The Birds and the Beasts Were There

by Margaret Millar

  There are a number of sounds that can be heard only when you live right in the midst of birds. An excellent example is the good­night of the acorn woodpeckers, a low-pitched, sleepy mumbling made about half an hour after they’ve disappeared into the tele­phone pole for the night. The interpreting of bird language, at this stage of our knowledge, must be subjective, so I can only claim that to me this mumbling sounds like the response to a question: “Yes, everything’s fine, now settle down and go to sleep.”

  The acorn woodpeckers provided me with another example of special semantic effects, at least one of them did. He was a mature bird, perhaps the head of the clan, certainly old enough to be set in his ways. In his case this meant that he had very strong likes and dislikes in the food department. One afternoon when I was dusting in the living room I saw an object fly over the porch railing that seemed too small to be any bird I knew. Hope, the poet said, springs eternal in the human breast. And if the breast happens to belong to a birder, the hope is often wild and wonderful: a green-backed twinspot or locust finch from Africa—blown a few thousand miles off course—a red avadavat from the East Indies, a yellow-tailed diamond-bird from Australia. I was ready to settle for something found a bit closer to home, like the bee hummingbird of Cuba. The new birdwatcher, and I suspect a few old ones as well, lives in a beautiful world where anything is possible! I grabbed my binocu­lars and rushed into my office on the track of the unidentified flying object.

  The male acorn woodpecker was perched on the rim of the wooden dish which I had had to fill three times that day with bread and doughnuts and grapes. I now understood why. My UFO was no twinspot from Africa or avadavat from the Indies or diamond-bird from Australia, it was a piece of bread from the corner bak­ery. Our crochety guest had decided not only that he would refuse to eat bread, which satisfied the rest of his family, but that he wouldn’t even tolerate its presence in the same container as decent food. Before taking so much as a peck at the doughnuts or grapes, he tossed out of the dish and over the porch railing every single scrap of bread. It reminded me of the hooded oriole chucking the cotton balls out of the cornucopia, except that the oriole did the job quietly while the woodpecker informed the neighborhood at the top of his lungs what he thought of peasant food like bread and the barbarians who dared serve it to him. Every time I filled the dish that spring he repeated his performance, until he tired of it or else finally accepted the idea of bread. His nickname, B.T., in the beginning stood for Bread Tosser.

  One morning as I was gathering together all the bird food, I came across a tin of salted cashews no longer fresh enough for people to eat. Thinking the woodpeckers would be delighted at such a treat I put ten or twelve cashews in the wooden dish instead of grapes. The male sentry flew down and ate as usual, paying no attention to the nuts. The next two woodpeckers, both females, hesitated a few moments over the new item of food, like very good shoppers. Then one took a nut and flew off, the other departed carrying a piece of bread after several pecks at the doughnut.

  Then came B.T. Crouching low over the wooden dish he let out a “Jacob?” whose meaning couldn’t have been clearer if he’d spoken it in Harvard English: “What’s this?”

  He turned his head to the right and studied the cashews with his left eye, he turned his head to the left and studied them with his right eye. Both eyes agreed: the new stuff was bad.

  He told me all about it, me and everyone else in the canyon, shouting at the top of his lungs and moving his body violently up and down and from side to side like a drunken sailor trying madly to compensate for the pitch and toss of the ship under him. His performance lasted nearly five minutes. It didn’t earn him an Academy Award or even a new name. It simply changed the mean­ing of his old one. B.T. no longer stood for Bread Tosser but for Bad Temper.

  Everyone who has watched birds has seen and heard them ex­press anger at the intrusion of people or animals or other birds. B.T.’s anger—rage might be a better word—was different. No other creatures were present: he was reacting entirely to an unfa­miliar food. One of our scrub jays reacted in a similar way to a comparable situation involving food. Since the acorn woodpeckers had ganged up to drive him away from the wooden dish on the porch railing, he had taken to eating off the ledge. Every now and then he was unable to resist the sight of a nice fresh doughnut practically asking to be buried and he would attempt to pick it up in his beak and make off with it. Since a whole doughnut weighed almost as much as he did, it simply dropped out of his beak and rolled across the ledge and down onto the patio below.

