The Hylands and the Williamses kept the spotted owl family under observation until mid-August when the opening of deer hunting season made the canyon too dangerous to linger in. By this time the young owls were ready for independence, with wing and tail feathers well developed. The last I heard of them, they were still haunting their wooded canyon.
I have since had news concerning two other owls mentioned previously in this chapter. Someone cut the wire of the cage where Tiny lived, the burrowing owl who was a pet at the Museum of Natural History for years. Perhaps it was a senseless piece of vandalism, or perhaps Tiny’s escape was engineered by someone of good faith and poor judgment who didn’t realize the little bird had been raised in captivity and couldn’t survive by himself.
On a happier note, the living quarters under the museum roof which were long left vacant after the death of the screech owl Hermie have been found, approved and occupied by another screech owl. Possibly among owls, as among humans, the dwelling defines the dweller. Hermie Too has developed the same peculiarties and social mannerisms as his predecessor, and most visitors to the museum don’t know he isn’t the original.
Volumes could be written on the subject of the differences between the sexes among birds. Space limitations permit me only to emphasize that there are no hard and fast rules.
Usually the male is larger and stronger than the female, yet most of the male predators — eagles, hawks, falcons, harriers, buteos — are smaller than their mates and look to them for leadership.
Though singing is the prerogative of the male of most species, female grosbeaks sing, and so do cardinals, robins and mockingbirds. The dipper sometimes joins her mate in a duet, as do the females of several species of owl. Recently a pair of great horned owls put on a concert while sitting, appropriately enough, on our television antenna. Perhaps it wasn’t singing in the Metropolitan Opera sense, but I’ve heard human performances I’ve enjoyed less.
In at least one species of bird the female not only sings, she can do so with her mouth full. On a February morning I watched a pair of house finches during an early stage of their courtship. The female, who was being fed by the male, several times broke into song, enough like the male’s song to be identifiable, but softer and incomplete.
Usually it is the male bird who makes advances to the female, by displaying in various ways or by presenting her with nesting materials. But here, too, there are buts. Some female birds, like the skua, present grass and twigs to the males at courting time, and mutual display is the rule rather than the exception among sea birds.
One spring I watched a pair of mockingbirds put on what I thought was a mutual display beside the road in front of our house. The stage was an area about six feet square and the mockers stood facing each other, heads and tails held high, so that both birds looked larger than normal and of somewhat different shape. One of the birds hopped into the center of the stage and bowed briskly. The other did the same. The first bird gave a little hop to the left and bowed, the second repeated the movements exactly. This went on for some time, with the birds often meeting chest to chest in a seemingly amorous posture. The performance was both solemn and funny, and an onlooker couldn’t help being reminded of the fact that many folk dances originated in attempts to copy the movements of birds.
When I first witnessed this mockingbird exhibition it was during early spring and I assumed the dancers were male and female, and the dance was intended to take advantage of the difference. This assumption was shaken when, the following October, I saw a pair going through precisely the same ritual. Perhaps October eyes are different, unblurred by the winds of March, the rains of April, the wild weather of the heart in spring. At any rate my autumn eyes saw the birds as two males engaged in a bluffing match to decide territorial boundaries.
Since that time I’ve witnessed many such mockingbird rituals. When the same two birds were involved, the arena was usually the same patch of ground and the demonstration occasionally ended with feathers flying, but more often with the dignified retreat of one of the contestants. There can be little doubt that these were territorial disputes, or what Edward A. Armstrong calls “hostility displays, slightly socialised.” I say little doubt rather than no doubt because among birds, as among human beings, love-making exhibits some striking similarities to hate-making.
Mr. Armstrong also points out, in Bird Display and Behaviour, that among certain birds like terns, cormorants, grebes and band-tailed pigeons, even the climactic act of mounting doesn’t belong exclusively to the male.
A friend was recently lamenting that the task of differentiating between the human sexes was becoming more and more intricate, what with males coiffed and perfumed like females and females dressed like males. I suggested that the only really certain method was to wait and see which one of a pair went to the hospital to have the baby. We might do well to apply this to birds: the one that lays the eggs is the female.
7
A Tempest of Tanagers
The western tanager is a symbol for me of the strangeness and beauty of my first year of bird-watching. It is as effective as a time machine. At the sight of one of these birds I am instantly transported back to an August morning several years ago.
It was a summer of extremes. Along the shore the fogs were thick enough to stop traffic and virtually close the airport, yet a mile and a half crow’s flight away, in the foothills, we were having a heat wave. Santa Barbara’s heat waves are not publicly acknowledged since the official thermometer is down at the wharf. It is more or less amusing to sit in a 90° living room reading in the evening paper about how the rest of the nation sweltered while Santa Barbara remained “cool and comfortable with a midday high of 70°.”
Officially recognized or not, the heat wave, and the drought that went with it, continued. Most of the streams had long since dried up, and ours at the bottom of the canyon had only a trickle of water left in it. This, plus the containers of water we’d put out, in various sizes and at various heights, attracted a great many birds since water was in shorter supply than food.
The first tanager appeared on August 15, a male still wearing the brilliant red hood of his breeding plumage. I had never seen a western tanager before, and after I watched him drink and bathe and depart, I consulted the local checklist of birds. On the checklist then in use in Santa Barbara, the western tanager was marked as a local resident. Such a list is practically a bible to the new bird-watcher. Certainly I had no wish or reason to question it. So when the tanager appeared again the next day, with a couple of his relatives, I assumed that these were simply birds who lived in the area and were discovering our feeding station for the first time.
The three tanagers, all of them males, sat in the tea tree eating grapes. Since the occasion in early summer when I first put out grapes as substitutes for cherries, every day I’d been fastening a small bunch of them in the tea tree. They were eaten by the house finches, California thrashers, mockers and hooded orioles, but not avidly. There were always some left over for the silver-grey rats that streaked up and down the tree after dark like ribbons of light.