The Birds and the Beasts Were There

by Margaret Millar

  The second pigeon feeder had a trough placed between two pine trees some distance from the house, and could accommodate twenty pigeons. Almost as soon as Ken had driven in the last nail, we began to learn of the existence of an ornithological principle new to us: people with a six-pigeon feeder have twenty pigeons, people with a twenty-pigeon feeder have fifty, and for people who have two feeders, a ledge and a charge account at the feed store, the sky’s the limit—unless nature steps in and sets a limit of her own. And that is what happened next.

  The conclusion of the bird course hadn’t meant the end of my association with Mr. Rett and Marie Beals. Both had been to our house to see the bird-feeding setup, Marie and I went birding together whenever possible, and I frequently visited the Museum of Natural History for advice and information from Mr. Rett. On one of these occasions he asked me if Ken and I had been coming across any dead mourning doves or band-tailed pigeons in our area. Two doves had been brought to the museum, one dead and the other greatly emaciated and unable to eat. Autopsies had in each case revealed a large growth in the throat caused by a protozoan parasite, trichomonas gallinae. Birds so afflicted were unable to eat but they kept trying and regurgitating, thus passing the parasite on to others, especially at a feeding station. He advised me to be on the lookout for dead or emaciated birds, and if I found any, to suspend feeding operations immediately in order to prevent a serious out­break of trichomoniasis.

  I didn’t like the idea of suspending feeding operations. It seemed to me that a well-nourished bird would be more resistant to disease and that a bird already infected would be even more dependent than usual on a steady food supply and lots of fresh clear water. Closing down the station would be a little like closing down a hospital because people were getting sick. Mr. Rett admitted that he’d never witnessed an actual epidemic (or rather, epizootic) outbreak of trichomoniasis, but he’d received government pam­phlets warning of such a thing and advising people to beware. I assured him that we would beware.

  As the week progressed there were manifest indications that we were losing some of our pigeons: cracked corn and milo left un­touched on the lower terrace and in the trough between the pines, fewer and scantier gatherings of the clan in the eucalyptus trees, the sounds of partying more sober and subdued. We found no dead birds but this was not surprising since much of our area is a jungle of underbrush. Here a dead or dying bird could lie undetected or be eaten by a cat, a sharp-shinned or Cooper’s hawk, or a turkey vulture. Whatever the cause, we were rapidly losing our pigeons.

  The following Monday, when I went down to scrub out the drip bath, a bandtail was waiting for me on the terrace. He watched my approach without alarm, making no effort to move away or take cover. When a wild creature departs from its usual behavior pat­tern like this, you can be pretty sure it’s sick; its survival instincts are not operating. The bird was not emaciated. Frequently on our winter beach walks Ken and I come across oil-soaked and grounded scoters, grebes, gulls and loons. Our friend and fellow birder, John Flavin, who has rescued, cleaned, fed and put back into circulation any number of these creatures, taught us how to pre­dict with some accuracy a bird’s chance of surviving the various steps of this difficult treatment. If the breastbone appears very sharp it means the bird hasn’t eaten for a long time and is a poor risk.

  Our bandtail’s breastbone appeared to be well fleshed. I kept the bird under surveillance all morning. Mostly he dozed in the sun, sometimes he picked up a few grains of milo and ate them with no sign of difficulty in swallowing. By noon he was dead.

  This was the first bird we lost at our feeding station and it was a blow to me. I had fallen into the habit of accepting the California sun as a fetish that would dissolve disease and hold death in abey­ance.

  I had to drop in at the veterinarian’s that afternoon to pick up a case of the special diet my Scottie needed, so I decided to take the bandtail with me and find out what had caused its death. If an epidemic was about to start I wanted to be ready for action, pref­erably immediate and drastic.

  The vet, a soft-spoken, pleasant man, was surprised when he opened the carton containing the pigeon—and not one hundred percent delighted. “What am I supposed to do with it?”

