The Birds and the Beasts Were There

by Margaret Millar

  It was a summer of extremes. Along the shore the fogs were thick enough to stop traffic and virtually close the airport, yet a mile and a half crow’s flight away, in the foothills, we were having a heat wave. Santa Barbara’s heat waves are not publicly acknowledged since the official thermometer is down at the wharf. It is more or less amusing to sit in a 90° living room reading in the evening paper about how the rest of the nation sweltered while Santa Barbara remained “cool and comfortable with a midday high of 70°.”

  Officially recognized or not, the heat wave, and the drought that went with it, continued. Most of the streams had long since dried up, and ours at the bottom of the canyon had only a trickle of water left in it. This, plus the containers of water we’d put out, in various sizes and at various heights, attracted a great many birds since water was in shorter supply than food.

  The first tanager appeared on August 15, a male still wearing the brilliant red hood of his breeding plumage. I had never seen a western tanager before, and after I watched him drink and bathe and depart, I consulted the local checklist of birds. On the checklist then in use in Santa Barbara, the western tanager was marked as a local resident. Such a list is practically a bible to the new bird-watcher. Certainly I had no wish or reason to question it. So when the tanager appeared again the next day, with a couple of his relatives, I assumed that these were simply birds who lived in the area and were discovering our feeding station for the first time.

  The three tanagers, all of them males, sat in the tea tree eating grapes. Since the occasion in early summer when I first put out grapes as substitutes for cherries, every day I’d been fastening a small bunch of them in the tea tree. They were eaten by the house finches, California thrashers, mockers and hooded orioles, but not avidly. There were always some left over for the silver-grey rats that streaked up and down the tree after dark like ribbons of light.

  The tanagers seemed hungrier than the other birds. Perhaps they actually were, or perhaps the grapes were a particular treat—a child eating a plate of ice cream can look a lot hungrier than one eating a plate of spinach. At any rate the bunch of grapes was gone in no time. Though the slightest movement at one of the picture windows made the birds fly away, they came back immediately and hung around the tea tree, almost as if they were waiting for others to arrive.

  They were, and others did—a mixed group of adult and imma­ture males. I put out the last of the grapes I had on hand. When these were eaten, the birds turned to the other edibles in the tea tree: doughnuts, a banana, half a coconut shell filled with peanut butter and corn meal mixture.

  At that point Ken and I had no misgivings whatever. We were delighted to be hosts to such beautiful birds and we proved it by making a quick trip to the store for more grapes. The grapes were a little over-ripe and on the way home a large number of them fell off their stems into the bottom of the paper bag. I washed them all thoroughly, as usual, wondering how to serve loose grapes to birds obviously accustomed to picking their own. The tanagers were wild creatures, easily alarmed, quite the opposite of the tame and trustful hooded orioles, though the females of these two species look quite similar to the untrained eye. I doubted that the tanagers would come down to the ledge to gather loose grapes so I had the idea of impaling the grapes on the twigs of a two-foot plastic tree we’d bought the previous Christmas to serve holiday delicacies to guests. I took the tree out of storage. It was still going to feed guests; they would merely be of another kind.

  I fastened the tree to the far end of the porch railing. When its crystal-clear boughs were trimmed with blue and green grapes it looked very enticing. The birds agreed. It was picked clean within half an hour. I put out a fresh supply and the same thing happened again, in even less time. As the week ended I began to realize that I had spent the greater part of it sticking grapes on a plastic tree.

  I had also succeeded in putting a large dent in my food budget. The band-tailed pigeons were a serious enough problem but at least it was relatively easy to fill a hopper with grain, and the grain used, milo, cost only a little over four dollars for a hundred pounds. Grapes, which had to be tied with twine or fastened with pipe cleaners or impaled on plastic twigs, caused considerably more trouble and expense. Nor was the situation likely to improve. Later in the season grapes, if they were available at all, would be prohibitively priced.

