sing. Bewitchedy, witchedy, witched, be-witchedy, witchedy witched. Perhaps he is warning the bird world that he is indeed bewitched, but that at any moment the spell will end and he will take off his mask and reveal what he really is, at least an eagle.

  During the mid-morning break I had a chance to ask Mr. Rett about Houdunit’s strange relationship with the hubcap and the two windows. He said that most birds, and many mammals as well, will defend their territory vigorously against other members of the same species. This territorial fighting among birds is more or less ritualized and no real harm is done to the contestants, though some observers have seen blood drawn in boundary disputes be­tween brown towhees.

  The towhee in the hubcap, the second one in the lanai window and the third in the bathroom window were, to Houdunit, inter­lopers who had to be driven off, contenders for his title, his food supply and his nesting sites. The trio’s persistence must have cast doubts in Houdunit’s mind about his ability as a fighter, but he didn’t give up. Instead, the sun gradually changed position in the sky and obliterated his enemies.

  I also asked Mr. Rett to imitate the call note of a brown towhee. He replied what sounded to me exactly like chin.

  Would you believe wzschthub?

  4

  You’re a Stool Pigeon, Mother

  At noon the class returned to the Museum of Natural History for lunch. The meal was planned, pre­pared and served by Junior Aides—a number of girls in their early teens who did volunteer work at the museum during the summer and after school hours. The girls also made up their own menus, which were printed on a blackboard and offered such delicacies as:

  goop soup • sand witches

  false furters • dam burgers

  kookies

  We ate outside at redwood picnic tables under a huge live oak tree. Unfortunately there was a heavy infestation of oak moths that year so the Junior Aides were able to add an unexpected item to their menu, oak moth larvae. The wiggly little creatures seemed to hang from every leaf, and the lightest brushing against an over­hanging branch netted at least fifty of them on your clothes and in your hair, and naturally the odd one dropped into a sand witch or a dam burger. Some members of the class made fast and shrill departures.

  Marie Beals was undismayed. “It’s all good honest protein.”

  The oak moth larvae turned out to be the lesser of two evils associated with eating in the museum patio that summer. The other was Melanie.

  The name was well chosen since it comes from the Greek word for black, and Melanie was black indeed. Black as coal, black as night, black as ebony or jet, black, in fact, as the raven she was; black of feather, of foot, of bill, of eye, and most definitely, of heart.

  I was later told that Melanie had been found when she was about a month old, on Santa Cruz Island, some twenty-five miles offshore from Santa Barbara. Raised as a pet by a family who lived near the museum, Melanie spent her first year developing her wings and practicing the aerial acrobatics of her kind. She stayed close to home since she was fond of her adopted family and knew a good thing when she saw one. There was an additional reason: ravens are very scarce in our area. She was not tempted to join a pair of strong black wings tumbling and soaring and diving in the air, and no male voice, curiously softened and symphonized by love, called her away.

  It is almost an axiom that the more intelligent a creature is, the more ways he discovers or invents to amuse himself. By this standard Melanie was a genius. At the beginning of her second spring she found out what sport there was to be had on the grounds of the museum—people to laugh at her, animals to snap at her, caged birds to denounce her. There were little girls to howl if she merely, by the purest accident, pulled out a few strands of hair in an attempt to make off with a barrette or bobby pin, and little boys to shriek if she stole their pocketknives or poked them in the stomach while trying to determine if silver belt buckles were detachable. In all fairness to the children, I would like to draw the reader’s attention to the size of a raven. Melanie was two feet long, and with her wings spread, four feet wide, and her beak measured three inches in length and was one inch deep at the nostril. This is a lot of beak attached to a lot of bird.

  A good deal of Melanie’s attention was lavished on middle-aged matrons. She had no particular affection for them as such, but they happened to wear more jewelry than any other class of people. Earrings and necklaces, wristwatches, bracelets, jeweled pins and buttons—Melanie adored them all, not because she was female but because she was a raven. I have never heard a satisfactory expla­nation of why birds of this family find shiny objects irresistible. Perhaps there is no explanation that can be properly translated from ravenese into humanese.

  Melanie’s only legitimate jewelry consisted of a pink plastic name band on her right leg, which was meant to indicate to the general public that she was no ordinary bird. She occasionally chewed the band, not with any intention of getting it off—she could have accomplished this in short order with her powerful beak—but in a lazy, desultory way, like a bored teenager chewing gum in class.

  Melanie also had a weakness for nipping ankle socks. Her friends claimed she didn’t know that socks contained ankles or that the owners of same would object vociferously. A class of visiting schoolchildren was worth at least an hour of good clean noisy fun. Some of the noise Melanie supplied personally, since ravens are capable of making a wide variety of sounds. The cost of first aid equipment was running high and the number of excuses for Melanie’s conduct was getting low. The result was inevitable— the museum officials decided to banish Melanie from the grounds. As a member of the staff succinctly put it: “One of these days she’s bound to take a hunk out of somebody who doesn’t want to give a hunk.”

