The Birds and the Beasts Were There

by Margaret Millar

  Time passed, the fogs lifted and the swifts passed on their way northward to their breeding grounds. All except one—our bird was still appearing every evening with astonishing punctuality. In the middle of May he was joined by another swift, presumably female. Where she came from is anybody’s guess—was she a late migrant? Was the meeting accidental? Or did he go looking for a mate and persuade her to accompany him to our canyon? At any rate we were delighted because there was no official record of the Vaux’ swift nesting in southern California and we had considerable hope of supplying one. It seemed easy enough. All we had to do was watch and see which hole in which dead tree the birds emerged from and returned to. Since these birds also nest in chimneys we would have to be chimney watchers, too.

  Every day, when the sun had set, I began my vigil, sometimes inside the house, sometimes outside, at the back, at the front, on the driveway. It hardly mattered, since the appearances and disap­pearances of these birds were like those of a magician’s rabbits. Suddenly they were there and just as suddenly they weren’t. Their speed, their unpredictable twists and turns and the number of hid­ing places available made constant observation impossible. I was lucky to get my binoculars on them for a fraction of a second.

  On July 19, a third swift appeared with the other two, and while I didn’t witness any feeding maneuvers, I was as certain as I could be under the circumstances that the pair had mated and this was their fledgling. During the following week a new ornithological rule emerged from my experience: it is just as easy to lose track of three Vaux’ swifts as it is to lose track of two. Right under my nose (presumably) the birds had mated, built a nest and raised a family and I still hadn’t the foggiest notion which dead tree or which chimney held the secret.

  My twilight vigils, covering a period of eleven weeks, had come to nothing of a positive nature, so I gave them up. Out of habit, however, I still glanced at the sky when the sun had set. During August and September I saw the Vaux’ swift on a dozen occasions, always just a single bird and probably the same one each time. On September 22, the Coyote fire started early in the afternoon and by sundown every schoolchild in Santa Barbara, Montecito and Goleta knew it was going to be a bad one. Many families living in the foothills were already packing their belongings in cars and trucks and borrowed trailers. Ken had the rainbirds going on our roof—these had been installed after the previous fire on the advice of the Montecito fire chief to all canyon dwellers—but the water pressure was dropping and the fire was racing toward us across the explosively dry mountains. I walked up the road to consult a neighbor about what we ought to do. As we stood watching the flames, the Vaux’ swift suddenly darted over our heads.

  “Did you see that?” my neighbor screamed above the roar of helicopters. “It must have been a bat.”

  It hardly seemed the time or place for a bird lesson, so I agreed that it must, indeed, have been a bat.

  We didn’t see the bird again that year. Vaux’ swifts are said to winter in the tropics and I have a notion that he headed straight for some nice, wet rainforest.

  The following spring the migrating Vaux’ swifts either missed us entirely, or, since the weather was unusually warm and clear, passed over us at a great height. We saw none of the birds at all until our friend of the previous year arrived back on April 25. He fell immediately into the same pattern, appearing out of nowhere to cross the darkening sky between the two largest Monterey pines, and becoming as regular a part of evening as the scent of star jasmine and the sound of May beetles striking the windows when I turned on the lights.

  This swift, then, was the bird I was waiting for when I learned firsthand of the caution of the great horned owls in the presence of gunfire. The swift showed up on schedule, stayed within eye range for all of five seconds and disappeared.

  I sat still, hoping for another glimpse of him and some inkling of where he was hiding out. My chances of finding a nest were con­siderably better than last year, since a great many of the dead trees in the area had been burned to the ground during the Coyote fire. Suddenly I heard what I thought was a shot. Then further up the canyon I saw a rocket-type firecracker rising in the air. Fortunately it was more crack than fire—it fizzled out at less than a hundred feet. Firecrackers are illegal in California and particularly dan­gerous in heavily wooded foothill areas, so I tried to determine the exact location of the explosion before reporting it to the fire de­partment. Suddenly I saw the male great horned owl swoop past our house at chimney height. He didn’t make a sound. About three minutes later the female followed him, also without a sound. Al­ways before when we’d seen the owls they had alerted us to their presence by calling to each other. That night, and every night for the next two weeks, though there were no more “shots,” the owls remembered the first one and passed through our canyon as mute as moths.