  I will make no attempt to estimate our tanager population as the month of September ended. I’ll simply confess that I could no longer afford to buy enough grapes to keep the birds fed and I was reduced to asking for discards from the various markets to supple­ment the grapes I bought. This meant at least one, and often two or three trips a day checking produce departments and being ingra­tiating to store managers. Patience is not one of my virtues, so I am astonished, on looking over my records, to find the following autumnal note:

  “The season for grapes is almost over. When I think of the hours I’ve spent lugging the things—since August 15—and putting them out in the trees, I begrudge not one minute of them.”

  Perhaps happiness is a thing called feeding birds.

  Meanwhile the tanagers kept coming. The majority of the new arrivals were females and young males, and traveling with them was the occasional Bullock oriole and hooded oriole, the whitish belly distinguishing the former species from the latter. Among the tanagers themselves there was considerable fighting, frontal jabs and pecks on the rump, and a lone male trying to feed with a group of a dozen females was promptly given the bum’s rush.

  Watching the tanagers in the tea tree was a little like watching a movie made in the early twenties, because there was no sound. The birds arrived, ate, drank, communicated, fought and departed without uttering a note. It seemed unnatural to us, accustomed as we were to the forceful comments of the acorn woodpeckers, the scoldings of the wrentits and the bold exposés of the scrub jays. Our tanagers were as silent as color. A year and a half was to pass before I heard one sing and then it was in the mountains near Flagstaff, Arizona, and I mistook the song for a robin’s. W.L. Dawson, whose translations of bird songs I find irresistible, writes the tanager’s thus: piteric whew, we soor a-ary e-erie witooer. Amen.

  As the weeks passed the majority of female and young male tanagers over adult males constantly increased. If, as the checklist claimed, the birds were resident in our area, what was happening to all the adult males? I began to suspect that the checklist might be wrong and that the birds we were feeding were not the same ones over and over but were different groups stopping to eat and rest for a day or two before moving on. This would explain why they never became any tamer or more friendly toward us.

  A phone call to the Museum of Natural History confirmed my suspicion. While the western tanager has been recorded here every month of the year, it is far more commonly known as a migrant. The spring migration begins as early as the second week in March, and the fall migration goes on until the end of October, though the peaks are mid-April to mid-May, and the last three weeks of Sep­tember. A few pairs stay to breed in the lowlands but the majority favor the pines and firs of the upper altitudes, as do the hepatic tanagers. The other two species of tanager that migrate to the United States from the tropics both prefer lower altitudes, the summer tanager keeping pretty much to the cottonwoods along streams and the scarlet tanager to oak trees.

  At our feeding station we have learned to tell at a glance whether a particular tanager is remaining for a while in the area or whether he is a migrant. The bird which has grown accustomed to the station will grab a grape and fly off the way our permanent residents, the mockingbirds, do. Probably, like the mocker, he is aware of the stiff competition and prefers his meals cafeteria style. The migrating bird, on the other hand, usually stays and eats, restaurant style, in the manner of the black-headed grosbeaks.

  The rather belated discovery that our tanagers were migrants did nothing to alleviate the problem of keeping them all fed. Oc­tober arrived. Most of th
e summer birds had left, the flycatchers and swallows, the grosbeaks and orioles, the Wilson and yellow warblers and the chat; and some winter ones had already arrived, the white-crowned and golden-crowned sparrows, Audubon’s war­blers, hermit thrushes and pine siskins. Still the tanagers kept com­ing. My hospitality had deteriorated considerably—the plastic tree was long since taken down, scrubbed and stored away for the next Christmas, to serve less greedy, less numerous guests. Now I sim­ply hurled the grapes by the boxful onto the terrace, unwashed, some mouldy, some brown with rot.

  It was in October that we became acquainted with Richard the rat—in fact, it might be said that in a roundabout way the tanagers introduced us to him.

