Every wooded canyon attracts rats, and the way the great horned owls haunted our particular canyon led us to believe we had more than our share. The rat we called Richard was not just a member of the pack. He was different, a loner. That he had a splendid reason for being a loner we didn’t discover for some time.
While the other rats were scurrying up and down the tea tree as soon as the sun set, Richard’s scene of action was the cotoneaster tree growing beside the porch outside my office. Here I had experimented with hanging half a coconut shell as a sunflower seed feeder for the finches and titmice. I figured that the voracious scrub jays would find it impossible to land on the shell and so the smaller birds would get their fair share for a change. I was partly right: the jays found it impossible to land on, but they didn’t find it impossible to try to land on, and their efforts made the shell toss and pitch and bounce and rock so vigorously that within five minutes there wasn’t a seed left in it. I abandoned the project and the coconut shell remained empty until Richard discovered it.
I saw him for the first time one night when I was working late. The sky was cloudless, the moon almost full and I could make out the coconut shell in the cotoneaster tree, swaying gently on its wire. Two things were wrong with the picture — first, there wasn’t enough wind to fret a feather; second, I saw hanging from the bottom of the shell what appeared to be another length of wire which hadn’t been present in the afternoon. Curious, I turned the beam of my desk lamp on the tree. Richard was curled up in the coconut shell, eyes closed, tail hanging straight down. His conscience must have been clear indeed because even when I called Ken and the two of us went right out on the porch, Richard didn’t wake up. There was something moving about this wild little creature trusting us enough to go to sleep in such an exposed place. There was something mighty suspicious about it, too, though we didn’t think of it at the time.
The following night Richard was back again for another long, deep sleep. He fitted so neatly into the coconut shell that it might well have been constructed especially for him. I was reminded of all the old movies with tropical settings provided by a potted palm, an imitation cobra and a couple of wicker chairs, the winged and hooded kind that sort of wrap around you or at least meet you halfway. In one of these chairs the rubber planter or civil servant or visiting cad would doze off after a few belts of brandy. The coconut shell bore some resemblance to such a chair, but Richard bore none at all to a rubber planter or civil servant or even visiting cad, and I couldn’t figure out why I was reminded of the old movies. To many people sounds are more evocative than sights — “Darling, they’re playing our song” — and smells more evocative than either sight or sound. Probably the novelty of the whole business dulled my sense of smell because it wasn’t until the end of the week that I became aware of the strange mixture of odors out on the porch. Half the mixture was what you might expect at a busy feeding station, the rest was definitely not.
We were experimenting with a flashlight to see just how much it took to wake Richard up. He didn’t respond to light at all, and didn’t open his eyes even when Ken jiggled the coconut shell up and down and back and forth. Richard had either a weak survival instinct or an optimistic nature, since the area had both bobcats and domestic cats, as well as great horned owls. The odor on the porch was particularly strong that night and not unpleasant, in fact, a little bit like wine.
“Wine,” I said. “Wine.” I pointed at our unconscious guest. “He’s not tame, he doesn’t trust us, he’s not just sleeping — he’s dead drunk. Stoned.”
“That’s impossible. Where would he get any wine?”
“I don’t know. But he got it.”
We let the situation go at that for the night, since neither of us was sure how a drunken rat would react to being suddenly awakened and evicted.
An investigation the next day revealed the picture. The coconut shell, which contained a few seeds and bits of rotting grapes, was serving as Richard’s winery. Whatever grapes the tanagers had left on the terrace to ferment, Richard had been gathering up and depositing in the coconut shell. If wine bottled for humans is aged by the year, Richard’s must have aged by the minute. But it had the same effect. For a certain period every night Richard forgot the cares and casualties of life and dreamed of a world where streets were not paved with gold but upholstered with cat pelts and owl feathers.
Unlike many of his human counterparts Richard was harming nothing but his liver. Still, some changes had to be made. The smell on the porch was increasingly bad — even sober rats tend to be a bit casual in their personal habits — and I found myself opening my office windows less and less. Two steps were agreed on: more careful selection of grapes for the lower terrace and removal of Richard’s coconut shell winery to a place farther from the house and less exposed to his enemies.
We don’t know what happened — whether one or both of these steps mortally offended Richard or whether he succumbed to cirrhosis or less subtle enemies — but we never saw him again, or if we saw him he was merely part of the group and indistinguishable from the rest. The bougainvillaea has long since grown up over the deserted winery.
Richard and the tanagers were only the beginning of what was to be a most unusual fall and winter. New bird-watchers don’t know what to expect and are unable to tell whether or not something is out of the ordinary. I accepted everything that happened as something that had doubtless happened the previous year and would happen again the following year. When Silk and Satin, the pair of phainopeplas that had nested in the pepper tree, departed in the fall I fully expected them to return the next spring. They’d practically been household pets, spending a great deal of time outside Ken’s office windows, eating the berries from the nightshade and the bugs from the tomato plants. The nightshade berries, the bugs, the pepper tree all remain, but the phainopeplas have not come back.
On September 26 a green-tailed towhee arrived, the first of the mountain species to visit us in the lowlands that autumn. We knew him only by his picture in the field guide and were delighted at the lordly way he kept his head feathers raised so that he seemed to be wearing a bright cinnamon crown. The brown towhee, too, raises his crest but not nearly so noticeably or so often. Green-tail stayed for a week. Perhaps because he was out of his element he acted in a much shyer manner than others of his family we’ve since seen in the mountains. He kept to the lower terrace, skulking in and out of the wild blackberry vines and poison oak. We never saw him fly. The green tail, by the way, figures less prominently in the living bird than it does in the scientific name given to it, chlorura chlorura, which is Greek for green tail green tail.
Overlapping the visit of the green-tailed towhee was a male Scott’s oriole in full lemon-and-black plumage. Once again the scene was the lower terrace, where we had arranged the birdbath fed by a continuous drip from a hose. Such a drip may have seemed like a waterfall to the oriole since he is a desert bird rarely found in our region. We very infrequently see Bullock’s or hooded orioles near the birdbaths, perhaps because their diet of insects, fruit and flower nectar provides them with sufficient liquid. But the Scott’s oriole seemed fascinated by water. He perched on the rim of the birdbath or stood under the drip from the hose for long periods of time. Though this species is noted for its persistent and beautiful singing, our guest was as silent as the tanagers whose grapes he shared for four days.
Many of the birds that visit us are equally quiet. They arrive in the fall, their families raised and songs sung, and depart again in the spring before new songs rise in them. Audubon warblers are among our most abundant winter visitors, yet we must go high into the mountains to hear one sing. This is true of other species. On a June morning in Banff National Park I discovered that the new song I was listening to came from an old friend, the ruby-crowned kinglet, whose ordinary winter rattle we hear from nearly every oak tree. And it was at Jenny Lake in the Grand Tetons where I heard my first hermit thrush sing. Everybody knows the robin’s song — except the people who’ve stayed in Santa Barbara all their lives. (At least one pair of robins has attempted to correct this situation by nesting in a park beside the Woman’s Club for the past three years.)