The Birds and the Beasts Were There

by Margaret Millar

  The third week in October brought a varied thrush, shy, melan­choly cousin of the robin, to eat the ripening cotoneaster berries, and a Grace’s warbler which, unwarblerlike, perched for a long time in one place as if it were exhausted. It was considerably off course since it’s a bird mainly of the coniferous mountains of Arizona and New Mexico and the only previous sighting of the species in California dated back to 1881.

  A Steller’s jay and a mountain chickadee blew in on a wind­storm at the end of the month. We couldn’t have asked for a better study in contrasts, the affable little chickadee, for whom I cooked special pancakes, and the large belligerent jay whom I ended up chasing off the ledge with a broom.

  The jay’s name, Big Boy Blue, seemed inevitable—even the “frown” lines on his forehead were sky-blue. He decided soon after his arrival to convert the ledge into a private dining room and he went to work right away, announcing his intention in squawks so fierce that they either frightened or shamed the scrub jays into silence. He would take up his position in the tea tree, well hidden, and wait there quietly until the ledge had attracted a reasonable number of customers. Then he would swoop down with an ear-piercing shriek and fly low the entire length of the ledge, scattering birds in all directions. Ordinarily I don’t interfere in bird bicker­ings but the situation became serious when some of the smaller birds, fleeing in panic before Big Boy’s wrath, struck the window. Many were knocked unconscious and two were killed, and I was forced to begin chasing Big Boy off the ledge and out of the tea tree every time I saw him. In similar situations involving the bird world I have found one thing to be true: the bird invariably wins because he can concentrate all his attention on the problem and I have other things to do.

  The sight of me wielding a broom may have reminded Big Boy of Halloween but it certainly didn’t scare him. He simply waited until the doorbell or the phone called the witch back into the house, then he cleared the ledge as usual. Only once did he get his comeuppance and it wasn’t from me. A flock of about seventy-five band-tailed pigeons were perched in the tops of the eucalyptus trees waiting for the descent signal. It was given at the same moment that Big Boy decided to rid the ledge of his competitors. When the sky suddenly opened up and rained pigeons Big Boy must have thought his time of reckoning had arrived because he took flight like a blue bullet and we didn’t see him for the rest of the after­noon. But the next day he was back at his old tricks.

  Bribery may not be the best way to handle a bird but it’s more effective and less time-consuming than wielding a broom. I re­called an occasion when I went to the Museum of Natural History to check a bird and saw one of the Museum’s tame scrub jays hopping around the front desk in a welter of peanut shells. If scrub jays liked peanuts it seemed inevitable that Steller’s jays would, too. The museum jays had their peanuts shelled for them. I decided to remove just enough of the shell to show Big Boy there was a treat for him inside, then let him take over from there. The theory was that if we could keep Big Boy busy with some project of his own at the front of the house he would leave the birds feeding on the ledge at the back of the house unmolested.

  Jays, having voracious appetites, are highly adaptable to changes in food. The first day I put out some shelled and some partly shelled peanuts. The loose nuts Big Boy hauled away, two or three at a time—the maximum carrying capacity of his beak turned out to be five whole Virginia peanuts. Though he jabbed at the others he couldn’t dislodge them from their shells. Finally he flew down to the side of the road carrying a shell and began dashing it repeatedly on the concrete, the way scrub jays beat caterpillars on the ground to remove their unpalatable fuzz. Even­tually the peanuts rolled out. This method worked only as long as the shells were partly removed. Big Boy tried the same thing with peanuts whose shells were intact and nothing at all happened. The shells didn’t crack open because they were too resilient. Big Boy made a very funny picture beating them on the concrete and then hopefully searching the roadway for loose peanuts.

  He caught on pretty quickly, though, and changed his tactics. He would carry the shells to the garage roof, which was made of rough shingles and offered sure footing for him. Various crevices held the shells tightly while he jabbed holes in them big enough to allow him to get at the nutmeats. This gentle drumming punctuated the rest of our winter days. Hearing it we would be reassured that the smaller birds were eating unmolested and that Big Boy was flinging himself into his new hobby.