  We have a wide variety of wildlife in our canyon, but at that point we had seen little of it beyond the rats in the tea tree. There were clues that couldn’t be overlooked, however. Every morsel of food left at night on the ledge or terrace was gone by morning. Sometimes we caught a whiff of musk or there was a sudden rustling in a tree with no wind to explain it. On half a dozen occasions we found the ceramic birdbath on the lower terrace overturned. The last time it broke, and we replaced it with one that was heavier and not so high, and beside it we put a large saucer and filled it with water. I know now that many wild creatures were watching our house every night, familiarizing themselves with us and our dogs and our various routines.

  Every wooded canyon attracts rats, and the way the great horned owls haunted our particular canyon led us to believe we had more than our share. The rat we called Richard was not just a member of the pack. He was different, a loner. That he had a splendid reason for being a loner we didn’t discover for some time.

  While the other rats were scurrying up and down the tea tree as soon as the sun set, Richard’s scene of action was the cotoneaster tree growing beside the porch outside my office. Here I had exper­imented with hanging half a coconut shell as a sunflower seed feeder for the finches and titmice. I figured that the voracious scrub jays would find it impossible to land on the shell and so the smaller birds would get their fair share for a change. I was partly right: the jays found it impossible to land on, but they didn’t find it impossible to try to land on, and their efforts made the shell toss and pitch and bounce and rock so vigorously that within five min­utes there wasn’t a seed left in it. I abandoned the project and the coconut shell remained empty until Richard discovered it.

  I saw him for the first time one night when I was working late. The sky was cloudless, the moon almost full and I could make out the coconut shell in the cotoneaster tree, swaying gently on its wire. Two things were wrong with the picture—first, there wasn’t enough wind to fret a feather; second, I saw hanging from the bottom of the shell what appeared to be another length of wire which hadn’t been present in the afternoon. Curious, I turned the beam of my desk lamp on the tree. Richard was curled up in the coconut shell, eyes closed, tail hanging straight down. His con­science must have been clear indeed because even when I called Ken and the two of us went right out on the porch, Richard didn’t wake up. There was something moving about this wild little crea­ture trusting us enough to go to sleep in such an exposed place. There was something mighty suspicious about it, too, though we didn’t think of it at the time.

  The following night Richard was back again for another long, deep sleep. He fitted so neatly into the coconut shell that it might well have been constructed especially for him. I was reminded of all the old movies with tropical settings provided by a potted palm, an imitation cobra and a couple of wicker chairs, the winged and hooded kind that sort of wrap around you or at least meet you halfway. In one of these chairs the rubber planter or civil servant or visiting cad would doze off after a few belts of brandy. The coconut shell bore some resemblance to such a chair, but Richard bore none at all to a rubber planter or civil servant or even visiting cad, and I couldn’t figure out why I was reminded of the old movies. To many people sounds are more evocative than sights—“Darling, they’re playing our song”—and smells more evocative than either sight or sound. Probably the novelty of the whole business dulled my sense of smell because it wasn’t until the end of the week that I became aware of the strange mixture of odors out on the porch. Half the mixture was what you might expect at a busy feeding station, the rest was definitely not.

  We were experimenting with a flashlight to see just how much it took to wake Richard up. He didn’t respond to light at all, and didn’t open his eyes even when Ken jiggled the coconut shell up and down and back and forth. Richard had either a weak survival instinct or an optimistic nature, since the area had both bobcats and domestic cats, as well as great horned owls. The odor on the porch was particularly strong that night and not unpleasant, in fact, a little bit like wine.

  “Wine,” I said. “Wine.” I pointed at our unconscious guest. “He’s not tame, he doesn’t trust us, he’s not just sleeping—he’s dead drunk. Stoned.”

  “That’s impossible. Where would he get any wine?”

  “I don’t know. But he got it.”

  We let the situation go at that for the night, since neither of us was sure how a drunken rat would react to being suddenly awak­ened and evicted.

  An investigation the next day revealed the picture. The coconut shell, which contained a few seeds and bits of rotting grapes, was serving as Richard’s winery. Whatever grapes the tanagers had left on the terrace to ferment, Richard had been gathering up and depositing in the coconut shell. If wine bottled for humans is aged by the year, Richard’s must have aged by the minute. But it had the same effect. For a certain period every night Richard forgot the cares and casualties of life and dreamed of a world where streets were not paved with gold but upholstered with cat pelts and owl feathers.

