That month of February marked the first time that I saw the orange crown of the orange-crowned warbler. During or right after a heavy rain this crown is visible because soaking flattens the greenish feather tips that normally conceal the burnt-orange color underneath. There was another first that month: on the 20th, John Glenn took three very quick trips around the world.
The rain continued, interrupted every now and then by an interlude of dazzling sun that turned the eucalyptus leaves to silver and made golden balls out of the pittosporum pods. The waxwings, as usual, had their own idea of how to make the best use of these dry interludes — they bathed, as any chronicler of waxwing eccentricities should have guessed. They bathed as if they’d just been released from some desert prison.
While our creek turned into a roaring river and our yard into a swamp, while we were bailing out our lanai and piling furniture on furniture trying to keep half of it dry, while bridges disappeared, and fences and sections of road, the waxwings fluttered down into the birdbaths like wet autumn leaves and fluttered back up again to the tops of the eucalyptus trees whose blossoms they shared with the Audubon warblers. If I opened the dining-room window while they were using the birdbath just below it, I could hear the flock communicating with each other in their continual whistles so high that many people are unable to register the sound. Of the birds I’ve heard, only the blackpoll warbler reaches as high a pitch. Another of the waxwings’ familiar noises was made not by their vocal chords but by the rush of air through many pairs of wings as they rose in a body to the tops of the trees. It consisted of a long, drawn-out phew.
As the rains went on and on, even the waxwings had to dry out sometimes. I would find them roosting all over the place, on the rafters in the garage, under the eaves, in the woodpile, and once I even found a row of them perched on the handlebar of my bicycle, looking for all the world as if they expected to be taken for a ride. In a fit of compassion, untempered by common sense, I arranged a shelter for them on the porch, an old-fashioned wooden clothes-drying rack left over from the prelaundromat days. I had long since switched from grapes, which were not available, to apples, which were, and during the period that the clothes rack remained on the porch I learned one equation welclass="underline" apples + waxwings = applesauce.
Other birds discovered the rack, too, and it soon became a popular hangout. I counted ten species on it at one time: band-tailed pigeons and mourning doves, waxwings, mockingbirds, jays, English sparrows, house finches, purple finches, white-crowned sparrows and golden-crowned sparrows. Such a close and peaceful assemblage would have been unlikely to occur in good weather when its members had more freedom of choice. In fact, the change in attitude brought about by a prolonged period of storms was apparent not only in the birds’ relationship with each other, but in their relationship to me. In a four-inch rain I was the kindly purveyor of seeds and doughnuts and peanut butter sandwiches, and the birds perched on window ledges and porch railings waiting for a handout and peered in at me over the edge of the roof. A day of sun, however, shrank me down to size. The same creatures who’d almost eaten out of my hand now looked at me as if they had never seen me before and expected the worst.
During the storms we had our first and most intimate experiences with purple finches. Some of these birds, which usually breed at the higher altitudes, come down to the southern California coastal areas for the winter, their numbers varying considerably from year to year according to the availability of food in the mountains. That winter they were almost as common as our permanent residents, the house finches. The two species resemble each other physically, but there are striking differences in behavior. It would, in fact, make more sense if it were the purple finches who pursued a close association with dwellings and people. They are calmer in deportment, quieter in voice, and in general seem more adaptable to human beings.
House finches are nervous, noisy birds, always chipping and chirping and on the move. Their fright reaction to a door opening for the five thousandth time is the same as their reaction when the door opened for the first time. Such behavior is instinctive, but in the case of the purple finches it was quickly modified by experience. They learned that the opening of a particular door meant doughnuts, not disaster, and while instinct always made them fly away, experience kept shortening the distance. By April 23, when the last of them migrated, the flyaway distance had become the merest token foot or two.
The purple finches showed a pronounced weakness for sweets. When I put out the doughnuts in the morning, they avoided the plain kind and went immediately to the ones coated with icing. Instead of pecking at them here and there the way all the other birds did, the finches carefully proceeded to eat every trace of icing off, barely touching what lay underneath. We could always tell which doughnuts had been finch food: they hung naked in the trees like Christmas ornaments with the tinsel worn off.
Purple finches were more numerous at the feeding station that winter than any year since. This was also true of fox sparrows, represented by the three main subspecies, the dusky brown, the rusty and the slaty — by the end of the season a total of about fifteen birds. Subsequent winters have brought no more than one or two fox sparrows at a time and none of them stayed for the season.
In recent years other local birders have found fox sparrows in short supply. On the last five Christmas counts, for instance, a total of only fifty-eight were reported. Contrast this with the estimate, made by W. L. Dawson in the early twenties, that there were present “on a winter day in California anywhere from 20 to 200 million fox sparrows.” Perhaps the reason for the difference can be deduced from another set of figures: in the early twenties the human population of California was three and a half million, today it is nearly twenty million.
Some species, like the mockingbird, have adjusted so well to human intrusion that they are usually seen only in inhabited areas. Mockers appear to be more at home on a T.V. antenna than on a tree top, and better able to cope with cats and dogs than with hawks and owls. Such an adaptation is a much more complicated procedure for birds as innately shy as the fox sparrows. However, another species noted for its shyness is proving surprisingly adaptable. This is the wrentit.
At quite a number of feeding stations in this area, wrentits have become as sociable as titmice. Ours serenade us from the porch railing, their long expressive tails vibrating in rhythm with each note, and in the spring the young ones learn to sing in the lower branches of the ceanothus or elderberry bush. The song, among the easiest of all bird songs to identify, must be difficult to perfect. The summer air rings from dawn to dusk with the sound of wrentits practicing. These music lessons remind me of all the little boys who ever sawed away at a violin and all the little girls who ever blew earnestly into a woodwind.