The Birds and the Beasts Were There

by Margaret Millar

  Marbled type—

  Sides have a stripe.

  Xantus by name—

  Very plain.

  My mnemo for the ancient murrelet is different from any of the others in that it’s in the first person, as if I unconsciously knew, when I made it up, that this murrelet was very special, was, in fact, destined to be my nemesis.

  Each time I board a boat the words go through my head—and every ancient murrelet in the channel heads for the open seas:

  My ancient cap is black,

  Grey is my ancient back.

  11

  Hanky-Panky

  Spring was on its way.

  By mid-February the blue gums were in full bloom. Their whit­ish fuzzy blossoms blew in gusts across our windows and covered the vacant field next door like hoar frost. In the tops of the trees Allen and Anna hummingbirds fought with noisy abandon, and restless flocks of cedar waxwings fed on the bugs and nectar in the flowers as well as the petals themselves. These three species show no seasonal change in plumage, so they were no different from the way they’d been in the fall, except that possibly the waxwings looked a bit sharper after the addition of the marble birdbath to their diet. (The final sliver of the birdbath had been thrown in the trash can.)

  It was in the Audubon warblers, occupying the same eucalyptus trees, that real changes were occurring. During the last two weeks of February and the first two of March they were busy donning their traveling togs, dark grey topcoat with black stripes and a white side patch, dashing little yellow cap and solid-black scarf draped with careless elegance across the chest. Mature birds re­tained their yellow throats and younger birds acquired theirs. This solved one of my problems: during the fall and winter I’d had to strain to differentiate the young Audubons from the myrtles, since both have white throats. The white of the myrtle’s throat extends to outline the cheek somewhat and this species also has a light eyestripe, but neither of these field marks is very noticeable and I had to look at a hundred Audubons to find a myrtle, much rarer in our parts.

  The passage of time changed all this. Myrtle and Audubon as­sumed strictly individualistic plumage, one of nature’s devices to ensure the continuation of the species and prevent hybridization. The myrtles also assumed a characteristic quite funny in such small birds—they became noticeably more aggressive and would go to considerable trouble to clear the ledge of Audubons before settling down to eat. I’ve never seen a myrtle act this way toward any bird except an Audubon or another myrtle. Over many thou­sands of years he has learned a lesson in survival: the species seek­ing the same food that he seeks is his enemy, and he has more to fear from a tiny warbler than from any cast of hawks or gathering of eagles.

  At the beginning of March the oak trees, too, came into bloom. From a distance they appeared to be covered with dark pink blossoms, but the binoculars revealed that these were actually the new leaves, as yet unfurled, and the real blossoms were the catkins hanging down. These catkins proved a popular food with the white-crowned and gold-crowned sparrows, and later, the brown-headed cowbirds.

  The pittosporum undulatum was also in full bloom by now and whole sections of the city were permeated by its poignant sweet­ness which is to me the loveliest of all flower scents and the one that evokes California and home more than a hundred thousand orange blossoms. The flowers and seeds of this kind of pit­tosporum, which can grow forty feet in height and nearly that in width, are not particularly attractive to birds but its dense, deep foliage provides excellent cover for them. They use it for protec­tion from weather and predators, and as a safe roost at night. Often at twilight I’ve seen whole flocks of birds disappear into the largest of our pittosporums with scarcely the telltale flutter of a leaf. At this point I wrote in my notebook:

  The season of hanky-panky is upon us—male linnets on the porch railing feeding willing females, red-winged blackbirds posturing and singing oo-ka-lee at the Bird Refuge, green-backed finches whistling all over the Botanic Garden, song sparrows calling from the acacias down by the creek, press, press, press, Presbyterians, sometimes giving the Presbyterians one less press. All over town the doves are nesting, the bandtails and the towhees, the mockers and hummingbirds. And so on… ad, one hopes, infinitum.

  One does, indeed.

  We put out nesting materials, strips of cloth and short lengths of twine hung on the clothesline, yarn unraveled from an old sweater, balls of cotton tied in the trees, or piled in tiny wicker cornucopias left over from Thanksgiving, pieces of kapok placed in the venti­lated plastic boxes fresh berries are packed in. The hummingbirds preferred to hover while pulling out shreds of cotton through the interstices of the wicker. Some birds grabbed and flew off before I could raise my binoculars, and others perched on the side of the plastic box or on the clothesline and made their selection with the careful gravity of engineers about to try a new kind of building material. Some particularly fussy linnets, dissatisfied with what I had to offer them, took their business to a house across the can­yon. In due time Renée Westermeyer, the lady of the house, re­ported that the large umbrella she kept on her patio no longer had any tassels on it.

  The behavior of a male green-backed goldfinch caused quite a few comments on the part of my bird-watching friends. The gold­finch always brought his industrious little bride with him, and for a very good reason: she did all the work. He would lead her to the clothesline, which was hung with bits of string and colored yarn, and she would begin meticulously testing them for size and texture and color, since she wanted nothing too large or gaudy or rough. Meanwhile, he perched on a twig in the nearby tea tree and preened his feathers. The most he contributed to the proceedings was a lively snatch of song now and then, probably intended to assure her that he was manning the lookout post while she was womanning the nest.

