The Birds and the Beasts Were There

by Margaret Millar

  Perhaps he went back for a return engagement with the same cat and this time, weighted down by rain-soaked feathers, he’d lost more than a tail. I would like to think, instead, that the spring fever spread throughout his bloodstream and he had begun the long flight home to Maracaibo, following his heart.

  Nearly every feeding station in southern California has had its share of escaped parakeets. At our place they usually flew in with a flock of other birds such as house finches, blackbirds, English sparrows or mourning doves. Some stayed only a few minutes, others were in the neighborhood for two or three days before disappearing. In July, 1962, a turquoise and white male remained for nine days, always arriving and departing with what seemed to be the same group of Brewer’s blackbirds. Escaped birds like para­keets usually manage fine during the daytime. It is the darkness that brings danger because they haven’t learned the necessity for adequate cover at night, and they become easy prey for owls.

  The record stay at our feeding station was set by a blue parakeet with a chartreuse head who first appeared on the ledge in March of 1964. The flesh color of the cere, the horny area between bill and forehead, marked her as a female.

  Her difference from our previous parakeets was noticeable immediately: she didn’t join up with other birds for companion­ship or security. She arrived on the ledge alone, scurrying back and forth and round and round on her short, stubby legs like a mechan­ical toy that had wound itself up. When she finished eating—she ate only seed, I never saw her even taste any of the cake crumbs or doughnuts or similar food available—she retired to the tea tree to clean and hone her beak on the rough bark. It would be fanciful to think she chose this particular spot because both the tree, Leptospermum laevigatum, and she herself, Melopsittacus undulatus, had their origin in Australia. Most likely she chose it because it offered a safe and convenient perch.

  During the month that followed she appeared half a dozen times a day on the ledge and in the tea tree and we also saw her at various other places in the neighborhood. As it became obvious that she felt at home in our area and intended to stay, we gave her a name, Blue Betty, bought some special delicacies parakeets were sup­posed to like and put them in the tea tree. Egg cakes and salt licks and sprays of wild millet were attached with pipe cleaners, and from B.B.’s favorite perch we hung three compressed-seed balls with a wooden perch at each ball. These additions to the doughnuts, bunches of grapes and suet-filled pine cones already there made Leptospermum laevigatum look like a Christmas tree decorated in pop art style.

  B.B. gave no sign of even noticing the delicacies purchased especially for her. The house finches went crazy over the millet sprays, and by day the pigeons and by night the opossums con­sumed the salt lick. The scrub jays hammered away at the egg cakes, which were considerably harder than their name suggested, and every evening the rats gave us an exhibition of wild and won­derful acrobatics as they maneuvered up and down the string that connected the seed balls.

  Quite a few parakeets came and went that year, including an exquisite white male with a cornflower-blue rump and a hint of blue wash across his chest. (A parakeet expert I know tells me that birds bred for albinism, as this one probably was, are less robust and long-lived than ordinary birds, and that unpigmented feathers are more susceptible to wear and tear.) In each case I tried to contact the bird’s owner, by phoning the Humane Society, the Animal Shelter and the Museum of Natural History, and by check­ing the lost and found ads in the local newspaper. After we’d made all possible attempts we would sit back and watch the ex-prisoners enjoying their freedom, careening down the canyon like huge mad butterflies or bustling around the ledge like sanderlings around an ebbing wave. Sometimes, in the company of drab little house spar­rows, they looked like jungle flowers blown by the wind. For a bird any cage is too small, and freedom is not an abstract word; it is Blue Betty and her transient kin moving across an open sky.

  March rolled around once more and the wild birds began their songs of claiming and proclaiming, their nest building and incubat­ing, and finally bringing their babies to the ledge and the porch railing. All this family activity made B.B.’s aloneness more appar­ent, and to me, more pathetic. Parakeets seem to form a stronger pair bond than most birds and I’d had in mind for some time a scene where a hearty young male would land on the ledge, take one look at B.B., and it would be instant love.