  Unlike many of his human counterparts Richard was harming nothing but his liver. Still, some changes had to be made. The smell on the porch was increasingly bad—even sober rats tend to be a bit casual in their personal habits—and I found myself open­ing my office windows less and less. Two steps were agreed on: more careful selection of grapes for the lower terrace and removal of Richard’s coconut shell winery to a place farther from the house and less exposed to his enemies.

  We don’t know what happened—whether one or both of these steps mortally offended Richard or whether he succumbed to cirrhosis or less subtle enemies—but we never saw him again, or if we saw him he was merely part of the group and indistinguishable from the rest. The bougainvillaea has long since grown up over the deserted winery.

  Richard and the tanagers were only the beginning of what was to be a most unusual fall and winter. New bird-watchers don’t know what to expect and are unable to tell whether or not some­thing is out of the ordinary. I accepted everything that happened as something that had doubtless happened the previous year and would happen again the following year. When Silk and Satin, the pair of phainopeplas that had nested in the pepper tree, departed in the fall I fully expected them to return the next spring. They’d practically been household pets, spending a great deal of time outside Ken’s office windows, eating the berries from the night­shade and the bugs from the tomato plants. The nightshade ber­ries, the bugs, the pepper tree all remain, but the phainopeplas have not come back.

  On September 26 a green-tailed towhee arrived, the first of the mountain species to visit us in the lowlands that autumn. We knew him only by his picture in the field guide and were delighted at the lordly way he kept his head feathers raised so that he seemed to be wearing a bright cinnamon crown. The brown towhee, too, raises his crest but not nearly so noticeably or so often. Green-tail stayed for a week. Perhaps because he was out of his element he acted in a much shyer manner than others of his family we’ve since seen in the mountains. He kept to the lower terrace, skulking in and out of the wild blackberry vines and poison oak. We never saw him fly. The green tail, by the way, figures less prominently in the living bird than it does in the scientific name given to it, chlorura chl
orura, which is Greek for green tail green tail.

  Overlapping the visit of the green-tailed towhee was a male Scott’s oriole in full lemon-and-black plumage. Once again the scene was the lower terrace, where we had arranged the birdbath fed by a continuous drip from a hose. Such a drip may have seemed like a waterfall to the oriole since he is a desert bird rarely found in our region. We very infrequently see Bullock’s or hooded orioles near the birdbaths, perhaps because their diet of insects, fruit and flower nectar provides them with sufficient liquid. But the Scott’s oriole seemed fascinated by water. He perched on the rim of the birdbath or stood under the drip from the hose for long periods of time. Though this species is noted for its persistent and beautiful singing, our guest was as silent as the tanagers whose grapes he shared for four days.

  Many of the birds that visit us are equally quiet. They arrive in the fall, their families raised and songs sung, and depart again in the spring before new songs rise in them. Audubon warblers are among our most abundant winter visitors, yet we must go high into the mountains to hear one sing. This is true of other species. On a June morning in Banff National Park I discovered that the new song I was listening to came from an old friend, the ruby-crowned kinglet, whose ordinary winter rattle we hear from nearly every oak tree. And it was at Jenny Lake in the Grand Tetons where I heard my first hermit thrush sing. Everybody knows the robin’s song—except the people who’ve stayed in Santa Barbara all their lives. (At least one pair of robins has attempted to correct this situa­tion by nesting in a park beside the Woman’s Club for the past three years.)

  Two of our winter visitors, on the other hand, try to make up for the rest. The white-crowned and golden-crowned sparrows sing every day they are here, at dawn or at dusk, singly or in duet, from tree and thicket and field. To me this is the sound of the California winter, the clear sweet sparrow songs that seem to be rejoicing that our winter is only a pretend one and spring and summer never really leave.