The Birds and the Beasts Were There

by Margaret Millar

  Eventually the reasons for the singing appeared, a trio of Baby G’s, bodies fat and round as tennis balls, heads striped brown and beige like their mother’s. Right from the beginning they showed their musical heritage. As they tagged along after their devoted parents in search for food, they did not make a terrible racket like the baby blackbirds or cheep incessantly like the sparrows and house finches. Their soliciting sound was a soft, plaintive, gently aggrieved, “Hey, you!” Every shrub and tree in the yard seemed to be equipped with its own music box which played over and over, “Hey, you! Hey, you! Hey, you!”

  The red-shafted flicker normally lays a clutch of half a dozen eggs or more, but that year only one survived to fledgling size. He had two sounds as he followed his parents to the doughnut in the wooden feeder. One was soft like the grosbeaks’, a plaintive and questioning, “Yup yop? Yup yop yop?” The other was a shrieking that can’t be described in words. When I first heard it I thought a murder was taking place on the porch railing. It looked like a murder, too, with the mother flicker thrusting her formidable one-and-a-half-inch beak down the baby’s throat while he screamed like a banshee. This noise, as far as a mere spectator-auditor could tell, was caused by nothing more than excitement.

  At intervals throughout the day, one or other of the parent flickers, sometimes both, would bring their son, Yup Yop, to the wooden feeder. He was enormous compared to the other young birds, but he was a terribly spoiled baby. The little wrentits and song sparrows and Wilson’s warblers and goldfinches all fended for themselves while Yup Yop sat helplessly on the railing, refusing to try even a bite of doughnut or bread or a single grape or peanut. As two weeks passed and Yup Yop still clung to his dependence, his parents were at the end of their wits. They had tried coaxing, prodding, pecking and pushing. Now they tried the only other thing they could think of—they flew off and left him.

  Watching Yup Yop’s initial attempts to feed himself was like watching a human infant’s introduction to solid food. He wasn’t used to the texture and he did considerable head shaking and bill wiping before he showed signs of enjoyment. But he soon became our best customer, and as time passed, the boss of the feeder. This lofty position was strictly the result of his size, since his disposition was like that of his parents, mild and unaggressive. He was ex­tremely wary, though. No matter how often he watched from a distance while I took food out to the ledge or worked around the garden or in my office, I could never get close to him. Perhaps it was because in the not too distant past flickers were shot as game birds and had learned the destructiveness of man. Fifty-five species of birds have been observed using that particular feeder, and of them all, only the crows showed more wariness than the flickers.

  Yup Yop was also cautious about planes. If one approached the canyon at what he considered too low an altitude he flattened himself in the wooden feeder and stayed there, looking like a feathered turtle, motionless except for the once-a-second blinking of his eyes. I’ve seen acorn woodpeckers assume this same posture when alarmed, but instead of blinking they moved their heads slowly in a circle the way owls do when they want to examine something.

  The month of May was nearly over and we still hadn’t seen hide or feather of the new batch of brown-headed cowbirds. We knew cowbirds to be brood parasites whose eggs were hatched and young were raised by other birds, usually a smaller variety, and we were curious to find out which of our neighborhood species had been so used, or misused. At the Botanic Garden we’d watched a newly fledged cowbird being fed by a tiny orange-crowned warbler and another by an Oregon junco. (The beginning birdwatcher is apt to be thrown for a loss by the appearance of immature cow­birds, particularly since they are seldom pictured in books. Their color is misleading—a sort of lead laced with platinum.) Also near the house of Alice and Charles Richardson in Montecito we’d seen a Hutton’s vireo struggling to feed a cowbird twice its size. But our Oregon junco was gone, there were no nesting vireos of this kind in our immediate neighborhood, and our orange-crowned warblers had already raised a family.

  On the ledge, at the other feeders and in the adjoining field, the adult cowbirds associated almost entirely with red-winged black­birds. No interrelationship between the two species was discerni­ble; they simply showed up in the same place at the same time to eat the same things. With the arrival of the young, however, a baffling picture began to emerge.