  The titmice and orange-crowned warblers were steady custom­ers for the cotton balls in the cornucopia. So was the hooded oriole, but for an entirely different reason. Over a period of about a week I’d watched this bird, a female, gathering the long tough fibers from the leaves of a Washington fan palm in the neighbor­hood. (Hooded orioles in southern California have such a predi­lection for building their nests in these trees that they were once called “palm-leaf orioles.”) At the same time, the cornucopia in the tree outside my office was being emptied of cotton balls as fast as I could replenish the supply. I naturally assumed that the balls were being used to make a soft lining in various birds’ nests and I was surprised to find a dozen or so scattered around the patio and at least that many more caught in the boxwood hedge and the bougainvillea. It was as if some bird, perhaps a flicker, whose weight the cornucopia couldn’t support, had been awkwardly try­ing to land on it anyway, spilling the cotton balls each time I put out a new batch.

  Then one morning, as I was sitting down to write, the culprit appeared. It was the female hooded oriole. She landed gracefully on the rim of the cornucopia, picked up a cotton ball in her beak and deliberately dropped it over the side to the ground. When the cornucopia was empty she flew off. I filled it up again. Half an hour later she was back to repeat her performance. No one wit­nessing it could believe it was anything but a deliberate and well-motivated action—only what was the motivation?

  Once the cotton balls were tossed on the ground she showed no further interest, so it was clear that she didn’t want them as nest-lining. Two theories occur to me, but until some form of oriole communication is discovered they’ll very likely remain theories.

  There is a certain family of insects, Aprophorinae, sometimes called froghoppers, whose young are hidden in a spittle of white froth which protects them while they live by sucking sap. I’ve often watched orioles go after these spittle insects in the conifers in our canyon. The foamy masses bear considerable resemblance to cot­ton, so it’s possible that the female oriole was testing the cotton balls in the cornucopia to see if they contained food, and discover­ing that they didn’t, chu
cked them out. This theory seems to me to insult the little lady’s intelligence. Birds may not be the smartest of God’s creatures but where food is concerned they learn fast, and I can’t believe it would have taken that many cotton balls to con­vince the oriole she was on the wrong track.

  What is more, she gave no sign that she was investigating the balls. She grabbed one after another and without hesitation chucked them out as if she was getting rid of them as fast as possible because they represented a threat to her and her family. Most people know the trick of sticking pieces of cotton into the screen of a door or window in order to repel houseflies. The idea behind it is that the houseflies will stay away from the cotton because they mistake it for the nest of a certain wasp that likes housefly meat. Perhaps the hooded oriole was acting under a simi­lar misapprehension. We must give her credit anyway for knowing her business—she successfully raised three broods that spring and summer. And I went through an awful lot of cotton balls. Every bird’s nest in the neighborhood, except the hooded oriole’s, must have been lined by Johnson and Johnson.

  The sight of a band of bushtits twittering and tumbling from bush to bush makes it difficult to believe that they could ever settle down to the sober business of raising a family. Yet the bushtits were among the first birds to nest. As early as the middle of January, I’d noticed that the flocks passing through the canyon were getting smaller as the birds were beginning to pair off. One particular couple we came to know very well since they chose one of our oaks as the site for their elaborate nest, the cornucopia as their home-furnishing store and the porch railing as their restaurant.

  The bushtit is an insect-eating bird and no garden could have a better friend, especially since scale and aphids make up about one-fifth of his diet. I’m sure our little couple would have been content with this fare if they hadn’t seen so many other birds eating dough­nuts and decided to try a taste. One bite and they were addicted. Almost any time of the day I could look out my office window and see them pecking happily away at a doughnut, often at the same time as the yellow-throat and the Bewick’s wren, the Audubon warb­lers and song sparrows. These are all tiny creatures but none is so tiny as the bushtit. His thumb-sized body and vivacious movements make other birds seem large and clumsy.

  On February 13, the bushtits began gathering cotton from the cornucopia. On February 24, I watched them shredding a piece of Kleenex in the front yard, and on March 6, I saw one of them carrying leaves in his beak. While they were engaged in relatively quiet pursuits like these, the difference in the eye color of the male and female was much more noticeable than when the birds are seen only in constantly moving flocks. Getting close enough to bushtits to study them is no problem since they usually ignore the presence of a human being, with good reason—they present no challenging target for the gun or slingshot, no taste treat for the palate, no handsome trophy for the den wall, and so they are indeed fearless of men. Getting these lively little devils to stay still while you study them is another matter.

  I’d been watching the flocks in our canyon every day for a long time but it wasn’t until the pair came to taste doughnuts that I became aware of the noticeable difference in eye color, and even then I wasn’t positive which color belonged to which sex. The Peterson field guide simply stated that “females are said to have light eyes, males dark.” I knew this was true of the black-eared bushtit found in New Mexico, but the female of this species is differ­ent from the male in plumage as well. In the common bushtit of our area, eye color is the only noticeable difference between the sexes.