  During that spring three parakeets came and went, all females. The season was nearly over when, on June 15, a green parakeet appeared whose larger size and bluish-grey cere marked him as a male. We named him Green Gus. Though Gus and B.B. both fed off the ledge several times a day, it was two weeks before their paths crossed, in the late afternoon of June 29. The scene began to unfold just as I’d imagined it—Gus took one look at B.B., and sure enough, it was instant love. He started chasing her madly around the ledge, dodging sparrows and blackbirds and hopping over bandtails.

  Perhaps Gus’s approach was too importunate, or his timing was wrong—it was, after all, the supper hour and B.B. was undoubtedly hungry—or perhaps B.B. had been alone so long that she’d grown to prefer her own company. From ledge to tea tree, cotoneaster to eucalyptus, pine to porch railing, B.B. fled her suitor. When she had the chance she stopped to pick up a few seeds and swallow them with nervous haste before Gus caught up with her again. She could fly better than he could, probably because she’d spent more time in freedom, and by sunset he looked pretty tired and discouraged.

  B.B. had given every indication that she considered the whole business extremely annoying, so I was taken by surprise the follow­ing morning when the two of them arrived for breakfast together. A couple of times during the meal Gus remembered his passion, but both his advances and B.B.’s retreats looked rather perfunctory. Anyway, some kind of amicable understanding seemed to have been reached.

  It lasted three days. On the fourth, B.B. began to show signs of restiveness. She had, after all, been the number-one parakeet in the neighborhood for well over a year and it must have been difficult for her to share the billing—and the cooing. Her irritability in­creased daily. Twice I saw her peck Gus viciously on the back of the neck and send him plunging for cover into the thick foliage of the pittosporum.

  On July 6, exactly a week after the two parakeets first met, B.B. appeared for breakfast alone. She ate in a more leisurely manner than she had for some time, and after breakfast she retired to the tea tree to preen her feathers and hone her beak, and now and then doze off. There was an air of complacency about her, as if she was perfectly sure her grooming wouldn’t be interrupted or her sleep disturbed.

  She was right, of course. It’s possible that Mr. Rett’s theory about the danger to parakeets from owls applied in Gus’s case. More likely, though, B.B. decided that rather than lose her pleas­ant, peaceful life as a spinster, she preferred to lose Gus. Whatever her methods—and those two vicious pecks I’d seen her give him surely offer a clue—we never saw Gus again.

  The three dogs, Johnny, the Scottish terrier, Rolls Royce, the red cocker, and Brandy, the German shepherd, paid little attention to our exotic bird visitors. To them a troupial was no better or worse than a robin. But the unfeathered four-footed wildlife kept them in a state of excitement, especially at night.

  Johnny had a regular raccoon watch. As soon as the sun set, he took up his position at one of the two small louvered windows that had been put in below the main picture window for ventilation. Typically, the louvers never quite closed tightly and John would sit with his nose pressed against the slits, sniffing the evening air, his beady little eyes peering into the darkness. He ignored the rats, who were too common to bother about, and the possums, who were too slow and dull to arouse his interest, and he concentrated on the raccoons. Probably the basic reason for this is that his sight and hearing were failing with old age and the raccoons were the easiest of all our night visitors to hear coming and to keep track of once they’d arrived.

 
Even if the house was full of people and the hi-fi was fying its highest, the approach of the raccoons could hardly go unnoticed. It was announced by a series of loud, high-pitched shrieks. After this would come the snapping of twigs and crackle of oak leaves and eucalyptus; then, when they reached the silverleaf cotoneaster which was their staircase to the porch, there would be another series of shrieks. As far as I could tell, the raccoons’ fights, which were not confined to mere vocalizing, had to do with the order of ascent, first up the path from the creek, then up the tree to the porch railing. During the mating season, which seemed to last a good part of the year, these noisy sessions were more prolonged and even noisier and were mistaken by most of the neighbors for tom­cats fighting.