  The first week in June the baby redwings and cowbirds appeared on the ledge, more than three weeks later than the Brewer’s black­birds. The close association of the adult cowbirds and redwings and the simultaneous appearance of their young led me to believe that the redwings, in spite of their greater size, were being used as the host birds, and so I paid particular attention to the actions of the young cowbirds.

  It turned out to be a disappointing and inconclusive study. In my hours of watching every day for a period of two weeks I didn’t observe a single instance of an adult redwing feeding a young cowbird, or of a cowbird soliciting a redwing or, in fact, of a cowbird soliciting any kind of bird at all, including its own kind. From the moment the young arrived on the ledge they seemed completely self-sufficient, while the redwings were still in the solic­iting stage. This suggests that if a host-parasite relationship existed between the two species, the cowbirds’ eggs were laid several days before the redwings’.

  In the final week of May the mockingbirds began the first of their nocturnal serenades. The night of May 26, when I was par­ticularly restless, or they were particularly loud, I was awakened at midnight, one-thirty, two, three, four and five-thirty. To those who insist that it is the brightness of the moon which evokes nocturnal song, I can only report that it was foggy all night and that the following morning all planes were grounded until nine-thirty. I have heard many replies to the question of why mockingbirds sing at night. The simplest and perhaps the most satisfactory was given by Ken: “Why not?”

  During the hours of darkness the mockers had no vocal compe­tition, but at dawn every baby bird in the neighborhood began sounding its hunger notes. Yup Yop, the flicker, alternately whis­pered and shrieked, the hooded orioles clucked, the blackbirds remonstrated, “Tut, tut, tut, tut!” The house finches and sparrows cheeped and chattered up and down the ledge; and from the porch railing, the elderberry bushes and the lemon tree, the grosbeaks called softly and plaintively, “Hey you! Hey you!”

  These were the sounds of summer as the younger generation grew up and Ken and I grew older.

  14

  Johnny and the Night Visitors

  My life list of birds was grow­ing rapidly, too rapidly. While my greed was assuaged, my common sense warned me of lean pickings ahead since there were only a limited number of birds in our area and a new species seen in the present meant one less in the future. A bird watcher’s Utopia would have to include a system of rationing that would allow you a new bird on your birthday, for instance, another at Christmas, and per­haps a third on the Fourth.

  This suggestion was prompted by the appearance on our ledge one Christmas morning of a white-winged dove, a species rare in these parts and new to us. I mentioned to a friend that it was the best present we ever received, and the following Christmas he brought over a three-foot manzanita tree with winter pears wired to its branches and a partridge leashed at its tip with a golden ribbon. The partridge would also have been a new bird for us if it hadn’t been made of clay. A year and a half was to elapse before Kay Ball found us a real partridge on the campus of the University of Alberta at Edmonton.

  Our list of Home Visitors, that is, birds seen at or from our feeding station, was also growing rapidly, and not always accord­ing to pattern. Some birds which we had good reason to expect since they were frequently seen in the vicinity never showed up, such as the western kingbird, Say’s phoebe, rough-winged swallow, canon wren, loggerhead shrike, western bluebird, lark sparrow. Others arrived which we had no reason to expect—Scott’s oriole, rose-breasted grosbeak, catbird
, Grace’s and Tennessee warblers, summer tanager—and one of these, Home Visitor No. 103, was a bird we didn’t even know existed.

  I was in the kitchen preparing the dogs’ breakfast one morning when a piercing whistle suddenly split the air. It was as loud as a flicker’s, with a clearer and sweeter tone. When I heard it again I knew it was no bird I knew, perhaps no bird at all, but a boy whistling a signal to a friend. I dropped everything and rushed into the living room for my binoculars. As it turned out, I didn’t need them.

  The whistler was perched in the Australian tea tree at the east end of the ledge, eating one of the doughnuts I’d just put out. His brilliant yellow-and-black plumage and long, sharp, cone-shaped bill marked him as an oriole, but he was bigger than any oriole of my acquaintance, including the rare Lichtenstein’s oriole of the Rio Grande delta region of Texas. Our new visitor was about the same length as a scrub jay, though he seemed considerably larger because more of his length was body and less was tail. But the most peculiar thing about him was revealed in a closer study through binoculars: at the outer corner of each yellow eye he had a trian­gular patch of bare skin, sky-blue in color.

