The tanagers seemed hungrier than the other birds. Perhaps they actually were, or perhaps the grapes were a particular treat — a child eating a plate of ice cream can look a lot hungrier than one eating a plate of spinach. At any rate the bunch of grapes was gone in no time. Though the slightest movement at one of the picture windows made the birds fly away, they came back immediately and hung around the tea tree, almost as if they were waiting for others to arrive.
They were, and others did — a mixed group of adult and immature males. I put out the last of the grapes I had on hand. When these were eaten, the birds turned to the other edibles in the tea tree: doughnuts, a banana, half a coconut shell filled with peanut butter and corn meal mixture.
At that point Ken and I had no misgivings whatever. We were delighted to be hosts to such beautiful birds and we proved it by making a quick trip to the store for more grapes. The grapes were a little over-ripe and on the way home a large number of them fell off their stems into the bottom of the paper bag. I washed them all thoroughly, as usual, wondering how to serve loose grapes to birds obviously accustomed to picking their own. The tanagers were wild creatures, easily alarmed, quite the opposite of the tame and trustful hooded orioles, though the females of these two species look quite similar to the untrained eye. I doubted that the tanagers would come down to the ledge to gather loose grapes so I had the idea of impaling the grapes on the twigs of a two-foot plastic tree we’d bought the previous Christmas to serve holiday delicacies to guests. I took the tree out of storage. It was still going to feed guests; they would merely be of another kind.
I fastened the tree to the far end of the porch railing. When its crystal-clear boughs were trimmed with blue and green grapes it looked very enticing. The birds agreed. It was picked clean within half an hour. I put out a fresh supply and the same thing happened again, in even less time. As the week ended I began to realize that I had spent the greater part of it sticking grapes on a plastic tree.
I had also succeeded in putting a large dent in my food budget. The band-tailed pigeons were a serious enough problem but at least it was relatively easy to fill a hopper with grain, and the grain used, milo, cost only a little over four dollars for a hundred pounds. Grapes, which had to be tied with twine or fastened with pipe cleaners or impaled on plastic twigs, caused considerably more trouble and expense. Nor was the situation likely to improve. Later in the season grapes, if they were available at all, would be prohibitively priced.
I will make no attempt to estimate our tanager population as the month of September ended. I’ll simply confess that I could no longer afford to buy enough grapes to keep the birds fed and I was reduced to asking for discards from the various markets to supplement the grapes I bought. This meant at least one, and often two or three trips a day checking produce departments and being ingratiating to store managers. Patience is not one of my virtues, so I am astonished, on looking over my records, to find the following autumnal note:
“The season for grapes is almost over. When I think of the hours I’ve spent lugging the things — since August 15 — and putting them out in the trees, I begrudge not one minute of them.”
Perhaps happiness is a thing called feeding birds.
Meanwhile the tanagers kept coming. The majority of the new arrivals were females and young males, and traveling with them was the occasional Bullock oriole and hooded oriole, the whitish belly distinguishing the former species from the latter. Among the tanagers themselves there was considerable fighting, frontal jabs and pecks on the rump, and a lone male trying to feed with a group of a dozen females was promptly given the bum’s rush.
Watching the tanagers in the tea tree was a little like watching a movie made in the early twenties, because there was no sound. The birds arrived, ate, drank, communicated, fought and departed without uttering a note. It seemed unnatural to us, accustomed as we were to the forceful comments of the acorn woodpeckers, the scoldings of the wrentits and the bold exposés of the scrub jays. Our tanagers were as silent as color. A year and a half was to pass before I heard one sing and then it was in the mountains near Flagstaff, Arizona, and I mistook the song for a robin’s. W.L. Dawson, whose translations of bird songs I find irresistible, writes the tanager’s thus: piteric whew, we soor a-ary e-erie witooer. Amen.
As the weeks passed the majority of female and young male tanagers over adult males constantly increased. If, as the checklist claimed, the birds were resident in our area, what was happening to all the adult males? I began to suspect that the checklist might be wrong and that the birds we were feeding were not the same ones over and over but were different groups stopping to eat and rest for a day or two before moving on. This would explain why they never became any tamer or more friendly toward us.
A phone call to the Museum of Natural History confirmed my suspicion. While the western tanager has been recorded here every month of the year, it is far more commonly known as a migrant. The spring migration begins as early as the second week in March, and the fall migration goes on until the end of October, though the peaks are mid-April to mid-May, and the last three weeks of September. A few pairs stay to breed in the lowlands but the majority favor the pines and firs of the upper altitudes, as do the hepatic tanagers. The other two species of tanager that migrate to the United States from the tropics both prefer lower altitudes, the summer tanager keeping pretty much to the cottonwoods along streams and the scarlet tanager to oak trees.
At our feeding station we have learned to tell at a glance whether a particular tanager is remaining for a while in the area or whether he is a migrant. The bird which has grown accustomed to the station will grab a grape and fly off the way our permanent residents, the mockingbirds, do. Probably, like the mocker, he is aware of the stiff competition and prefers his meals cafeteria style. The migrating bird, on the other hand, usually stays and eats, restaurant style, in the manner of the black-headed grosbeaks.
The rather belated discovery that our tanagers were migrants did nothing to alleviate the problem of keeping them all fed. October arrived. Most of the summer birds had left, the flycatchers and swallows, the grosbeaks and orioles, the Wilson and yellow warblers and the chat; and some winter ones had already arrived, the white-crowned and golden-crowned sparrows, Audubon’s warblers, hermit thrushes and pine siskins. Still the tanagers kept coming. My hospitality had deteriorated considerably — the plastic tree was long since taken down, scrubbed and stored away for the next Christmas, to serve less greedy, less numerous guests. Now I simply hurled the grapes by the boxful onto the terrace, unwashed, some mouldy, some brown with rot.
It was in October that we became acquainted with Richard the rat — in fact, it might be said that in a roundabout way the tanagers introduced us to him.
We have a wide variety of wildlife in our canyon, but at that point we had seen little of it beyond the rats in the tea tree. There were clues that couldn’t be overlooked, however. Every morsel of food left at night on the ledge or terrace was gone by morning. Sometimes we caught a whiff of musk or there was a sudden rustling in a tree with no wind to explain it. On half a dozen occasions we found the ceramic birdbath on the lower terrace overturned. The last time it broke, and we replaced it with one that was heavier and not so high, and beside it we put a large saucer and filled it with water. I know now that many wild creatures were watching our house every night, familiarizing themselves with us and our dogs and our various routines.