In heartening contrast to the shovel-wielding workman are the people like Gloria Forsyth, a friend of mine, who found a very young baby cliff swallow which had fallen out of its nest under the eaves of the Forsyth’s house. The experts whose advice Gloria asked about raising the tiny creature all told her the same thing: forget it, it’s too difficult to keep a baby swallow adequately supplied with insects. Gloria was not easily discouraged and she had, moreover, a steady source of food because she kept riding horses. For the next two weeks she could be seen at any time of the day walking around the corral, swatting horse flies, picking them up carefully from the ground with eyebrow tweezers and placing them in a little gold pillbox. Neighbors and passers-by must have received a distinctly odd impression but the swallow thrived, and the last Gloria saw of it, it flew expertly off her forefinger toward the corral. Sic transit Gloria’s hirundo.
There is something both absurd and awesome about the very tiny owls. The elf owl is the smallest and has the distinction of being the only member of the family in which the male is as large as the female — though at five inches it hardly seems to matter. The elf owl caught by a flashlight beam as he peers out of his hole in a saguaro makes a captivating sight, but it is the pygmy owl which intrigues me most. The size of a sparrow, he has the courage and skill of an eagle. He has been known to kill birds as large as a meadowlark, mammals as large as squirrels and reptiles a foot long.
Pygmy is different from other owls in many respects. He does not share the gross eating habits of the larger ones who devour their victims, bone and feather, and fur and teeth, and regurgitate the indigestible parts in the form of pellets. Pygmy eats daintily (though not in quite the same manner as Tiny, the burrowing owl at the museum, who holds his food in one claw and lifts it to his mouth like a picnicker eating a chicken leg) and he leaves no pellets to betray his presence.
There are other differences. Pygmy is unperturbed by the approach and observation of people. He hunts by day and his flight is different from that of most owls, both in manner and sound. He makes a distinct noise as he swoops down on his prey because his wings lack the adaptation of nocturnal owls, the sound-deadening filaments on the feather tips. There has been some disagreement about whether this adaptation was intended to permit the night owl to sneak quietly up on his victims or to make it easier for him to use his sense of hearing to locate his victims in the dark. The latter seems more reasonable. It would surely be inconsistent on the part of nature to silence an owl’s wings to conceal his presence and do nothing about moderating his voice, which gives him away to every mouse in a meadow miles away.
The pygmy owl is especially intriguing to me because, after years passed without one being reported in our area, Jewell Kriger and I found a pair nesting in Refugio Canyon. Refugio Canyon is perhaps best known to birders for its yellow-breasted chats, which can nearly always be found in May and June in the willow thickets along the stream. (The canyon is also known for its tarantula migration, an event not likely to appeal to many spectators.) Sometimes patience is necessary to see the chats. It certainly was on that day. We could hear them sounding off, first from one side of the road, then the other, but we couldn’t manage to get one in the binoculars. This spring repertoire of raucous noises contrasts sharply with the absolute silence of the chat who visits us every fall for a month to feed on grapes and bananas.
Suddenly Jewell said in a rather surprised voice, “I didn’t know sparrows would eat mice...”
Nor did I. I focused my binoculars on the limb of the dead oak tree she was looking at and the “sparrow” turned his head slowly and transfixed me with a pair of the brightest yellow eyes I’ve ever seen.
The little owl showed not the faintest sign of nervousness or alarm at our intrusion. He casually resumed his business, which was not eating the mouse but removing certain inedible portions of it. I began to suspect that he had a mate nearby and that the mouse must be intended for her. He was in no hurry to let me know for sure. He picked fastidiously at the mouse’s carcass, turning every now and then to look at Jewell and me in a manner that reminded me of an earnest biology teacher giving a lesson in dissection and checking to see if his pupils were paying attention.
Meanwhile we weren’t the only creatures to discover the presence of the pygmy owl. Suddenly the air around us was filled with wingbeats and the sounds of avian alarm and anger, buzzes and cluckings and rattles and squeaks and squawks. The swallows appeared first and were most abundant, tree swallows and violet-greens and cliffs. One would swoop down on the owl so low it almost touched him, then rise in the air to let the next one swoop down, until there was a steady strafing of outraged swallows. Other birds hastened to join the action — Bullock’s orioles, Oregon juncos, ash-throated flycatchers, red-winged blackbirds, black-headed grosbeaks — until the place was a riot of sound and color and motion. Many of the birds were larger than the owl, but if he was disturbed he didn’t show it. He calmly continued his task with only the occasional blink to indicate his thoughts: Look at these idiots railing at me when I’m only doing my duty...
After about ten minutes he flew to a hole fifteen or twenty feet up in the main trunk of a dead sycamore tree. He dropped the remains of the mouse over the edge of the hole so that its tail and hind legs hung down, then he let out a sound which was half-hoot, half-whistle, and flew down low, straight across the road, and out of sight. Except for a dozen or so swallows who followed him, the other birds dispersed and went about their business.
We kept our binoculars focused on the hole in the sycamore and as we watched, the mouse seemed suddenly to come to life and start crawling over the edge into the hole, wagging its tail back and forth. It was an eerie sight indeed, even though one was aware that Mrs. Pygmy was the principal behind it. We waited, hoping she would show herself, but she didn’t. Many times on subsequent occasions I saw her yellow and black eyes peering out of the little round hole in the sycamore. She looked like a jack-o’-lantern set in the window of a tree house at Halloween. Her eyes, incidentally, appeared quite different from the male’s. Since she spent most of her time in the darkness of the nesting cavity, her pupils were greatly dilated and the narrow yellow rim of iris seemed to have been added as an afterthought by someone with a dab of leftover paint.
Jewell and I decided to postpone finding the chats until another day so that we could hurry back to town and put the pygmy owl on the Rare Bird Alert.
The R.B.A. was started in Santa Barbara in 1963. It works simply. People who sign up for it are given cards with a list of six or seven names and phone numbers. When they are contacted by the person whose name precedes theirs on the card they must contact the next person listed below. Thus, in as little as fifteen minutes, every eager bird-watcher in town can be informed of the whereabouts of a rare bird. There is one essential rule — the birds so found must not be molested or disturbed in any way.
In certain other localities the R.B.A. has been sadly abused. Collectors for museums and universities have operated with such callous disregard for birds and birders alike that many expert birders no longer report their findings to the R.B.A. This will continue to be the case, I am assured, until collecting is outlawed in the United States as it was some time ago in England when the English became aware that a little collecting here and a little collecting there added up to an awful lot of dead birds. Collectors actually exterminated one species of hummingbird, Loddige’s racket-tail, before naturalists had a chance to study the birds in life. Only about forty California condors survive in the world today, though there are 112 dead ones in public collections and nobody knows how many more in private collections. I think we can safely assume that very few of them died of heart attacks. But perhaps the prize for the most stupid act of collecting must go to the famous ornithologist who saw the last authenticated flock of Carolina parakeets in 1904 in Florida. There were thirteen birds in the flock and he shot four of them.