  Year after year Santa Barbara’s Christmas bird count would list one screech owl. Readers of Audubon Field Notes, where the Christmas-count results are published, couldn’t be expected to know that it was always the same screech owl. The little bird’s name was Hermie, which stood not for Herman or Hermione but for Hermit since no one was sure what sex he belonged to, though he was referred to as “he.”

  And a hermit he was indeed. Some years ago he established squatter’s rights to a four-inch tunnel that ran horizontally under the apex of the red tile roof of the Natural History Museum. This setup was so ideal that no mere chemical urge could compel him to share it with a partner. Or perhaps he’d already had a partner and lost her, and since screech owls mate for life, he was destined to spend the rest of his days alone. At any rate he made the best of things.

  Hermie’s quarters, warm and dry in the winter, cool in summer and secure from enemies, permitted him to have a rather lively social life for an owl. When he felt like fraternizing he would come to the entrance hole of his tunnel and sit in the sun and watch the people going in and out of the front door of the mu­seum. If they seemed particularly interesting he would watch with both eyes; if not, he would close one eye. Often he went to sleep entirely and at these times, without the glitter and movement of his eyes to draw attention to him, he looked like part of the building and even people who knew he lived there had trouble spotting him. He didn’t like too much attention. When a group of noisy school­children pointed at him or bird watchers trained their binoculars on him with too much interest he retreated with sour dignity into the fastness of his tunnel.

  The curiosity which can kill cats also kills many birds. This is what started Hermie’s trouble—though it was human ignorance that caused his death, as it does for so many wild creatures. Flying down to investigate some workmen who were putting in a new parking lot for the museum, Hermie got trapped in the wet black­top. One of the workmen, seeing Hermie’s struggles, killed him with a shovel “to put him out of his misery,” a phrase that can cover a lot of unnecessary killings. And Hermie’s was unnecessary. Waldo Abbott, now curator of ornithology at the museum, says that if the little owl had been brought to his lab, no more than fifty yards away, the blacktop could have been removed from his feath­ers quite easily and Hermie would still be occupying his penthouse.

  In heartening contrast to the shovel-wielding workman are the people like Gloria Forsyth, a friend of mine, who found a very young baby cliff swallow which had fallen out of its nest under the eaves of the Forsyth’s house. The experts whose advice Gloria asked about raising the tiny creature all told her the same thing: forget it, it’s too difficult to keep a baby swallow adequately sup­plied with insects. Gloria was not easily discouraged and she had, moreover, a steady source of food because she kept riding horses. For the next two weeks she could be seen at any time of the day walking around the corral, swatting horse flies, picking them up carefully from the ground with eyebrow tweezers and placing them in a little gold pillbox. Neighbors and passers-by must have received a distinctly odd impression but the swallow thrived, and the last Gloria saw of it, it
flew expertly off her forefinger toward the corral. Sic transit Gloria’s hirundo.

  There is something both absurd and awesome about the very tiny owls. The elf owl is the smallest and has the distinction of being the only member of the family in which the male is as large as the female—though at five inches it hardly seems to matter. The elf owl caught by a flashlight beam as he peers out of his hole in a saguaro makes a captivating sight, but it is the pygmy owl which intrigues me most. The size of a sparrow, he has the courage and skill of an eagle. He has been known to kill birds as large as a meadowlark, mammals as large as squirrels and reptiles a foot long.

  Pygmy is different from other owls in many respects. He does not share the gross eating habits of the larger ones who devour their victims, bone and feather, and fur and teeth, and regurgitate the indigestible parts in the form of pellets. Pygmy eats daintily (though not in quite the same manner as Tiny, the burrowing owl at the museum, who holds his food in one claw and lifts it to his mouth like a picnicker eating a chicken leg) and he leaves no pellets to betray his presence.

