I said what I had to say: “That’s impossible.”
“I know. It’s a male, in perfect plumage, head solid black, belly and rump oranger than oranges.”
I told her I’d be right over, bringing along all my reference books on birds.
When I arrived at the Krigers’ some twenty minutes later, the oriole had left. Jewell was confident though that he would return because his friend was still in the willow tree. She showed me the “friend,” a red-breasted sapsucker, a rather uncommon winter visitor in this region and well worth the trip over just by himself.
The friendship was strictly a one-sided affair, the sapsucker’s opinion of orioles being low, and regrettably, quite justified. As almost everyone who feeds hummingbirds is aware, orioles have a weakness for sweet syrup. So do sapsuckers. But there the similarity ends, for the sapsucker works for his syrup. The oriole, whose beak is not equipped to drill into the bark of trees, does the next best thing — he follows the sapsucker as the jaeger follows the tern and the gull the pelican.
While we were waiting for the Baltimore oriole to rejoin his friend in the willow tree I checked the various books I’d brought with me for references to the species. It was not mentioned at all in Ralph Hoffman’s Birds of the Pacific States, W. L. Dawson’s Birds of California, or Brown and Weston’s Handbook of California Birds. Birds of America, edited by T. Gilbert Pearson, limited the range of the Baltimore oriole to east of the Rockies, and Roger Tory Peterson, in his Field Guide to Western Birds, wrote that any appearance of the species in California or Arizona was accidental. I began to have serious doubts about Jewell’s eyesight.
Through binoculars I watched the sapsucker drill another hole in the already riddled tree — these birds are partial to willows because the wood is soft and juicy. He was young and tousled-looking as if he’d just blown in on a high wind, and the red of his upper parts was duller and darker than in any pictures I’d seen of him. (A year later he was a much sleeker and more beautiful bird.)
Suddenly the sapsucker paused, turned his head, shook himself all over as though in a rage, and flew off. Almost instantly his place at the newly drilled hole was taken by the Baltimore oriole. There wasn’t the slightest doubt about the bird’s identification, every feather was perfect. The solid black head and the orange of the undertail reversed the colors of the hooded oriole, and a thin white wing bar supplanted the broad white patch of the Bullock oriole.
I called Mr. Rett at the Museum of Natural History, told him I was watching a Baltimore oriole in the Krigers’ yard and asked him to send someone from the museum to come and check it.
He sounded quite exasperated. “I can’t send the members of our staff charging off every time a crackpot call comes in. You know what kind of reports we get? — condors perched on rooftops, coppery-tailed trogons fluttering around gardens, cactus wrens in pine trees...”
He went on to what I assumed was his standard lecture to crackpot callers: birds often didn’t look exactly like their pictures in the field guides; size was always, and color usually, very deceiving, yellow and orange, for instance. The bird I was watching might well be a Scott’s oriole since one had recently been reported in Montecito.
“I know,” I said coldly. “I reported it. And yellow and orange are no more alike than lemons and oranges.”
“All right, all right, all right. I’ll see if Waldo can make it out there later in the day.”
Arrangements were made for Waldo Abbott to come at two o’clock since the oriole’s time of arrival in the afternoon averaged about two-thirty according to Jewell’s records. Meanwhile the word had spread. Pat Higginson arrived hoping to add a new bird to her list, Mary Hyland staggered in with half a ton of photographic equipment, and shortly before two Waldo arrived, looking like a man determined to be underwhelmed.
Waldo is a very active, restless man, and as long as he was helping Mary move photographic equipment around and set it up, he was content. But the instant he had to sit down quietly in a chair and wait for the oriole he began to show signs of wanting to bolt. We couldn’t risk losing him at this critical juncture so Pat and I had a conference in the kitchen. She suggested that since Waldo was a man who loved food and birds — not necessarily in that order — we should ply him with food and bird questions. Waldo was a born teacher and he could no more walk away from a question than an actor could walk away from an audience. Pat supplied the cookies and coffee, I supplied the questions.
The oriole picked that day to be late. Three o’clock came and no bird, and Waldo was fit to be tied. In fact, Pat and I were seriously considering tying him if nothing else worked. Fortunately we didn’t have to. At three-thirty the red-breasted sapsucker flew into the willow tree, closely followed by his orange-and-black “friend.”
Cameras clicked, and the Baltimore oriole became part of Santa Barbara’s bird history. The colored slides taken by Mary and Waldo that day, of the Baltimore oriole alone and with the sapsucker, were burned in a serious fire started by chemicals in Mr. Rett’s lab, but Mary still has all the negatives. Subsequently, Waldo wrote an article about the oriole which appeared in Condor magazine and which, as far as I know, was the first official report of the bird in California. Since then, this species has been sighted in the state on many occasions. Two years after the appearance of Jewell’s Baltimore oriole, which stayed in her yard all that winter and every winter since, ten members of this species were seen at various places in southern California: Santa Ana, Rancho Park and Point Loma in addition to Montecito.
No single wild bird has become more popular with nature lovers throughout the state than the Krigers’ Baltimore oriole, which came to be affectionately known, at Pat Higginson’s suggestion, by its initials. During fall and winter, birders, in fact whole bird clubs, arrive at the Krigers’ house equipped with binoculars, field guides, sandwiches, and in at least one instance, a sleeping bag. As Easterners prepare for the winter by having their furnaces checked, the Krigers prepare for it by buying up extra quantities of coffee and bracing themselves for a series of telephone calls that usually begin: “Do you still have your B.O.?”
Long-time residents of Santa Barbara know that Olive Mill Road was named for its olive mill, which is still standing and used as a residence; that Parra Grande Lane, in the 1800s, was the site of the world’s largest single grapevine, covering a trellis 100,000 square feet in area; and that Salsipuedes was one of the old town boundaries and meant, “Get out if you can.” Newcomers find out for themselves that Conejo Road has rabbits, Las Encinas oaks, Nogales walnuts, that Overlook Lane overlooks and that in the early spring the Monarch butterflies swarm like bees in the Monterey cypresses of Butterfly Lane.
Local birdwatchers were puzzled by the fact that one small area of Montecito, as soon as the Krigers moved into it, should produce such a number and variety of orioles, both in and out of season. (On one November morning in 1963, for instance, I saw there four kinds of orioles, a hooded, two Bullocks, the adult male Baltimore with a younger male in tow and a male orchard oriole.) It was a happy accident that I discovered, less than a block from the Krigers’ backyard, a small private lane almost hidden by its own lush foliage. A wooden sign indicated its name, Oriole Road. Evidently orioles had been frequenting the neighborhood for a long time, but what kind? Were they merely our rather common summer visitors, the hooded, or the somewhat less common Bullock? Or was it possible that Baltimore orioles had been coming there every winter for years and were simply not spotted by competent observers? Shortage of such observers is underlined by the fact that these flashy, vivid birds, visible half a mile away, have wintered in Montecito since 1961 but have not been reported from any area except the Krigers’ backyard.