  When he departed in February, I missed his noisy company and looked forward to his return. Like many of the unusual birds of that unusual year, the green-tailed towhee, the mountain chicka­dee, the Grace’s warbler, Big Boy was a creature of the mountains. Other mountain species were seen elsewhere in Santa Barbara dur­ing late fall and early winter, a Clark’s nutcracker on Mission Ridge Road, a Townsend’s Solitaire in Montecito, a flock of moun­tain bluebirds in a field near Goleta slough. Of the seven species only the mountain chickadees have returned. And this is good news because it means that the drought of 1961, which brought the mountain species down to us, has not been repeated.

  There were other uncommon birds arriving that fall who made their visits yearly events. I have previously mentioned the yellow-breasted chat who comes at the end of August and remains until the end of September and who, during all that time, never opens his mouth except to eat bananas and grapes. It’s difficult to believe that this is the same bird whose springtime repertoire is so varied that many people, believe he is a true mimic like the mockingbird. If this were the case, the chats found in southern Alberta would have different sounds from the ones found in our Refugio Canyon because of the different kinds of birds and animals to imitate. I haven’t found this to be true.

  On the other hand, the mockingbirds that sing from our tele­vision antenna and the top of the neighbor’s sequoia tree are easily distinguishable by ear from those around the house where my bird-watching niece, Jane, lives. Her house, over the hill toward the sea, is in an area of open hills with few large trees. Jane’s mockingbirds imitate, as ours never do, the red-tailed hawks and ash-throated flycatchers and green-backed goldfinches, while the notes that characterize our mockers of the woods are missing, the scold of the titmouse and the acorn woodpecker, the lisp of the bushtit.

  On October 6, a white-throated sparrow arrived to spend the winter. Though Easterners are well acquainted with this bird he is rare in California and usually seen only at feeding stations. Two days later a lively little band of pine siskins flew in for a stay of two weeks. The comings and goings of these engaging creatures are usually described as erratic, yet every fall they appear here, darting in and out of the feed boxes and hopping and splashing in the birdbaths. So completely do they make themselves at home that it is hard for me to believe my eyes when I look out one morning and find them gone. Often in the case of migrating birds the main group will move on leaving a straggler or two behind. This never happened with the siskins, who arrived together, ate together, bathed together and left together. I am told that they sometimes carry their communality to the extent of nesting together in one tree, though I have no direct knowledge of this. Like most of our other guests that fall, they perform their most important function in the mountains: Santa Barbara is a nice place to visit but they wouldn’t want to love here.

  October also brought our first robins and cedar waxwings. In spite of the large number of berried shrubs on our property, coton­easter, toyon, eugenia and pyracantha, we have never had huge flocks of robins such as I’ve seen in nearby areas. That winter we were hosts to a pair of robins, one of whom, after Big Boy Blue was lured around to the front of the house with peanuts, tried repeatedly to take over the ledge. He didn’t succeed. Short-tempered and peremptory as he was, he lacked Big Boy’s substan­tial voice and personal force and as soon as be began driving the birds off one end of the ledge, they began congregating at the other end. Perhaps the explanation is simply that birds recognize mem­bers of the jay family as
their enemies. For all his pomposity the robin is a thrush, no stealer of eggs or eater of nestlings, and he was more of a nuisance than a threat to the other birds.

  The arrival of the waxwings presented an entirely different prob­lem. These inoffensive little creatures, gentle as silk, were respon­sible for more havoc among the other birds than the robins and jays combined. The trouble was caused by their numbers and their gregarious instincts. One waxwing on a birdbath or a food perch still leaves plenty of room for a purple finch, a slaty fox sparrow, a brown towhee and a couple of Audubon warblers. In the world of birds, however, a single waxwing is very rare and seen only at the beginning of the fall season when one is scouting an area in ad­vance, or at the beginning of the spring season when a crippled or diseased bird is left behind by the departing flock.