  “Find out why it died, whether it had trichomoniasis or not.”

  “Good grief, what’s that?”

  I repeated what Mr. Rett had told me about trichomoniasis. The vet, while examining the pigeon briefly, said he didn’t know very much about avian diseases, except those affecting domestic species like parrots, budgerigars and canaries, but that the bandtail ap­peared to be young, uninjured and well nourished. This ruled out old age or accident as the cause of death, as well as trichomoniasis.

  I said, “Are you positive?”

  “There’s no sign of a swelling in the throat.”

  I had gone into the vet’s office all set to fight an epidemic and I was not about to leave again without one to fight. “But it could be something equally serious that the other birds might catch?”

  “Could be. Diseases caused by bacteria or viruses are usually communicable.”

  Bacteria and viruses were more along my line than protozoan parasites, and I warmed to the subject: “What would you do if, for instance, you had a flock of homing pigeons and wanted to prevent the spread of a disease?”

  “Well, if there was any urgency about it, I’d give each of them an intramuscular shot of antibiotics.”

  The thought of trying to catch several dozen wild pigeons and administer an intramuscular shot of antibiotics to each of them was enough to dampen the enthusiasm of even the keenest epi­demic fighter. “What if the urgency wasn’t so great?”

  “I’d dissolve the stuff in their drinking water.”

  “Suppose they didn’t like the taste and refused to drink it?”

  He said he didn’t know if it had any taste but for the sake of science—and a three-dog client who paid her bills promptly—he would find out. He brought from his supply cupboard a plastic bag containing a pink powder. He mixed a little powder in some water, drank it and declared the stuff was delicious and he felt better already. He put the bandtail back in the carton and closed the lid.

  “I’m leaving town for a couple of days so I won’t be able to per­form an autopsy right away. But I’ll do it as soon as I return. My secretary will call you when there’s something definite to report.”

  “The bandtails could all be dead by then.”

  “If you’re worried, take along some of the powder. If they’re sick, it’ll help, if they’re not, it won’t hurt.” He wrote the mixing instructions on a piece of paper and gave it to me.

  I was halfway home before it occurred to me that getting wild pigeons to accept an antibiotic solution in place of water might be almost as difficult as giving them an intramuscular injection. Our bandtails, unlike the hypothetical homing pigeons I’d mentioned to the veterinarian, were free. They had choices: come or go, take it or leave it. With their swift, direct flight they could range many miles during a day, and if our birdbaths contained a new mixture instead of water, they didn’t have to drink it. There were lots of other birdbaths, and a few creeks which were still flowing, however sluggishly.

  We had some things working for us though. The first was food: the range of the birds was restricted by their desire to stick fairly close to their source of supply, especially of milo. This was their favorite food, more because of its size and shape than its taste. One of nature’s economies was not to bother providing pigeons with much sense of taste because they bolt their food. It goes down the esophagus and into the crop with such speed that even the most sensitive taste bud wouldn’t know what hit it.

  The second factor in our favor was habit. Like people, birds develop habit patterns. The bandtails had taken a particular fancy to the drip bath on the lower terrace and to a very large ceramic saucer we kept on the ledge. We let the other birdbaths go dry a
nd substituted, for the smaller birds to use, tin pie plates which the pigeons would only tip over if they tried to stand on them. In the drip bath and the ceramic saucer Ken put the antibiotic solution. The arrangement worked very well. Evidently pigeons’ discern­ment of color is no more highly developed than their sense of taste, for right from the beginning they treated the pink mixture with the foam on top as if it were the purest water.

  For the balance of the week the bandtails drank, bathed in and waded through antibiotic. (So did a lot of the other birds, includ­ing Houdunit, the brown towhee, who spent a great deal of time breaking the bubbles with his beak.) Keeping the containers full was quite a job, but we had the satisfaction of seeing that the flock was no longer on the decrease. It had leveled off at about fifty bandtails—all of whom looked healthy, or at any rate not sick. Meanwhile we heard nothing from Miss Ames, the vet’s secretary, who was supposed to call us. On Friday I decided to call her since our supply of the antibiotic wouldn’t last through the weekend. I asked her if I could pick up some more of the stuff.