  If I happened to be working late in my office I would see the cotoneaster begin to shake violently—although this kind of coton­easter (pannosa) is usually referred to as a tree, it is, in fact, a shrub, and not meant to support the weight of twenty-five to fifty-pound mammals. I’d hear the rustle of leaves and the thump, thump, thump, thump, as one after another of the raccoons jumped from the porch railing onto the ledge.

  This was the moment Johnny had been waiting for since sunset. His tail would shoot straight up into a black furry exclamation point, stay there for a minute or two as if paralyzed with astonish­ment, and then it would start to wag. Guests seeing this performance for the first time invariably thought it meant that Johnny wanted to get out on the ledge to play with his new friends. Certainly he wanted to get out, but the purpose wasn’t play and the tail wagging was simply a nervous habit. I have seen him do the same thing just before he leapt for the throat of a hundred-pound malamute. Years of experience—and veterinarians’ bills—have taught me that most male Scotties are inveterate fighters, long of tooth and short of tact.

  Johnny’s raccoon watch was watched on the other side of the window by the raccoons’ dog watch. There were three raccoons to begin with, two males we called Rascal and Pascal, and a blithe and bonny female named for our fellow zoophile, Mary Hascall. A plentiful supply of one of their main dietary staples, acorns, supplemented by the hard-boiled eggs and peanut butter sandwiches we provided, had given them thick glossy coats, and moist black noses that shone like patent leather.

  Moving in single file along the ledge, the three of them would pass the louvered window beside my chair with barely a glance. But when they reached the window where Johnny was lying in wait, they rose up on their hind legs like little dancing bears and began going through all kinds of dodging and ducking and swaying movements, as if in time to Johnny’s soft, ominous growls.

  They also jabbed the air with their front paws in a manner that reminded me of the workouts of a punch-drunk fighter I used to see on the beach. Almost every day he came down to shadowbox on the wet sand. He chose early morning or late afternoon when the sun’s rays were oblique and lengthened his shadow into a formida­ble opponent. Watching his shadow intensely, almost as if he ex­pected it to make the first move, he would jab and feint, lunge and retreat, weave and bob, twist and twirl. Such a performance invari­ably attracted an audience, especially kids, many of them Mexican-Americans who stood and watched, half-envious, half-contemptu­ous. They called him Gavilan and I am not sure to this day whether the reference was to Kid Gavilan or to the numerous gavilans (sparrow hawks) that frequented the playing fields nearby. They called him other things, too, but he didn’t seem to mind. There wasn’t a shadow on the beach he couldn’t lick, just as there wasn’t a Scottie on the other side of the window that our raccoons couldn’t stand up to.

  Another raccoon joined us that spring, and in early August the first babies were brought to the ledge, the most irresistible trio I’ve ever had as guests. They were then about two months old, weighing as many pounds and looking like exact miniatures of their parents. At this stage the mother was extremely protective and did her best to shield them with her body when they had to pass Johnny’s window. This wasn’t easy when they got older and more venturesome and so she had to teach them the art of self-defense. These early lessons included, of course, the shadow boxing routine meant to outwit and confound Johnny.

  Perhaps the sight of seven raccoons going through such ridiculous motions proved too much for Johnny, or perhaps it was simply that old age began creeping up on him. Each night his raccoon watches started later and ended earlier, and finally, as winter approached, they ceased altogether. The raccoons didn’t notice his absence im­mediately. They took it for granted that he was on his side of the window just as surely as they were on theirs. Eventually one of the younger members of the group became curious, put his front paws up on the window sill and peered inside. Seeing no sign of Johnny he got bolder and pressed his forepaws and his nose against the glass.

  To animals which are mainly nocturnal, like raccoons, the sense of touch is often more important than vision and becomes highly developed in a number of organs. Our raccoons loved to explore things, both with their slim, dainty forepaws and their restless little noses that seemed constantly in motion, sniffing, probing, twitch­ing. I’ve frequently watched a raccoon as he took stock of an item of food I’d never put out previously. He would see it and smell it first, of course, but the main investigation was done by touch. He stroked it slowly and carefully with his front paws, then felt all around it with his nose. If the item of food didn’t pass the test I would find it on the porch or ledge the next morning untasted, without so much as a tooth mark on it. Raccoons are supposed to be omnivorous; ours were not.

