Biologists themselves are becoming alarmed at the way many of their colleagues waste our natural resources. At the upper levels there is much unnecessary, even foolish, duplication in research. At the lower levels, class experiments all too often involve senseless destruction of mammals, birds and marine life. I recently came across, in an ornithological journal, the report of a study of hybridization between Baltimore and Bullock orioles as evidenced by differences in the amount of black and orange pigmentation. The birds could easily have been mist-netted, examined, banded for future observation and released. Instead, 623 orioles were collected — and this was for only one study among many done on the same subject.
Biology, which means the study of life, has come more and more to mean thanatology, the study of death. Biologist Farley Mowat wrote of being “sorely puzzled by the paradox that many of my contemporaries tended to shy as far away from living things as they could get, and chose to restrict themselves instead to the aseptic atmosphere of laboratories where they used dead — often very dead — animal material as their subject matter.”
To an increasing number of people, collecting is a dirty word.
I would never have reported the pygmy owl on the Rare Bird Alert if I hadn’t been sure it was safe from collectors. Jewell made a note of the time of day, the mileage on the odometer, the species and height of the tree containing the nesting hole, and so on, while I hunted around for a marker to place on the side of the road. I found a section of board that had been painted red. This was a piece of good luck. (Every year there is talk of our local Audubon branch designing simple markers and distributing them to members who spend considerable time in the field. Nothing ever comes of it, probably because most of us have learned that you find the rare birds only when you’re not prepared for them.)
Some members go out on just a few of the bird alerts, but there are others who will instantly drop whatever they’re doing and set out to wade through a marsh for a wood stork, climb a mountain for a white-headed woodpecker or go to sea in a dense fog looking for a Xantus’s murrelet.
Perhaps the most difficult alerts to follow through are the warblers, since they are so tiny and so active. Easterners accustomed to seeing warblers in migration through leafless trees aren’t happy about having to locate our California birds in the dense foliage of live oaks and sycamores and eucalyptus. Many warblers reported on the R.B.A. are never seen by anyone but the original finder. Quite a few, however, are. A rare palm warbler, put out on the R.B.A. as seen “in Gaviota State Park, near picnic table No. 9; look low and watch for tail wagging,” stayed all fall, seldom venturing even as far as picnic table No. 10. A chestnut-sided warbler — a first record for Santa Barbara — spotted by the Hylands on a lemonade bush along the bridle trail in Hope Ranch, was found the following day and the day after by Nelson Metcalf and Ken and myself in the very same bush.
The pygmy owls, committed as they were to a fixed location which was well marked, proved the easiest of all the R.B.A. birds to locate. The tiny pair became our star attractions, all the more so after Nelson Metcalf discovered that if the male was off hunting when visitors arrived, he could be coaxed back by an imitation of his call notes. It didn’t matter how poor the imitation was — I’ve never learned even to whistle properly, but by pursing my lips as if I were about to whistle, then saying “hoo-hoo” instead, I could always evoke a response from the little owl, who would answer from a considerable distance and come flying in with his obstreperous escort of swallows.
Refugio Canyon is too far away to permit anyone with a job to perform to keep the owls under close observation. But they must have raised their young in a manner satisfactory to them because they returned the following year to the same nesting hole accompanied by what surely appeared to be the same escort of swallows. Eventually a road construction crew bulldozed over the red marker I’d put out, but by that time every birder within a hundred miles knew exactly where to find a pair of pygmy owls.
Another member of the owl family, much rarer than the pygmy and probably the most difficult to find of all eighteen North American owls, couldn’t be put on the Rare Bird Alert because private property was involved, and the owners, after losing a valuable colt to a trespassing hunter, had the area posted and patrolled.
It was a canyon near Santa Maria, with steep sides heavily wooded, the preferred habitat of this particular species of owl. The trees along the stream were mainly cottonwoods, willows and sycamores, and on the slopes, mature oaks, both deciduous and evergreen, with an abundant undergrowth of poison oak, more popular with owls than with owlers. Mary and Tom Hyland had received permission to watch birds on the property, and it was here on an April twilight, in 1966, that they came upon a pair of spotted owls. With the enthusiastic help of Mickey and Ed Williams, the Hylands kept the birds under observation for four months.
Mary had called me from Santa Maria in late April when she and Tom found the owls, and again in May to urge me to drive up and see them. Once the owls were located early in the morning in a particular place, Mary said, they could almost certainly be depended on to stay in the same place for the balance of the day. The trick was to locate them. Many owls are seen more often by day than by night — the burrowing, the pygmy, the short-eared, the snowy, the hawk owl — but spotted owls are nocturnal. The best time to find them is at night when they call to each other as they hunt. The best time to observe them, however, is in the daytime while they doze in a tree.
Though I certainly wanted to see the owls I wasn’t keen about driving seventy-five miles by freeway, then searching through a remote canyon on foot to try to find two silent, motionless birds endowed with almost perfect protective coloration. I decided to wait.
On June 7, Mary called to tell me that while none of the observers had been able to find a nest, the evidence that one existed had been photographed the previous day — two baby spotted owls perched on the limb of a valley oak some fifteen feet above the ground. How the babies, still in natal down without tail or wing feathers, had gotten out of the nest and onto the limb of the oak tree was a mystery. Presumably the parent birds moved them because when I visited the canyon the next morning, only a single baby owl was in evidence, and according to Mary, he was in a different tree from the one he’d shared with his sibling the previous day.
It was 9:30 a.m., a time for all nocturnal creatures to be asleep. Baby Spot evidently hadn’t been told this. He was awake, his large dark eyes wide open and as luminous as two smoked agates. He was about twelve inches long, a little more than half-size, and so fuzzy all over that he appeared to be wrapped in cotton candy which someone had colored light beige instead of pink. The presence of five observers — Mary, Mickey Williams, Jewell Kriger, Nelson Metcalf and me — didn’t alarm him in the least. He dozed off while we watched him, his claws hooked securely around the limb of the oak tree, his head sunk into his shoulders, giving him a completely neckless appearance. With neck and eyes hidden he looked not so much like a bird as like a kind of large oval-shaped fungus growing out of the tree.