  There are other differences. Pygmy is unperturbed by the ap­proach and observation of people. He hunts by day and his flight is different from that of most owls, both in manner and sound. He makes a distinct noise as he swoops down on his prey because his wings lack the adaptation of nocturnal owls, the sound-deadening filaments on the feather tips. There has been some disagreement about whether this adaptation was intended to permit the night owl to sneak quietly up on his victims or to make it easier for him to use his sense of hearing to locate his victims in the dark. The latter seems more reasonable. It would surely be inconsistent on the part of nature to silence an owl’s wings to conceal his presence and do nothing about moderating his voice, which gives him away to every mouse in a meadow miles away.

  The pygmy owl is especially intriguing to me because, after years passed without one being reported in our area, Jewell Kriger and I found a pair nesting in Refugio Canyon. Refugio Canyon is perhaps best known to birders for its yellow-breasted chats, which can nearly always be found in May and June in the willow thickets along the stream. (The canyon is also known for its tarantula migration, an event not likely to appeal to many spectators.) Sometimes patience is necessary to see the chats. It certainly was on that day. We could hear them sounding off, first from one side of the road, then the other, but we couldn’t manage to get one in the binoculars. This spring repertoire of raucous noises contrasts sharply with the absolute silence of the chat who visits us every fall for a month to feed on grapes and bananas.

  Suddenly Jewell said in a rather surprised voice, “I didn’t know sparrows would eat mice . . .”

  Nor did I. I focused my binoculars on the limb of the dead oak tree she was looking at and the “sparrow” turned his head slowly and transfixed me with a pair of the brightest yellow eyes I’ve ever seen.

  The little owl showed not the faintest sign of nervousness or alarm at our intrusion. He casually resumed his business, which was not eating the mouse but removing certain inedible portions of it. I began to suspect that he had a mate nearby and that the mouse must be intended for her. He was in no hurry to let me know for sure. He picked fastidiously at the mouse’s carcass, turn­ing every now and then to look at Jewell and me in a manner that reminded me of an earnest biology teacher giving a lesson in dis­section and checking to see if his pupils were paying attention.

  Meanwhile we weren’t the only creatures to discover the pres­ence of the pygmy owl. Suddenly the air around us was filled with wingbeats and the sounds of avian alarm and anger, buzzes and cluckings and rattles and squeaks and squawks. The swallows ap­peared first and were most abundant, tree swallows and violet-greens and cliffs. One would swoop down on the owl so low it almost touched him, then rise in the air to let the next one swoop down, until there was a steady strafing of outraged swallows. Other birds hastened to join the action—Bullock’s orioles, Oregon juncos, ash-throated flycatchers, red-winged blackbirds, black-headed grosbeaks—until the place was a riot of sound and color and motion. Many of the birds were larger than the owl, but if he was disturbed he didn’t show it. He calmly continued his task with only the occasional blink to indicate his thoughts: Look at these idiots railing at me when I’m only doing my duty . . .

  After about ten minutes he flew to a hole fifteen or twenty feet up in the main trunk of a dead sycamore tree. He dropped the remains of the mouse over the edge of the hole so that its tail and hind legs hung down, then he let out a sound which was half-hoot, half-whistle, and flew down low, straight across the road, and out of sight. Except for a dozen or so swallows who followed him, the other birds dispersed and went about their business.

  We kept our binoculars focused on the hole in the sycamore and as we watched, the mouse seemed suddenly to come to life and start crawling over the edge into the hole, wagging its tail back and forth. It was an eerie sight indeed, even though one was aware that Mrs. Pygmy was the principal behind it. We waited, hoping she would show herself, but she didn’t. Many times on subsequent occasions I saw her yellow and black eyes peering out of the little round hole in the sycamore. She looked like a jack-o’-lantern set in the window of a tree house at Halloween. Her eyes, incidentally, appeared quite different from the male’s. Since she spent most of her time in the darkness of the nesting cavity, her pupils were greatly dilated and the narrow yellow rim of iris seemed to have been added as an afterthought by someone with a dab of leftover paint.