  If the raccoon decided the new food was worth a try, he would pick it up in his front paws, put it in his mouth and carry it to the large ceramic saucer that served as a birdbath at one end of the ledge. Here he would wash it vigorously, so vigorously that the food frequently disintegrated like a piece of cake tossed in with the family laundry. Eventually the raccoons stopped this practice of washing their food, and just about in time, too—I was getting thoroughly sick of cleaning up the mess in the birdbath every morning.

  Once Johnny’s absence was discovered by the young raccoon, all the others came to the window and took turns looking in to see what had happened. It became a nightly routine: Oh dear, what can the matter be? Johnny’s so long at the fair.

  Sometimes, perhaps by accident, perhaps by design, they would tap the glass with their claws. The noise didn’t wake up Johnny but the other two dogs would charge over to the window, barking at the top of their lungs. The raccoons merely stared, as though in disapproval, at such a lack of gamesmanship. It was funny the way they paid less attention to the noise of the big German shepherd and the hysterical spaniel than they did to the almost inaudible growls of the little Scottie. That they showed good judgment can be attested to by a tree surgeon, now nameless but not forgotten, who has the dubious distinction of being the only person ever bitten by one of our dogs. After trimming the trees on the adjacent property he climbed over the concrete wall into our patio to pick up a fallen limb. “I was keeping my eye on the two bigger dogs,” he said, several stitches later. “I never thought of watching the runt.”

  The raccoons were smarter. They watched the runt.

  Our possums were as tame as the raccoons, but it was a differ­ent kind of tameness. The raccoons had sized us up carefully and decided we were okay, the possums simply seemed oblivious to our presence and carried on their affairs as if we weren’t there.

  One of these affairs was a knock-down-drag-out fight that started low in the tea tree and got higher and higher until the battle between the two twelve-pound beasts was being waged on the uppermost branch which was hardly more than a twig. Under­neath the twig, a long, long way down, was solid concrete. The possums might have survived such a fall but they couldn’t have escaped injury of some kind, so I tried to stop the fight by pound­ing on the window and shouting at them. The only effect this had was to draw the dogs into the action, which in turn drew Ken out of his study.

  Ken took the situation in at a glan
ce—not too surprising since it involved a couple of fighting possums, three furiously barking dogs and a large over-excited woman—and decided to try a different approach. He would coax the pugilists down from the tea tree with food. Grabbing a box of cookies out of the cupboard he went down to the patio, turned on the floodlights and began placing cookies underneath the tea tree where the possums couldn’t help seeing them. That is, the possums couldn’t help seeing them if they looked down. Only they didn’t look down. They looked at each other, and the battle continued. To attract their attention Ken threw a cookie at them. It missed. He threw a couple more and they also missed, but as his temper got worse his aim got better. The fourth cookie clipped one of the possums on the nose and the fifth hit his opponent square in the eye. Both animals loosened their grips and peered down as Ken let go with another round of ammunition.

  Possums are not very bright but I think even they recognized that there was something unusual about being attacked by Nabisco Vanilla Cremes.

  When the young raccoons were about two-thirds grown, the parents began treating them not as their own offspring anymore but as unrelated adults in competition for the food supply. Fights were shrill and frequent, on the porch and ledge, in the cotoneaster tree, on the patio and on the lower terrace beside the concrete birdbath which was knocked over nearly every night. During the winter one pair of raccoons deserted us, presumably to seek more peaceful surroundings. For the others a system was eventually worked out, much like the pecking order among birds.

  The large male arrived first. He climbed up the cotoneaster alone, inspected the food in the wooden dish and on the deck of the porch and ate what he fancied. The same procedure was re­peated on the ledge, and it was all done in a very leisurely manner, as if he couldn’t have cared less about the four hungry creatures who were waiting. The next diner was the female, and after her, the three young ones.