  When food disappears off the ledge, by accident or design, some birds, the house finches for example, adopt an easy-come, easy-go attitude and show no curiosity or further interest in it. Our friend the scrub jay was much too intelligent to believe that doughnuts can disappear into thin air and he immediately hopped to the edge to investigate. When he saw the doughnut lying on the patio he launched into a violent tirade against the offender, and when that failed to evoke a response he dropped down and pecked at it furiously between squawks. It was very much like watching a man curse a hammer that had struck his thumb or break a golf club that had missed a putt or shake his fist at a bowling ball that had zigged instead of zagged. If a bowling ball, a golf club or a hammer can be considered culprits, we can hardly wonder at the jay assigning this role to a doughnut which had escaped from his beak and “flown” off the ledge onto the patio.

  Jays are adept at vocal self-expression and their tirades were often triggered by other things. I could expect a brisk tongue-lashing when I was half an hour late putting out breakfast or if I turned on a certain sprinkler that interfered with their foraging or if I let the dogs out at an inconvenient time. The only occasion when it really snowed in our area, a pair of jays sat in one of the Monterey pine trees and squawked from the first snowflake to the last.

  Among zoologists there is a tendency not to allow for individual differences of temperament and mentality among members of a species. Yet anyone who runs a feeding station for birds and ani­mals becomes keenly aware of many such differences even if the explanations for them aren’t apparent. Why did one acorn wood­pecker readily accept a new food which caused another to throw a fit? Why did some woodpeckers put useless things like stones and eucalyptus pods in the holes that had been drilled for acorns? Why did most of the rats eat the grapes on the spot while one hoarded them to start a winery?

  Why, after a dozen Bewick wrens furnished their nests without incident, did the thirteenth wren attempt repeatedly to push into the nesting hole material that was too bulky, and fly into a fury when his efforts were unsuccessful? Why, of all the California thrashers who’ve passed our windows and eaten our food, should there have been one who habitually talked to himself?

  These thrasher monologues bore no resemblance to the frenetic protests of B.T. and the scrub jays, and little to the normal voice of the thrasher which is loud and droll and vivacious. They con­sisted of a series of soft notes, a kind of gentle, absent-minded mumbling that sounded oddly human. I heard it a number of times before I found out who was responsible. When I finally caught him in my binoculars he looked oddly human, too. He was an older bird, as indicated by the curvature and great length of the bill which, some ornithologists suggest, may keep growing throughout a thrasher’s lifetime. He reminded me of an elderly uncle, fussy but benign, making some well-chosen remarks as he went about the complicated business of terrestrial living. He would take a few little running steps—he resorted to flying infrequently and for short distances only—and then he would pause to glance around him, probe a clump of earth, examine a patch of grass, peer under a dead leaf. All this time his throat was vibrating and his beak was opening and closing as he rambled on to himself. Am I sure it was to himself? Well, there was no one there but me, and I prefer to think that thrashers talk to themselves rather than to people. If people overhear, that’s their problem.

  During April no psychic powers were needed
to make us aware that among the acorn woodpeckers more was going on than met the eye and that it was going on inside the hole in the telephone pole. We had no way of determining whether one or two females laid their eggs in the nest, but on the basis of numbers of different woodpeckers seen entering and leaving we suspected the presence of a double clutch of eggs, and a couple of weeks later, a double batch of young.

  These were certainly well attended and fed frequently, though not the kind of diet considered ideal for baby woodpeckers since it was made up entirely of doughnuts and bread, grapes being out of season and unobtainable. The female bushtit had brought up both her broods on doughnuts, but the male had supplemented their diet with insects. On the few occasions that our woodpeckers flew from the pole to catch an insect in midair, the maneuver seemed more like a game than serious foraging; what’s more, the insect was eaten on the spot, not carried into the nest cavity.