  The sky-blue patches simplified the task of identifying the bird. He was a species of South American oriole called a troupial. I found a picture in the Austin-Singer Birds of the World which clearly showed the eye patch, the black hood and tail, the bright underparts and full color. There was one puzzling difference, though—the troupial in the picture was a deep orange, and our visitor was yellow.

  I called Waldo Abbott at the Museum of Natural History. He said a bird of similar description had been reported to him by a Mrs. Frank Kennedy who had a feeding station in the center of the city, a block from the courthouse. He’d gone down to see the bird and identified it positively as a troupial. There seemed little doubt that the troupial in Mrs. Kennedy’s fig tree and the one in our tea tree were the same bird, since the two feeding stations were less than three miles apart, as the crow flies. But I had to be sure so I drove over right away.

  Mrs. Kennedy didn’t know exactly how long the troupial had been with her. She first became aware that something had been added to her garden by observing that something was being sub­tracted from it. The succulents planted in redwood tubs and hang­ing baskets around the patio were disappearing. Apparently healthy plants were reduced to mere stalks within a day or so, and sometimes flowerpots were found overturned. Mrs. Kennedy blamed everything on rodents, which she assumed had been attracted to her yard by the grain she put out for the birds. She set traps, but they remained un­sprung while the succulents continued to disappear.

  Early one morning in May when she went out to fill the birdbath she found the culprit perched on a redwood tub, stripping off the fleshy new leaves of the sedum it contained. The troupial stared at her with his bright yellow eyes, then whistled. Mrs. Kennedy whis­tled back, and a pact of friendship was thus simply and immedi­ately formed.

  The birds that flocked to Mrs. Kennedy’s feeding station were mainly the common city birds, mourning doves and domestic pi­geons, Brewer’s blackbirds and house sparrows. It was natural enough that when the exotic stranger showed up, with his brilliant plumage and bold whistle, he was given a great deal of food and attention. He loved fruit—especially bananas—doughnuts, cake, bread softened with milk or water, and of, course, the leaves of succulents. He had his own feeding tray in the fig tree, apart from the other birds, and defended it vigorously. During the twenty-four hours he spent at our house he had no trouble driving off the scrub jays; perhaps they were too flabbergasted by the sight of the over­sized oriole to fight back.

  Where had the troupial come from? Although some orioles are long-range migrants, the Baltimore and orchard going as far as South America to winter, and the Bullock to Costa Rica, all the reference books I could find indicated that troupials, like most birds of tropical regions, were non-migratory and stayed pretty close to their part of South America. It seemed reasonable, then, to assume that Trouper had not come to California of his own choice or under his own steam. He was not wearing a leg band, as birds purchased in pet shops usually are, though it was possible that one had been attached and had subsequently worn off with the help of time and the weather and Trouper himself.

  I contacted Paul Vercammen, whose private aviary has been described in another chapter. He knew what a troupial was, of course, but he’d never purchased any and they weren’t the kind of birds normally stocked by the local pet stores. Someone wanting a troupial might have to go where the troupials were, Colombia or Venezuela.

  The word Venezuela jogged my memory. Maracaibo was the place where Pete and Adu Batten had acquired the first inmate of what was to become their zoo, or to put it more accurately, their collection of pet birds, reptiles and mammals. I called Adu on the phone. She told me that she and Pete had picked up a couple of troupials in Maracaibo some time ago, but they had escaped the previous fall while being transferred from one cage to another. All attempts to find them had failed and they were presumed dead. Both birds had been adult males, bright orange in color.

