Young birds were more likely to hit the windows than older ones. That spring three baby grosbeaks struck, and only one survived after about a twenty-minute period of semi-consciousness. The experts tell me, by the way, that when a bird is injured by a window strike it should be left strictly alone. Handling it, no matter how gently, may result in a fatal stroke or heart attack caused by fear.
During the past year we tried a system for preventing window kills which has worked very well for the smaller birds but has had no appreciable effect on the doves and pigeons. After the windows are washed on the outside we deliberately “spot” them, either with a hose or with one of the water pistols we keep around the house to discourage dog fights. The resulting stains mar the windows somewhat, but serve as caution signals for birds without interfering too much with the pleasure of watching them.
As the month of October continued I began to notice not so much a decrease in the number of tanagers as a decrease in the number of trips I had to make to the market for grapes. By the middle of the month the females and immatures going through were drably dressed for travel and the few males had lost all trace of their red heads of springtime. On October 22, I counted only five tanagers, and the following day, none at all. A lone bird appeared November 5, either a late migrant arriving, or a bird who hadn’t been able to keep pace with his group and had come back for more rest and food. He stayed for two days. His departure marked the end of the tanager migration. It had covered a period of eighty-three days and involved countless birds. The word countless is the only applicable one since we had no way of knowing which birds ate and departed, and which stayed for a day or two, or a week, or even longer.
Without the tanagers the terrace looked strangely colorless and still. Grapes rotted and mildewed in the shade, and shriveled to raisins in the sun. At the market I would be asked how all the tanagers were, and I would have to say I didn’t know, they had gone. Where? I wasn’t sure but the book said they wintered from Mexico to Costa Rica. Would they be back? Of course, I replied, and I believed it. Tanagers migrated every year, there was no reason why they shouldn’t visit us again the next fall and the one after. As a new birdwatcher, I had no way of knowing that what brought the tanagers our way in the fall of 1961 was an unusual set of circumstances which probably wouldn’t be repeated in our lifetime.
The first reference I found to such a migration was in Birds of America, edited by T. Gilbert Pearson:
The tanagers are in California every year, and every year they migrate to their nesting grounds in spring and return in fall, but only at long intervals do they swarm in prodigious numbers. Evidently the migration ordinarily takes place along the mountains where the birds are not noticed. It is possible that in some years the mountain region lacks the requisite food, and so the migrating birds are obliged to descend into the valleys. This would seem to be the most plausible explanation of the occurrence — that is, that the usual line of migration is along the Sierra Nevada, but some years, owing to scarcity of food, or other cause, the flight is forced farther west into the coast ranges.
A. C. Bent, in the tanager volume of his Life Histories of North American Birds, gives an account of a large migration in southern California, from April 23 to May 16 in 1896, and of another in 1903, in Pasadena, with the greatest number occurring the last three weeks in May.
In Birds of California, W. L. Dawson mentions the spring of 1912 as a very unusual one, when the birds “fairly swarmed,” and “one could have seen a hundred adult males in the course of an afternoon’s drive.” In the next paragraph he tells of a lady in Montecito — the part of Santa Barbara where we live — who during that spring had an arrangement for feeding halved oranges to the tanagers and as many as twelve birds would feed at the same time. Dawson adds, “Never was a more distinguished array of beauty at a single function — not in Montecito even.” I think we did as well in 1961 but it was much too late to invite Mr. Dawson.
The three heavy migrations mentioned took place in the spring and covered a period of less than a month. Ours was a fall migration and from the first arrival to the last departure a period of nearly three months elapsed. Why? The passage I quoted previously from T. Gilbert Pearson, in Birds of America, suggests that the mountain areas may be short of food in certain years and the tanagers have to move down into the lowlands. A study of our rainfall figures supports this theory.
The lush and varied foliage of Santa Barbara proper gives no indication that ours is a semi-arid region with an average yearly rainfall of 17.7 inches, all but a trace of which falls between November 1 and May 1. Our total rainfall for the last hundred Julys, for instance, measures a little over two inches, and for the same number of Augusts, less than two and a half inches. Total, not average. The native plants have adapted to this schedule and survive and even flourish throughout the dry summer months if they have received enough moisture during the winter and early spring. A flood year, 1958, brought nearly twice the normal amount of rain and more than the total rainfall of the three drought years that followed. Mere figures don’t give an adequate picture, however. For instance, in the season of 1960–1961 we had 9.99 inches of rain. This wouldn’t be so bad if it had been distributed fairly evenly over our six-month rainy season, but nearly all of it fell in November. By the middle of August, 1961, the third of three drought years, creek beds were as dry as the Mojave Desert, and in the mountains all but the toughest shrubs and trees were blighted, their leaves crisped and their fruits withered by unmitigated sun. What was worse still for the birds, insects were in short supply, especially the wasps and other hymenoptera which make up a much larger percentage of the tanager’s diet than fruits of any kind.
So the tanagers came down from the mountains. And came and came and came...
8
Wolves and Waxwings
The flood began in February. It was as if some well-intentioned but muddleheaded weatherlord had made a belated study of the low precipitation figures for the last three years and decided to even things up a bit for Santa Barbara. More rain fell, eighteen inches, than during an average year, and the month became the wettest since weather records were started in 1867. The birds were also the wettest since 1867. Differences seemed to dissolve in water and one soggy bird looked very much like another. Even those distinctive dandies, the waxwings, could be identified from a distance only by their dumpy little legs. Their crests looked like water-flattened cowlicks and their sleek beige coats were black and blotched.
The only birds that didn’t change in looks were those colored mainly black and white. The acorn woodpeckers were so unique in appearance that no mere foot and a half of rain could alter them, and the bold stripings of the white-crowned sparrows simply became exaggerated, with the black turning blacker and the white whiter. The same was true of the little black-throated grey warbler who had decided to spend the winter with us. Every now and then he would forage in the cotoneaster outside my office door and I would see the glitter of his golden eye jewel like a tear caught before it fell.
Readers familiar with our area will perhaps wonder why I omitted mentioning blackbirds in the preceding paragraph. The fact is, though it seems incredible to me now, the only blackbird we had then was a Brewer’s male who would come and perch quietly in a tree to watch the other birds eat. Weeks passed before he himself flew down to feed, and weeks more before he brought a friend and then a friend’s friend. The red-winged blackbirds didn’t discover our feeding station until June of 1962 when it had been established for a year, and another year was to elapse before we had our first brown-headed cowbird. The English sparrows, too, were mercifully slow in discovering us. That winter we had a grand total of five — and didn’t have sense enough to appreciate how grand it was! These last four species, depending somewhat on the season, now make up about seventy-five percent of our bird population and their sheer numbers have become a problem, especially the English sparrows. It is rumored that the breeding season of these birds begins on March 1 and ends on February 28, with a one-day holiday every leap year. My own observations lead me to disagree — our English sparrows don’t observe the holiday.