  I began to worry that the baby woodpeckers, stuffed with carbo­hydrates but starved for protein, would fail to develop properly and that the parents would abandon them the way the Hylands’ pigeons, Morgan and Dapplegray, had abandoned their ailing off­spring. I decided to improve their diet by adding peanuts which I shelled myself. Theoretically, and from the human point of view, this was a great idea: peanuts were close enough to their natural food to be acceptable, as well as richer in oils and protein, so the babies would grow up strong of leg, clear of eye and sleek of plumage. It would probably have worked out fine if the wood­peckers hadn’t had their own idea of how to treat a peanut.

  And just how did a woodpecker treat a peanut? He stored it, of course; not where he stored acorns which had to be shelled, but where he stored ready-to-eat food like grapes, in the large blue gum eucalyptus tree across the canyon. Behind its peeling bark went the peanuts I carefully shelled and put out for the baby woodpeckers, who never got so much as a sniff of one. Obviously more drastic measures were called for if I wanted the babies to get enough protein to develop normally. (By the way, that baffling bird B.T. showed as positive a liking for peanuts as he had a dislike for cashews.)

  It was about this time that Ken and I were invited to visit for the first time the large aviary operated as a hobby by Paul Vercammen. A partial list of some of his more unusual species included black-cap and great reed warblers, grey wagtails, bullfinches, yel­low buntings, stonechats, Mexican flycatchers, white-rumped shamas, golden orioles, saffron and lavender finches, nightingales, Pekin robins, purple sunbirds and emerald tanagers.

  We were allowed inside while Paul gave the birds their morning feeding. It was holiday fare, indeed: quartered oranges and apples, peeled bananas, fresh ripe figs, raisins soaked in hot water to make them tender and plump, bread and cake crumbs, pieces of cheese, various cooked vegetables and of course, seeds of all kinds. But the favorite of most birds was what Paul fed them by hand for dessert, meal worms.

  Meal worms, chock full of protein and obviously a bird favorite, seemed like the perfect food for our baby woodpeckers. On the way home we stopped at a pet store. Here we learned that meal worms were not worms at all but the larvae of darkling beetles, which were a dime a dozen except in pet stores where they were fifty cents a dozen. During their life cycle these beetles destroyed large quantities of flour and cereal; nevertheless they were bred commercially as food for birds. Some animals, like the smaller monkeys, were also fed meal worms to prevent or to cure arthritis. At the going price of four cents for a one-inch worm, medicine for monkeys seemed to have reached more dizzying heights than medi­cine for humans who could still get an aspirin tablet for a fraction of a penny.

  Used medicinally meal worms were expensive enough. Offered as daily fare at a large feeding station they would have been pro­hibitive. Even I, who obstinately refused to face the economics of our bird feeding, had to concede that much. We couldn’t put out meal worms for the woodpeckers without the other birds demand­ing and getting their share. If, as Marie Beals had told me, a single robin consumed sixteen feet of earthworms in a day, he could be expected to consume an equal amount of meal worms, or 192 inches. At four cents an inch this would amount to $7.68 a day for each robin, or $2,803.20 a year—definitely not chicken feed.

  There seemed only one reasonable solution: I would become a commercial breeder of darkling beetles. Ken took a very dim view of this idea, but Harry, the man at the pet shop, explained that it was as easy as rolling off a log. The beetles did the work; all I had to do was provide them with suitable living arrangements and food.

  The initial equipment was simple and very cheap, considering what stupendously expensive little creatures—pound for pound in the same class as emeralds—were supposed to emerge from it. I washed and dried a ten-gallon tin can that had once contained beef fat for the birds. It had a tight-fitting lid in which I punctured some small holes for ventilation. Meal worms don’t require much oxy­gen, they do some of their best work in the middle of hundred-pound sacks of flour. On Harry’s advice I used as a flour substitute duck bran purchased at a feed and grain store for sixty-five cents. I added the meal worms and a large piece of burlap for them to cling to and a quartered apple for moisture. Then I clamped on the lid and put the whole thing down in a storage room on the lower floor where I figured the little creatures could go about their business, and mine, undisturbed.

