Time passed, the fogs lifted and the swifts passed on their way northward to their breeding grounds. All except one — our bird was still appearing every evening with astonishing punctuality. In the middle of May he was joined by another swift, presumably female. Where she came from is anybody’s guess — was she a late migrant? Was the meeting accidental? Or did he go looking for a mate and persuade her to accompany him to our canyon? At any rate we were delighted because there was no official record of the Vaux’ swift nesting in southern California and we had considerable hope of supplying one. It seemed easy enough. All we had to do was watch and see which hole in which dead tree the birds emerged from and returned to. Since these birds also nest in chimneys we would have to be chimney watchers, too.
Every day, when the sun had set, I began my vigil, sometimes inside the house, sometimes outside, at the back, at the front, on the driveway. It hardly mattered, since the appearances and disappearances of these birds were like those of a magician’s rabbits. Suddenly they were there and just as suddenly they weren’t. Their speed, their unpredictable twists and turns and the number of hiding places available made constant observation impossible. I was lucky to get my binoculars on them for a fraction of a second.
On July 19, a third swift appeared with the other two, and while I didn’t witness any feeding maneuvers, I was as certain as I could be under the circumstances that the pair had mated and this was their fledgling. During the following week a new ornithological rule emerged from my experience: it is just as easy to lose track of three Vaux’ swifts as it is to lose track of two. Right under my nose (presumably) the birds had mated, built a nest and raised a family and I still hadn’t the foggiest notion which dead tree or which chimney held the secret.
My twilight vigils, covering a period of eleven weeks, had come to nothing of a positive nature, so I gave them up. Out of habit, however, I still glanced at the sky when the sun had set. During August and September I saw the Vaux’ swift on a dozen occasions, always just a single bird and probably the same one each time. On September 22, the Coyote fire started early in the afternoon and by sundown every schoolchild in Santa Barbara, Montecito and Goleta knew it was going to be a bad one. Many families living in the foothills were already packing their belongings in cars and trucks and borrowed trailers. Ken had the rainbirds going on our roof — these had been installed after the previous fire on the advice of the Montecito fire chief to all canyon dwellers — but the water pressure was dropping and the fire was racing toward us across the explosively dry mountains. I walked up the road to consult a neighbor about what we ought to do. As we stood watching the flames, the Vaux’ swift suddenly darted over our heads.
“Did you see that?” my neighbor screamed above the roar of helicopters. “It must have been a bat.”
It hardly seemed the time or place for a bird lesson, so I agreed that it must, indeed, have been a bat.
We didn’t see the bird again that year. Vaux’ swifts are said to winter in the tropics and I have a notion that he headed straight for some nice, wet rainforest.
The following spring the migrating Vaux’ swifts either missed us entirely, or, since the weather was unusually warm and clear, passed over us at a great height. We saw none of the birds at all until our friend of the previous year arrived back on April 25. He fell immediately into the same pattern, appearing out of nowhere to cross the darkening sky between the two largest Monterey pines, and becoming as regular a part of evening as the scent of star jasmine and the sound of May beetles striking the windows when I turned on the lights.
This swift, then, was the bird I was waiting for when I learned firsthand of the caution of the great horned owls in the presence of gunfire. The swift showed up on schedule, stayed within eye range for all of five seconds and disappeared.
I sat still, hoping for another glimpse of him and some inkling of where he was hiding out. My chances of finding a nest were considerably better than last year, since a great many of the dead trees in the area had been burned to the ground during the Coyote fire. Suddenly I heard what I thought was a shot. Then further up the canyon I saw a rocket-type firecracker rising in the air. Fortunately it was more crack than fire — it fizzled out at less than a hundred feet. Firecrackers are illegal in California and particularly dangerous in heavily wooded foothill areas, so I tried to determine the exact location of the explosion before reporting it to the fire department. Suddenly I saw the male great horned owl swoop past our house at chimney height. He didn’t make a sound. About three minutes later the female followed him, also without a sound. Always before when we’d seen the owls they had alerted us to their presence by calling to each other. That night, and every night for the next two weeks, though there were no more “shots,” the owls remembered the first one and passed through our canyon as mute as moths.
Year after year Santa Barbara’s Christmas bird count would list one screech owl. Readers of Audubon Field Notes, where the Christmas-count results are published, couldn’t be expected to know that it was always the same screech owl. The little bird’s name was Hermie, which stood not for Herman or Hermione but for Hermit since no one was sure what sex he belonged to, though he was referred to as “he.”
And a hermit he was indeed. Some years ago he established squatter’s rights to a four-inch tunnel that ran horizontally under the apex of the red tile roof of the Natural History Museum. This setup was so ideal that no mere chemical urge could compel him to share it with a partner. Or perhaps he’d already had a partner and lost her, and since screech owls mate for life, he was destined to spend the rest of his days alone. At any rate he made the best of things.
Hermie’s quarters, warm and dry in the winter, cool in summer and secure from enemies, permitted him to have a rather lively social life for an owl. When he felt like fraternizing he would come to the entrance hole of his tunnel and sit in the sun and watch the people going in and out of the front door of the museum. If they seemed particularly interesting he would watch with both eyes; if not, he would close one eye. Often he went to sleep entirely and at these times, without the glitter and movement of his eyes to draw attention to him, he looked like part of the building and even people who knew he lived there had trouble spotting him. He didn’t like too much attention. When a group of noisy schoolchildren pointed at him or bird watchers trained their binoculars on him with too much interest he retreated with sour dignity into the fastness of his tunnel.
The curiosity which can kill cats also kills many birds. This is what started Hermie’s trouble — though it was human ignorance that caused his death, as it does for so many wild creatures. Flying down to investigate some workmen who were putting in a new parking lot for the museum, Hermie got trapped in the wet blacktop. One of the workmen, seeing Hermie’s struggles, killed him with a shovel “to put him out of his misery,” a phrase that can cover a lot of unnecessary killings. And Hermie’s was unnecessary. Waldo Abbott, now curator of ornithology at the museum, says that if the little owl had been brought to his lab, no more than fifty yards away, the blacktop could have been removed from his feathers quite easily and Hermie would still be occupying his penthouse.