  A hundred waxwings on a ledge, fifty in a birdbath, ten on a doughnut, will drive non-waxwings away more effectively than the tactics of birds twice the size and a dozen times more aggressive. What it boils down to is a matter of room. When there is no more room, other species of birds will simply depart, but the waxwings keep on coming even if they have to land on each other’s backs. Instinct tells them to follow their leader and follow they must, usually with good results but often with disastrous ones. We have had a dozen strike a window in as many seconds, most of them fatally, this in spite of the fact that I was standing at the window, waving them away with a newspaper.

  Many similar events have made me a reluctant student of win­dow kills—which of the dozens of species around our house actu­ally hit the windows; what birds are killed, what ones are knocked out but survive, and what ones are tough enough to fly away uninjured, at least in any obvious way, and which birds are repeat­ers who have impaired faculties from previous strikes or other accidents.

  The species that fits every one of the above categories and has more strikes to its discredit than all the others combined, including the waxwings, is the mourning dove. Doves also account for the most fatalities, though the percentage of these is low compared to the great number of strikes. It is a simple matter to keep track of the number because birds of this family have a grey powdery coating on their feathers which adheres to any surface they touch. If a window of our house goes unwashed for a month it becomes a showcase for a parade of glaucous ghosts. More than a dozen outlines of doves can be counted, each as clear as a photocopy. Band-tailed pigeons rank second in number of strikes but do not leave such complete or such distinct impressions on the glass, only half a wing sketched here or a bit of head there.

  On any day in winter the mourning doves and band-tailed pi­geons make up about ten percent of the birds feeding on our ledge. When ten percent of the population is responsible for over ninety percent of the window strikes we must be concerned with the reason why. All birds are believed to have superb eyesight. Experi­ments with pigeons have shown that they can differentiate as many as twenty shades of color, and since their eyes are at the sides of their heads, they have a field of vision of about 340°; in other words, they can see everything in their environment except the space oc­cupied by their own bodies (Welty, The Life of Birds). In spite of all this I’m tempted to think that members of this family have some organic or functional weakness of the eye. (Perhaps I should explain at this point that the lighting in our front room is arranged so that no bird can mistake it for a fly through: when the north window is open, the south one is draped, and so on.)

  A few of the less serious window strikes involving pigeons and doves may be accounted for by their awkwardness in handling themselves at close quarters, landing or taking off. Most of the fatalities, however, occur when a bird, starting in another part of the canyon, comes at full speed toward our windows in what ap­pears to be nothing less than a suicide attempt. For some time we preserved on glass an example of this kind of strike. It happened in the fall of 1964. While talking to a friend on the telephone I saw a mourning dove fly out from the top of a eucalyptus tree about two hundred feet away. The bird’s flight was very fast and very direct, straight toward our window. It hit head on, its wings raised for the next beat that never came. The sound of the impact was so loud that my friend on the other end of the telephone thought it was some kind of explosion. Certainly death must have been instan­taneous, for the dove ricocheted into the heavy underbrush on the canyon slope, leaving behind on the window a perfect record of the last episode in its life.

  Of the ghosts on our glass this one was the clearest: feather and foot, head, beak and eyes—in fact, the outlines of its eyes, we discovered, were not outlines at all but the actual eyes themselves which had been jolted out of their sockets and adhered to the glass like glue. For several months we left that part of the window unwashed and while the eyes very gradually shrank in size, the rest of the dove’s memorial remained unfaded by sun, unerased by rain and fog.

  The speed of the bird’s flight indicated that it was attempting to escape man or hawk. But it had other and safer directions to take, and plenty of time to alter course. Why did this dove, and many others before and after it, fly directly to their deaths when a lift of just a few feet would have allowed them to clear both the window and the roof?