  I told Adu about Trouper and his golden-yellow feathers, and asked if she was positive about the color. She said the birds were orange when they escaped, but they would have had a moult since then and the color of their feathers might be influenced by diet. She used to feed them oranges every day, just as the flamingos were fed a certain kind of shrimp paste to keep their plumage pink. I thought of the sea otters we frequently saw in the kelp beds off the coast of Monterey and the Big Sur. Their very bones are dyed purple by the pigment in the sea urchins that form a large part of their diet.

  Adu was pleasantly surprised that a troupial—possibly two—had managed to survive for six months on its own. Or to a consid­erable extent on its own. Mrs. Kennedy did provide handouts, certainly, but it was Trouper himself who’d discovered the food value of succulents. Or was it the food aspect that had attracted him in the first place? Perhaps, in his native environment, he used succulents as a source of water the way many inhabitants of our California desert do. My private picture of Venezuela had always been that of a vast and lush rainforest. Adu made some correc­tions in the picture. Though all of Venezuela was very humid, actual rainfall occurred heavily only in the mountain and foothill regions. Maracaibo itself, at sea level, received barely enough rain to support scrub vegetation.

  Three of the mysteries about Trouper had been tentatively solved: his place of origin, his fondness for succulents and the color of his plumage.

  During the next year Trouper became well known in the neigh­borhood. Mrs. Kennedy had learned to imitate his whistle—or, more likely, he’d learned to recognize hers, since the bird’s whistle and Mrs. Kennedy’s sounded completely different to me. Anyway they understood each other, and when our Audubon members went to visit him, Mrs. Kennedy was usually able to call him down from the date palm where he took his siestas.

  When the spirit moved him Trouper would leave the Kennedys’ place for a few hours—or a few days—and catch up on what was happening in the outside world. He returned from one of these excursions sadder, wiser and without a tail. The life of a bon vivant had made him a bit too casual in his relationship with cats.

  We have had many tailless birds at our feeding station during the past five years. Like Trouper, they could all fly fairly well for short distances. None of them stayed long, however. Some, lacking the quick maneuverability made possible by a tail, met an early death; others grew new tails and became once again indistinguish­able from their friends and relatives. The longest stay was on the part of a scrub jay who’d been born without the slightest stump of a tail and remained that way. His appearance was apt to mystify visiting birdwatchers who, seeing him in the distance in a bad light, identified him as everything from a quail to a flicker.

  To the layman, accustomed to the slow growth rate of such things as human hair and fingernails, it is amazing how quickly a bird can rep
lace pulled-out feathers. The stub of Trouper’s new tail was visible within three days, within three weeks the tail was fully grown again. He was in no hurry for further adventures though. For some time he stuck pretty close to his feeding tray in the fig tree and the fresh batch of succulents Mrs. Kennedy had put around the patio. Then he started out on another series of excur­sions. He appeared once more at our house and three times at our neighbors’, who had a mission fig tree like the one Trouper was accustomed to. The Museum of Natural History received reports from various parts of town about a strange, large, black and orange-yellow bird with a loud, shrill whistle. It was suggested by one of our Audubon members that we keep track of Trouper’s where­abouts the way a general keeps track of his men in battle, with colored pins and a wall map. I didn’t purchase such elaborate equipment, but I did plot Trouper’s course on an ordinary street map of the city. He kept within a radius of about two and a half miles from home, i.e., Mrs. Kennedy’s, and his most frequent ap­pearances were near East Beach, within a couple of hundred yards of his point of escape.

  It was a peculiar winter. Starting out with a good five-inch rain in November, it was almost completely dry in January and Febru­ary. In March, the rain began again with two and a half inches, and April turned up as the wettest on record with nearly seven inches according to the Santa Barbara weather charts, eight and three-quarters inches according to our rain gauge—all of it in the first nine days of the month.

  Rain or no rain, Trouper suffered a sudden attack of spring fever and off he went. Eight days passed—his longest period of absence so far—and Mrs. Kennedy called and asked me if I’d seen him. I hadn’t. Nor were any reports of him phoned in to the Museum of Natural History. News of his absence and a complete description of him were passed along the Rare Bird Alert and also published in our local Audubon monthly, El Tecohte. Every birder in town was on the lookout for him, but he was never seen again.