  Like many people new to a commercial venture I had dreams of glory—perhaps eventually I would become known as the meal worm queen of the Southwest—but the dreams were promptly un­dermined by labor troubles. Because what happened inside that ten-gallon can for the next month was nothing, absolutely nothing. I checked it every day—and every day, nothing. Ken suggested that the creatures might be inhibited by my surveillance, but I began to suspect more basic problems.

  I phoned Harry at the pet store and accused him of giving me all-male or all-female stock. He explained that meal worms weren’t fussy about such things but they failed to develop sometimes if they were lonesome. What was probably the matter was that the can was too large for a mere dozen meal worms and they’d prob­ably lost contact and couldn’t find each other.

  “They can find each other,” I said coldly. “They’re just not trying.”

  Harry had a solution: not a smaller can, of course, but more meal worms. If I could stamp out meal worm loneliness I would be back in business.

  I drove down to the pet store. Harry had four dozen meal worms packed in a cardboard carton waiting for me. He assured me he’d picked the liveliest ones he could find and I could expect quick action provided all his instructions had been followed. Did I buy the right kind of bran? Yes. Did I remember the burlap and the pieces of raw apple or potato? Yes. Was I keeping their quar­ters warm and cosy at about 8o°? No. The storage room was about as warm and cosy as the catacombs. I didn’t tell Harry. I just got out of there as fast as possible—before he could sell me a meal worm heater.

  The big question then was, where would be the best place in the house to keep a ten-gallon can rather conspicuously labeled “Hoff­man’s Pure Rendered Beef Fat”? Two rooms were eliminated im­mediately. Ken said that much as he liked to share things with his fellow creatures, his study and the lanai adjoining it were too cold. (And, his tone implied, they weren’t going to get any warmer if he could help it.) The kitchen, which seemed a logical place, was eliminated because it was hardly bigger than an orange crate and every nook and cranny was already filled with containers of bird seed, stale bread and doughnuts. For aesthetic reasons the living room was excluded, and since a can of meal worms would, in spite of their name, do nothing to enhance meals, so was the dining room.

  The choice finally narrowed down, as I should have known it would, to my office. The meal worms, presumably no longer lone­some with the arrival of four dozen of their friends, were en­sconced on top of a bookcase, just above a heating outlet, and my office was known from that time on as the Worm Factory.

  Meanwhile the baby woodpeckers who were the
reason for the factory’s existence had grown up. They showed no obvious signs of protein starvation or of malnutrition in general. They were fat, contented little creatures as they sat, often three and four at a time, around the rim of the wooden dish on the porch railing. They weren’t easily alarmed; in fact, their confidence in me distressed their parents, who tried to squawk some sense into their heads from the telephone pole or the eucalyptus tree, “Watch out, watch out, watch out!” In this imperfect world we share with the wood­peckers, maturation must include the learning of fears.

  If I’d been informed that meal worms were slow and uncoopera­tive and demanded a great deal of heat, I would never have started the project. I was already heartily sick of staring at that big ugly can on top of the bookcase and working in a room that was ten degrees too hot. But I was also reluctant to give up and admit defeat. If the protein was too late for this generation of wood­peckers, it would at least be ready for the next.

  In late spring my niece, Jane, came to spend a weekend. She slept in my office, which doubled as a spare bedroom, and I over­heard her describing the experience to a friend over the telephone: “It’s called the Worm Factory. No, they don’t crawl all over you, but even if they did it would be okay because they’re pets.”

  Thus it was Jane who was responsible for the only good thing ever said about my meal worms: they didn’t crawl all over you. It was Jane, too, who doomed my future as the meal worm queen of the Southwest. She came into the kitchen while I was preparing lunch and announced that B.T. was on the wooden dish again throwing another fit. Since I’d started to keep records of the inten­sity and duration of B.T.’s fits, I hurried into my office. I saw immediately that the roof was missing from the worm factory. There was no need to ask what had thrown B.T. into a frenzy.