  Hermit thrushes and fox sparrows were responsible for a much greater percentage of window strikes than their small numbers would lead us to expect. Conversely, some species struck rarely or not at all. For seven months of every year there were as many Audubon warblers feeding on our ledge as there were house finches. It might reasonably be assumed that the finches, who spent their entire lives around buildings, would be sophisticated about windows, and that the tree-dwelling warblers would not. The op­posite turned out to be true. One Audubon warbler, an immature, died in this manner compared to dozens of house finches. In the winter of 1964–1965 we had seven kinds of sparrows at the feeding station—Lincoln’s, song, golden-crowned, white-crowned, Harris’, English and fox—and only the last named ever struck any of our windows. The record of the icterid family is even better: no strikes among the hundreds of cowbirds, red-winged and tricolor blackbirds, hooded and Bullock orioles. Jays, woodpeckers, mock­ers and thrashers also have perfect records.

  Young birds were more likely to hit the windows than older ones. That spring three baby grosbeaks struck, and only one sur­vived after about a twenty-minute period of semi-consciousness. The experts tell me, by the way, that when a bird is injured by a window strike it should be left strictly alone. Handling it, no mat­ter how gently, may result in a fatal stroke or heart attack caused by fear.

  During the past year we tried a system for preventing window kills which has worked very well for the smaller birds but has had no appreciable effect on the doves and pigeons. After the windows are washed on the outside we deliberately “spot” them, either with a hose or with one of the water pistols we keep around the house to discourage dog fights. The resulting stains mar the windows somewhat, but serve as caution signals for birds without interfering too much with the pleasure of watching them.

  As the month of October continued I began to notice not so much a decrease in the number of tanagers as a decrease in the number of trips I had to make to the market for grapes. By the middle of the month the females and immatures going through were drably dressed for travel and the few males had lost all trace of their red heads of springtime. On October 22, I counted only five tanagers, and the following day, none at all. A lone bird appeared November 5, either a late migrant arriving, or a bird who hadn’t been able to keep pace with his group and had come back for more rest and food. He stayed for two days. His departure marked the end of the tanager migration. It had covered a period of eighty-three days and involved countless birds. The word count­less is the only applicable one since we had no way of knowing which birds ate and departed, and which stayed for a day or two, or a week, or even longer.

  Without the tanagers the terrace looked strangely colorless and still. Grapes rotted and mildewed in the shade, and shriveled to raisins
in the sun. At the market I would be asked how all the tanagers were, and I would have to say I didn’t know, they had gone. Where? I wasn’t sure but the book said they wintered from Mexico to Costa Rica. Would they be back? Of course, I replied, and I believed it. Tanagers migrated every year, there was no reason why they shouldn’t visit us again the next fall and the one after. As a new birdwatcher, I had no way of knowing that what brought the tanagers our way in the fall of 1961 was an unusual set of circumstances which probably wouldn’t be repeated in our lifetime.

  The first reference I found to such a migration was in Birds of America, edited by T. Gilbert Pearson:

  The tanagers are in California every year, and every year they migrate to their nesting grounds in spring and return in fall, but only at long intervals do they swarm in prodigious numbers. Evidently the migration ordinarily takes place along the mountains where the birds are not noticed. It is possible that in some years the mountain region lacks the requisite food, and so the migrating birds are obliged to descend into the valleys. This would seem to be the most plausible explanation of the occur­rence—that is, that the usual line of migration is along the Sierra Nevada, but some years, owing to scarcity of food, or other cause, the flight is forced farther west into the coast ranges.

  A. C. Bent, in the tanager volume of his Life Histories of North American Birds, gives an account of a large migration in southern California, from April 23 to May 16 in 1896, and of another in 1903, in Pasadena, with the greatest number occurring the last three weeks in May.

  In Birds of California, W. L. Dawson mentions the spring of 1912 as a very unusual one, when the birds “fairly swarmed,” and “one could have seen a hundred adult males in the course of an afternoon’s drive.” In the next paragraph he tells of a lady in Montecito—the part of Santa Barbara where we live—who during that spring had an arrangement for feeding halved oranges to the tanagers and as many as twelve birds would feed at the same time. Dawson adds, “Never was a more distinguished array of beauty at a single function—not in Montecito even.” I think we did as well in 1961 but it was much too late to invite Mr. Dawson.