  The little birds told me which was which, in a very simple and direct way. On March 10, I heard the saucy chatter of a chipmunk from the tangle of ceanothus trees and I picked up my binoculars to look for him. A pair of bushtits wandered into my field of vision, gleaning among the leaves for bugs. At least one of them was gleaning. The other evidently had different things in mind, for he quickly and precisely mounted the first bird, hopped away, returned and mounted again. The whole business didn’t take half a minute, during which time the female showed no reaction what­ever. She didn’t stop eating or even turn her head, surely a unique example of sangfroid.

  The male’s eyes were as black as beads of jet, the female’s as tawny as topaz. They gave her a look of continual curiosity, like that of a wide-eyed child. It suited her to a T, for nothing in our yard could be kept a secret from this diminutive creature.

  She knew where the earwig hid by day beneath a rock, under which leaf the whitefly had laid her eggs and where the young of the black scale crawled along the limbs of the olive trees. She spotted where the spider had hidden his dinner fly in the brush pile, where a gopher’s digging had brought a batch of bugs to the surface and which loquat tree was the scene of a fruit-fly orgy. She knew which citrus tree the ants were using to herd their aphids and from which rosebush the leaf roller had borrowed a leaf for his pupa to occupy in privacy. But all this was insignificant compared to her really important piece of knowledge—where the doughnuts were.

  At this season I was putting out a dozen doughnuts at a time in various places around the house and yard. If the bushtit found a purple finch or gold-crowned sparrow already occupying the doughnut in the tea tree, she simply went on to the next one in the cotoneaster, or the next hanging from a nail on the porch or a clothes hook under the dining-room window. Until March 25, she brought her mate with her. After that she came alone. For more than a month, almost every time I looked out a window, I would see her on one doughnut or another and it became obvious that she was eating for two, or five, or even more. Many birds which subsist on seeds and vegetable matter will, when their young are hatched, feed them insects, since the protein is more nourishing and fewer feedings are necessary. But this was my first experience with an insect-eating bird feeding vegetable matter to its young.

  As time passed and the female kept appearing alone I began to suspect that her mate had met with some disaster and left her a widow with a family to raise by herself. Male and female bushtits under ordinary conditions share equally the duties of incubation and gathering insects to feed the young. Deprived of assistance, perhaps the female was feeding them what was readily available—doughnuts. I had visions of a weak and sickly brood raised entirely on carbohydrates.

  Then, during the third week of April, I happened to see the male and female together gleaning in an oak tree. I like to think that this was the same male and that all the times I waited for him to show up at the doughnuts, he was in fact gathering bugs to provide his children with a more conventional and healthful diet.

  Whether or not it was the same male, the same procedure started again: the lady began gathering cotton and shredding leaves and bits of paper, and on May 10, she brought the male to the doughnut. They ate together for a couple of weeks as they had in March, then she began coming alone. During the raising of the second brood her visits weren’t nearly so frequent, probably be­cause our place was one vast nursery by this time and so many young of the larger species were being fed there that the little bush­tit was intimidated. In the middle of June she stopped coming altogether.

  During the summer, flocks of bushtits began to form again, starting with family groups—the young being recognizable by their shorter tails and less skillful acrobatics—and getting larger and noisier as the weeks passed. Their constant twittering, which is the way the members keep in touch as they forage from bush to bush, changed only when the sparrow hawk from the adjacent canyon came over to visit. I’ve never seen any sparrow hawk in this area show the slightest interest in catching a bushtit, but evidently he represents an old and respected enemy, for at the sight of him the tiny birds began issuing their alarm cry, high, shrill, pulsating notes that seemed to be coming from anywhere and everywhere, like the singing of tree frogs. Our visitor was apparently offended by such an unfriendly greeting and he never stayed more than a few min­utes, long enough for a short bath and a quick shake.

  Tha
t fall and winter, watching the bushtits as they went through the front yard combing the arbutus and eugenias and pyracanthas, I would look at them and wonder which one was the little lady I had seen so often and so intimately for a third of the year. When the little birds passed through the backyard, however, I had no need to wonder. The flock would forage as usual through the cotoneaster and the tea tree, but then, as it passed my office win­dow on the way to the elderberry bush, one small grey form would detach itself from the group. Having been alerted by the sound of the birds’ twittering, I was always ready to catch the first gleam of two golden eyes and watch as the little female lit on the doughnut in the soap bark tree. There was a kind of furtive joy in her man­ner. Aphids and scale were all very well for the ordinary bushtit, but not for one who has known the delights of doughnuts and even passed them along to her children.

  On these gastronomical side trips she never brought any mem­bers of her family or the group; they were strictly private and solitary excursions. Nor in all my weeks of watching did I see any member pay the slightest attention either when she left the group or when she hurried to catch up with it again. Certainly no attempt was made to follow her, although at least one male, possibly two, knew that doughnuts were available and how to reach them. I can offer no explanation for this. Perhaps there isn’t any and we must simply accept the word of the ornithologists who state that the bushtit is an impulsive bird given to whims and fancies. This describes our little female rather well: she had a fancy for dough­nuts and a whim of steel.