  She hesitated for a moment. “Are you sure you need more? You probably don’t realize how expensive it is. I’ve been making out the bills and just the amount you’ve already used is costing you eleven dollars.”

  Miss Ames’s sudden concern for my bank account was unex­pected, and when I thought of the whopping bills she’d cheerfully sent me in the past, downright ominous. “Something happened, Miss Ames?”

  She admitted that something had happened which probably wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been Tuesday, and if the doctor hadn’t been on the point of departure, and if I hadn’t put the pigeon in a box. “The doctor was leaving just as the rubbish collectors were coming up the driveway for the Tuesday pickup. I was busy in the front office admitting a pair of Schnauzers to board. I thought I heard the doctor say something about refrigerating a pigeon, but by the time I got the Schnauzers settled, I couldn’t find any pigeon . . .”

  Our bandtail had truly been collected.

  We never found out what had killed the pigeon. We did learn, a year later, however, what had happened to many of his relatives and friends that autumn.

  The following spring and summer brought a sharp increase in the number of bandtails at the feeding station. Some were adults, males and females identical; some were young, easily recognized by their lameness and the lack of a white crescent on the nape of the neck. Then, in early fall, we began to notice the same signs as we had the previous year. Corn and milo were left untouched in the feeders and on the ledge. There were fewer and quieter gather­ings of the clan in the eucalyptus trees. Approximately half of our pigeons departed, but no viruses, bacteria or protozoan parasites were involved.

  They migrated.

  Many volumes have been written on the migration and homing ability of birds. An account of Morgan, the pig-headed pigeon, will add little to the scientific body of evidence, but as a study in determination Morgan’s story deserves telling.

  He appeared one late winter in the backyard of Mary and Tom Hyland, who lived on the north side of Santa Barbara. The neigh­borhood at that time was new, with the shrubbery only half grown and the trees just getting started. In order to compensate for this, the Hylands had gone to great lengths to attract birds.

  For birdbaths Tom had arranged a series of saucers, graduated in height and size, the one at the top overflowing into the one below, and so on. Every shrub, tree and flower had been planted to provide various kinds of birds with food, nesting sites or shelter. Even a weed, tree tobacco, was included because hummers and orioles loved its sweet yellow flowers. There were feeders every­where, for sunflower seeds, for the smaller grains, for bread, for raisins and apples and oranges. Just beyond the yard was a bar­ranca left in its wild state and filled with scrub oak, elderberry, toyon, ceanothus and sycamore trees growing right out of the creek bed. (A birder in our part of southern California can spot creeks a mile away by looking for stands of sycamores. In the dry season this is necessary since the presence or absence of water usually means the presence or absence of birds.)

  On my first visit to the Hylands’ backyard I came upon a scene of eerie stillness which, at a feeding station, always indicates the presence of danger. The baths and feeders were all empty, and not a twig moved or a leaf stirred.

  I soon found out why. Sitting on a fence post waiting for a piece of action, or rather of the actors, was a sharp-shinned hawk. Its plumage marked it as immature, its size as a female. The only other bird in sight was the pigeon, Morgan, on the roofed perch Tom had built for him just outside the living-room door. Even without the hawk’s juvenal plumage as a guide, I’d have estimated both birds to be very young. An adult pigeon would have had sense enough to remove himself, and an adult sharpshin, espe­cially the much larger, stronger female of the species, would have almost surely attacked. There was other evidence, later on, that when Morgan arrived in the Hylands’ backyard in February, he was very young.