  The cooperation of Melanie’s adopted family was, of course, necessary. When Melanie’s misdeeds were spelled out to them, they professed great astonishment: “You can’t mean our Melanie. She’s as gentle as a lamb. There must be another raven around.”

  This was possible, but the family finally conceded that it seemed rather unlikely there would be another raven wearing on her right leg a pink plastic ankle band with the name Melanie printed on it. At any rate, Melanie was banished.

  Her departure caused many changes around the museum. Visit­ing classes of schoolchildren were oddly quiet and monotonous. A sudden shriek splitting the air conveyed none of the now-what? excitement of the Melanistic days. The explanation was usually quite dull: a lady had turned her ankle, a Junior Aide had tried to pet the porcupine, a little boy had fallen into the creek or out of a tree.

  The mynah bird, who had taken to using Melanie as a confi­dante, lapsed into a depressed silence and could not be coaxed into repeating the sentiment he had picked up in some mysterious pe­riod of his past:

  “You’re a stool pigeon, Mother!”

  Meanwhile, Melanie’s fame had spread and people from out of town arrived daily, demanding to see “that trained raven
,” and taking a dim view of the fact that they’d driven fifty or sixty miles for nothing more than a mynah bird that wouldn’t talk and a porcupine that couldn’t be petted.

  Melanie became, in absentia, a kind of folk heroine whose pres­ence had been unappreciated and motives misunderstood. The same people who’d complained most bitterly about Melanie’s con­duct now inquired after her health and hinted at her return. The children who’d screamed the loudest over her advances, now ve­hemently protested her banishment. Teachers who’d accused Mel­anie of disrupting their classes, ladies left with a single earring and Junior Aides with ankle scars—everyone wanted Melanie back. So back she came.

  For the first couple of days after her return Melanie was a changed character. Showing the modesty becoming a folk heroine, she received the extravagant greetings and compliments of her admirers with quiet dignity, and accepted tidbits of food gra­ciously, hardly even maiming a finger. Perched on the railing of the little bridge over the creek she watched with regal detachment the parade of brightly-colored bobby socks, and ponytails held in place by jeweled clasps. Her performance was so convincing that one patron accused museum officials of feeding her tranquilizers, or of doing away with the real Melanie and trying to palm off on the public an inferior substitute.

  It was Melanie herself who prevented this accusation from de­veloping into a full-fledged rumor. Her new role, in spite of the fact that she was so good at it, bored her. She was too intelligent and curious for the docile life. She missed the excitement of chil­dren racing for cover, the slamming of doors and the honking of horns and the blowing of whistles.

  On the third morning after her return, a group of young girls from an out-of-town boarding school arrived at the museum. The girls were in the charge of two nuns, both of whom wore prayer beads. For poor Melanie this was temptation enough, but there was a greater one, something quite new to her world: one of the girls had attached to the laces of her saddle shoes tiny silver bells that tinkled when she walked. The bells—their gloss, their move­ment, their enchanting sound—were too much for Melanie.

  The girls were strangers to Melanie and she to them. Sensing this, she chose surprise tactics. Without a shadow or a whisper of warning, she swooped into the middle of the class, croaking, lung­ing with her beak and flapping her huge wings. No two witnesses tell the same story about what happened after that, but stories agree that the scene ended with children scattering in all directions and Melanie soaring over the oak trees, carrying a silver bell in her beak while the mynah bird screamed after her: “You’re a stool pigeon, Mother! You’re a stool pigeon, Mother!”

  Darkness set in before the last of the children was finally lo­cated, so it was not surprising that two days later the museum received a sharp and rather uncharitable letter from the head of the boarding school. A meeting was held, at which three decisions were made:

  1. Melanie was Melanie, and any thought of reforming her was ridiculous.

  2. All schools should discourage girls from taking up non-sensi­cal fads like wearing bells on their shoes.

  3. Visitors to the museum should be asked, on entering the grounds, to remove all jewelry before it was removed for them.

  The preceding events were, of course, unknown to me when I first met Melanie. She introduced herself by landing, apparently out of nowhere, on the redwood table where Marie Beals and I were having lunch.

  Marie was delighted, I was somewhat less so. A raven in the air is one thing, a raven sharing a table with you is another. And to complicate matters, I didn’t even know what kind of bird Melanie was. To me she was simply the biggest, boldest and blackest I’d ever seen. For a full minute she stood motionless, with her eyes on me, like a vampire bat locating in advance the most vulnerable portion of the jugular vein.

  “It’s obviously somebody’s pet,” Marie said. “I wonder if it’s hungry.”

  Marie tossed a piece of bread on the ground. Melanie didn’t even bother glancing at it. Instead, she walked sedately toward my plate, removed a frankfurter and began to eat it.

  Marie watched placidly. “She needs plenty of protein.”

  “So do I. That’s my lunch.”