  Jewell and I decided to postpone finding the chats until another day so that we could hurry back to town and put the pygmy owl on the Rare Bird Alert.

  The R.B.A. was started in Santa Barbara in 1963. It works simply. People who sign up for it are given cards with a list of six or seven names and phone numbers. When they are contacted by the person whose name precedes theirs on the card they must contact the next person listed below. Thus, in as little as fifteen minutes, every eager bird-watcher in town can be informed of the whereabouts of a rare bird. There is one essential rule—the birds so found must not be molested or disturbed in any way.

  In certain other localities the R.B.A. has been sadly abused. Collectors for museums and universities have operated with such callous disregard for birds and birders alike that many expert bird­ers no longer report their findings to the R.B.A. This will continue to be the case, I am assured, until collecting is outlawed in the United States as it was some time ago in England when the English became aware that a little collecting here and a little collecting there added up to an awful lot of dead birds. Collectors actually exterminated one species of hummingbird, Loddige’s racket-tail, before naturalists had a chance to study the birds in life. Only about forty California condors survive in the world today, though there are 112 dead ones in public collections and nobody knows how many more in private collections. I think we can safely as­sume that very few of them died of heart attacks. But perhaps the prize for the most stupid act of collecting must go to the famous ornithologist who saw the last authenticated flock of Carolina parakeets in 1904 in Florida. There were thirteen birds in the flock and he shot four of them.

  Biologists themselves are becoming alarmed at the way many of their colleagues waste our natural resources. At the upper levels there is much unnecessary, even foolish, duplication in research. At the lower levels, class experiments all too often involve sense­less destruction of mammals, birds and marine life. I recently came across, in an ornithological journal, the report of a study of hybrid­ization between Baltimore and Bullock orioles as evidenced by differences in the amount of black and orange pigmentation. The birds could easily have been mist-netted, examined, banded for future observation and released. Instead, 623 orioles were col­lected—and this was for only one study among many done on the same subject.

  Biology, which means the study of life, has come more and more to mean thanatology, the study of death. Biologist Farley Mowat wrote of being “sorely puzzled by th
e paradox that many of my contemporaries tended to shy as far away from living things as they could get, and chose to restrict themselves instead to the aseptic atmosphere of laboratories where they used dead—often very dead—animal material as their subject matter.”

  To an increasing number of people, collecting is a dirty word.

  I would never have reported the pygmy owl on the Rare Bird Alert if I hadn’t been sure it was safe from collectors. Jewell made a note of the time of day, the mileage on the odometer, the species and height of the tree containing the nesting hole, and so on, while I hunted around for a marker to place on the side of the road. I found a section of board that had been painted red. This was a piece of good luck. (Every year there is talk of our local Audubon branch designing simple markers and distributing them to mem­bers who spend considerable time in the field. Nothing ever comes of it, probably because most of us have learned that you find the rare birds only when you’re not prepared for them.)

  Some members go out on just a few of the bird alerts, but there are others who will instantly drop whatever they’re doing and set out to wade through a marsh for a wood stork, climb a mountain for a white-headed woodpecker or go to sea in a dense fog looking for a Xantus’s murrelet.

  Perhaps the most difficult alerts to follow through are the warblers, since they are so tiny and so active. Easterners accustomed to seeing warblers in migration through leafless trees aren’t happy about having to locate our California birds in the dense foliage of live oaks and sycamores and eucalyptus. Many warblers reported on the R.B.A. are never seen by anyone but the original finder. Quite a few, however, are. A rare palm warbler, put out on the R.B.A. as seen “in Gaviota State Park, near picnic table No. 9; look low and watch for tail wagging,” stayed all fall, seldom ven­turing even as far as picnic table No. 10. A chestnut-sided warbler—a first record for Santa Barbara—spotted by the Hylands on a lemonade bush along the bridle trail in Hope Ranch, was found the following day and the day after by Nelson Metcalf and Ken and myself in the very same bush.