However the columbine grapevine works — perhaps in a kind of pidgin English — it is quick and efficient in spreading the word about a new feeding and watering area. By week’s end our bandtail’s immediate family was well established and every hour brought a new batch of obscure in-laws and fifty-second cousins and friends of friends of friends. They all took an immediate fancy to the birdbath with the continuous drip. They stood on it, they drank from it, immersing their beaks to the nostrils and drawing in the water; they showered, lifting first one wing, then the other, letting the drip trickle down onto their wing pits.
Band-tailed pigeons share with some other flocking birds a custom that serves the species well in the wild but is not expedient at a feeding station. A bandtail arriving at dawn for breakfast doesn’t immediately go to the feeder and start eating. Instead, he perches in one of the eucalyptus trees, and even though he must be hungry he waits quietly for his friends, now and then thrusting his head forward and back to appraise his surroundings more accurately. When a certain number of birds have arrived, as when a critical mass is reached in nuclear physics, the action starts. Suddenly, like clumsy blue butterflies, the pigeons begin falling out of the trees onto the feeder and the lower terrace. At one of these eucalyptical gatherings of the clan I have counted ninety-eight bandtails.
There must be some kind of signal to start this mass movement. If it’s a voice signal, I’ve never heard it; if it’s kinetic, either I haven’t seen it or don’t recognize it. It seems likely that one of the bandtails is the accepted leader and sets an example for the rest to follow. When he decides to eat, everybody eats — providing the dining area is a two-acre field, not a seed hopper with a perch meant for half a dozen birds.
The lone bandtail is a quiet bird with little to say as he goes about his business. But when twenty or thirty of them attempt to land on a narrow perch the resulting noise sounds as if they were approaching the boozy climax of an avian cocktail party with every guest trying to communicate at once in grunts and clucks and squawks. From a certain distance this cacophony is very human-sounding and I sometimes think that if, instead of a party, they were holding a meeting with rules of procedure to give each of them a turn, I might be able to understand what they meant.
By the end of that first week in August, it was becoming obvious with the arrival of each new in-law and fifty-second cousin that we needed a much larger pigeon feeder, placed in an area apart from the other feeders so that the smaller birds wouldn’t be frightened away. Not that the bandtails were aggressive — I’ve never seen a bandtail indicate rancor toward a bird of another species even in self-defense, and I’ve watched many of them being bullied and birdhandled by acorn woodpeckers, scrub jays, mockingbirds, even house sparrows. The size of the pigeons and their number, however, were discouraging some of the shyer species. The wrentit, the Oregon junco and the song sparrow seemed reluctant to share a table with the bandtails, without having any real cause to fear them.
The second pigeon feeder had a trough placed between two pine trees some distance from the house, and could accommodate twenty pigeons. Almost as soon as Ken had driven in the last nail, we began to learn of the existence of an ornithological principle new to us: people with a six-pigeon feeder have twenty pigeons, people with a twenty-pigeon feeder have fifty, and for people who have two feeders, a ledge and a charge account at the feed store, the sky’s the limit — unless nature steps in and sets a limit of her own. And that is what happened next.
The conclusion of the bird course hadn’t meant the end of my association with Mr. Rett and Marie Beals. Both had been to our house to see the bird-feeding setup, Marie and I went birding together whenever possible, and I frequently visited the Museum of Natural History for advice and information from Mr. Rett. On one of these occasions he asked me if Ken and I had been coming across any dead mourning doves or band-tailed pigeons in our area. Two doves had been brought to the museum, one dead and the other greatly emaciated and unable to eat. Autopsies had in each case revealed a large growth in the throat caused by a protozoan parasite, trichomonas gallinae. Birds so afflicted were unable to eat but they kept trying and regurgitating, thus passing the parasite on to others, especially at a feeding station. He advised me to be on the lookout for dead or emaciated birds, and if I found any, to suspend feeding operations immediately in order to prevent a serious outbreak of trichomoniasis.
I didn’t like the idea of suspending feeding operations. It seemed to me that a well-nourished bird would be more resistant to disease and that a bird already infected would be even more dependent than usual on a steady food supply and lots of fresh clear water. Closing down the station would be a little like closing down a hospital because people were getting sick. Mr. Rett admitted that he’d never witnessed an actual epidemic (or rather, epizootic) outbreak of trichomoniasis, but he’d received government pamphlets warning of such a thing and advising people to beware. I assured him that we would beware.
As the week progressed there were manifest indications that we were losing some of our pigeons: cracked corn and milo left untouched on the lower terrace and in the trough between the pines, fewer and scantier gatherings of the clan in the eucalyptus trees, the sounds of partying more sober and subdued. We found no dead birds but this was not surprising since much of our area is a jungle of underbrush. Here a dead or dying bird could lie undetected or be eaten by a cat, a sharp-shinned or Cooper’s hawk, or a turkey vulture. Whatever the cause, we were rapidly losing our pigeons.
The following Monday, when I went down to scrub out the drip bath, a bandtail was waiting for me on the terrace. He watched my approach without alarm, making no effort to move away or take cover. When a wild creature departs from its usual behavior pattern like this, you can be pretty sure it’s sick; its survival instincts are not operating. The bird was not emaciated. Frequently on our winter beach walks Ken and I come across oil-soaked and grounded scoters, grebes, gulls and loons. Our friend and fellow birder, John Flavin, who has rescued, cleaned, fed and put back into circulation any number of these creatures, taught us how to predict with some accuracy a bird’s chance of surviving the various steps of this difficult treatment. If the breastbone appears very sharp it means the bird hasn’t eaten for a long time and is a poor risk.
Our bandtail’s breastbone appeared to be well fleshed. I kept the bird under surveillance all morning. Mostly he dozed in the sun, sometimes he picked up a few grains of milo and ate them with no sign of difficulty in swallowing. By noon he was dead.
This was the first bird we lost at our feeding station and it was a blow to me. I had fallen into the habit of accepting the California sun as a fetish that would dissolve disease and hold death in abeyance.
I had to drop in at the veterinarian’s that afternoon to pick up a case of the special diet my Scottie needed, so I decided to take the bandtail with me and find out what had caused its death. If an epidemic was about to start I wanted to be ready for action, preferably immediate and drastic.
The vet, a soft-spoken, pleasant man, was surprised when he opened the carton containing the pigeon — and not one hundred percent delighted. “What am I supposed to do with it?”
“Find out why it died, whether it had trichomoniasis or not.”
“Good grief, what’s that?”
I repeated what Mr. Rett had told me about trichomoniasis. The vet, while examining the pigeon briefly, said he didn’t know very much about avian diseases, except those affecting domestic species like parrots, budgerigars and canaries, but that the bandtail appeared to be young, uninjured and well nourished. This ruled out old age or accident as the cause of death, as well as trichomoniasis.