  “Ravens, as you probably know, are scavengers. They eat car­rion. So do we, if you come right down to it. A frankfurter is simply carrion that’s been cooked.”

  Viewed in this light, the loss of my lunch didn’t seem so bad.

  Marie, who turned nearly every occasion into a bird lesson, was explaining to me what distinguished the raven from the crow—the heavier beak, the wedge-shaped tail, the shaggy throat feathers. If the two species are seen side by side, the most obvious difference is one of size. But birds are seldom that cooperative, and anyway, using size as a means of identification is chancy. The far raven looks no larger than the near crow. (As an example of this deceptiveness I cite the experience of a friend of mine who was out on a condor survey with a Forest Service official. My friend was taken aback when the official pointed out as a distant condor—wing-spread, 8 ½ to 9 ½ feet—a not so distant turkey vulture—wing-spread, 6 feet.)

  The difference to look for, Marie said, is that of flight pattern: ravens soar like hawks, keeping their wings stiff and straight, while crows flap a great deal, and when they set their wings to glide, the wings are bent upward. Though the habitats of the two species may overlap, in California the crow generally prefers to roam in flocks through the more cultivated areas. The raven is more of a loner, and like many other loners he seeks a mountain fastness or the solitude of the desert.

  Melanie was no doubt surprised to hear this but her only com­ment was a hoarse, low-pitched Grub. She had finished my frank­furter, or cooked carrion, and was walking around the redwood table with the expectant air of a small boy at a circus: will the lion escape from his cage? Will the aerialist fall? Surely the bear will attack his keeper? Will the sword-swallower choke, the fire-eater burn, the elephants stampede?

  For Melanie none of these things would have been nearly so exciting as what actually happened. In an effort to put a more comfortable distance between Melanie’s beak and myself I stood up too abruptly and my purse fell off my lap, strewing its contents on the ground—wallet, comb, lipstick, checkbook, pillbox, and my keys for the house, the car and the safe-deposit box. The lipstick was in a gold case trimmed with a green glass emerald, the pillbox was turquoise enamel on copper and the five keys were attached to a silver dollar. It didn’t require more than two seconds for Melanie to decide which item she wanted. Before I even realized what was happening, my key ring was airborne. Up, up, up, over the toyon tree, over the oak, over the sycamore, and to all intents and pur­poses, out of my life forever.

  “Note the speed of a raven,” Marie said, “and its mastery of—”

  “Those are my keys.”

  “—air currents.”

  “I can’t get home without them.”

  “Ravens are what are known as static soarers, like the buteo hawks . . . Your car keys?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dear me, that is awkward. I was hoping you’d give me a lift as far as the courthouse.”

  Melanie had disappeared for a moment, but now she emerged from behind an enormous Monterey pine tree and took up a posi­tion on the very top of it. According to Marie, who was watching through binoculars, Melanie still had the key ring in her beak.

  “So far, so good,” Marie said. “However, she may have a cache up there—magpies and crows often have special hiding places for their treasures; perhaps ravens do, too. My climbing days, alas, are over.”

  “Mine haven’t begun.”

  “Well then, there we are, aren’t we?”

  There we were, and there we seemed likely to remain.

  By this time a small crowd had gathered, including a Junior Aide who told us a little about Melanie’s background, enough to convince me I’d better either call the garage or start walking. T
he idea of telephoning Ken occurred to me but was quickly cast aside. It is difficult for two professional writers living under the same roof to keep each other’s writing hours inviolate. But it must be done, and Ken and I had long ago worked out a system: he han­dles emergencies in the morning when I am writing, I handle them in the afternoon when he is writing. It was afternoon.

  At this point Melanie looked down, saw the size of her audience and decided to improve the show. With a flirt of her tail she sallied forth from the pine tree. Circling it once to make sure all eyes were on her, she dropped the key ring, did a complete somersault while it was falling, then swooped down and picked it out of the air. Catching a thermal updraft she repeated the performance half a dozen times, each time letting the key ring fall a little longer and a little further. I could almost feel my heart fall with it, but Marie took a more philosophical approach to the new turn of events: “At least it tends to dispel the theory that she has a secret cache in the tree, and that’s all to the good.”

  “I still don’t have my keys.”

  “Forget about them. Admire the bird’s performance.”

  Although it’s always somewhat difficult to admire a perform­ance put on at your own expense, I did my best.

  Since that day I’ve never seen any bird engage in such a compli­cated aerial game involving an object, though I’ve heard that golden eagles will play with stones in a similar fashion, and on a number of occasions I’ve watched them do barrel rolls while at­tempting to get rid of Swainson’s and red-shouldered hawks. Many birds drop and retrieve in the air, but the objects involved are usually food. I’ve seen ospreys and kingfishers go after fish that have escaped them, white-tailed kites after mice, jays and flycatch­ers and mockingbirds after insects. But only Melanie have I seen playing with a silver dollar and five keys.