  He was certainly very hungry. He ate grain out of Tom’s hand while Mary looked on with mixed feelings. The pleasure of seeing a hungry creature eat was marred by the knowledge that pigeons attract pigeons. There were already a great many in the neighbor­hood and she had been trying to keep them away from the feeders so they wouldn’t drive away the smaller birds, especially the white-throated sparrow which had recently arrived. The white-throated sparrow is a rare winter visitor here, and unlike his common cous­ins, the whitecrowns and goldcrowns, he is almost never spotted except at a feeding station. Mary wanted him to stay so that her fellow birders would be able to see him.

  Perhaps our world is more interesting because so many of our decisions are based on emotions rather than common sense. A friend of ours who breeds dogs tells us that when the time comes to sell a litter, she can bear it only if the pups haven’t been named. I have found this true about birds, too. The death of Old Crip, the departures of Li’l Varmint and Big Boy Blue are more poignant and memorable because these birds were not just a purple finch, a Tennessee warbler and a Steller’s jay—they were our birds and they’d become ours because we’d named them. It may have been the immediate naming of Morgan that made his staying a sure thing.

  “He reminds me of Bob Morgan,” Tom said as the pigeon fed out of his hand.

  So Morgan he became and as Morgan he remained.

  He was no beauty—his plumage could be described as white mottled with black or black mottled with white—but he was faith­ful. Though I’ve seen geese used as watchdogs, Morgan is the first pigeon I’ve known to assume this role. There was very little traffic in the vicinity of the Hylands’ house, since it was the next to last one on a dead-end street, and perhaps this was why Morgan as­sumed that that end of the street belonged to him. He would perch on top of the chimney or the telephone pole, moving his head back and forth as our bandtails do when they’re curious. Any approach­ing car or pedestrian, any dog or cat ambling past on the way to the barranca, Morgan would challenge with a kind of warning grunt, “Who? Who?”

  Mary and Tom always knew when someone was coming. The baying of hounds couldn’t have sounded a more effective alarm than Morgan’s rather soft, ominous question, “Who?”

  He had other noises, among them a typical coo which he used to communicate with the other pigeons in the neighborhood. At first the Hylands translated this cooing as an invitation to the other birds to come for dinner or at least drop in for a friendly visit. As time went on, however, they were forced to amend the translation.

  Human beings with no way of interpreting an animal sound have to judge its intent and meaning by its effect. For example, let’s picture two men standing on a city street. One of them whis­tles and a cab stops in front of him; the other whistles and the pretty girl passing him blushes or smiles. Without any analysis of pitch or tone, the girl and the cab driver know perfectly well what each whistle means and so does everyone else. If you need proof of this, try using the
wrong whistle next time you need a cab.

  The Hylands eventually agreed on the translation of Morgan’s pronouncements from the telephone pole: “Listen, you guys, I’ve got a good thing going here. You can come over and look, but don’t louse it up by staying.”

  The other pigeons and doves did indeed come over to look, and some even attempted to use the birdbath and steal a few grains of food. When this happened Morgan flew into a terrible rage. He paced back and forth on his perch in a frenzy of activity, flapping his wings, puffing out his feathers, inflating and deflating his throat, from which emerged a weird wild mixture of grunts and clucks. It is no tribute to the brain power of the other pigeons that they got the message and took off.

  We have all seen animals exhibit anger in ways that are quite nonhuman. The dog snarls and his hackles rise, the bull lowers his head and charges, the cat spits, the porcupine bristles. But I never expected to see an angry pigeon. Certainly I didn’t imagine that an angry pigeon would look so ludicrously similar to an angry person—the pacing up and down and flailing of arms, the heavy breath­ing and the wild incoherent speech. To this day I never see a person in a fit of rage without thinking of Morgan.

  That first year Morgan fitted smoothly into the Hylands’ routine. He guarded the premises and kept other pigeons away, he followed Mary around as she worked in the garden and he superintended Tom washing the car. As summer progressed and the weather grew warmer, Morgan spent the hottest part of the day in the house, sleeping beside the heirloom clock on the ledge of the brick fire­place, or up on the cornice above the living-room drapes.