On the same November day that the male orchard oriole visited the Krigers, I learned from Mary Hyland that another male of the same species had been in the yard of Neva Plank, on the other side of town, since the beginning of the month. Mrs. Plank, a birdwatcher, had identified it immediately but hadn’t told anyone except Mary about it because she didn’t want news of the oriole’s presence to get around to any collector. Mary assured Mrs. Plank of my strong anti-collecting stand and I was invited to her house, along with Jewell Kriger and Nelson Metcalf. The orchard oriole, while not as gaudy as Jewell’s B.O., was easier to see because he hung out close to the house in the tecomaria bushes, along with several Allen’s hummingbirds who should have been gone by the end of August.
Tecomaria is also known to gardeners by its scientific name, Tecoma capensis, and by its nickname, cape honeysuckle. Grown either as a vine or a shrub, it is a plant every backyard catering to birds should contain. With its delicate dark-green leaflets that glitter in the sun, and its vivid orange-red flowers that bloom almost all year, it looks like an exotic which requires much care and water. In fact, it thrives on neglect. Like the tree tobacco, another great attraction for birds, especially hummers and orioles, it grows anywhere, reseeds like mad, and needs no summer watering. Credit should be given to the three T’s — tobacco, trumpet and tecomaria — for the part they play in enabling increasing numbers of migrants and breeding birds to remain here all year. But the most credit must go to the eucalyptus trees, of which there are almost a hundred kinds growing in the Santa Barbara region. On a late winter or early spring day the crowns of the larger eucalypts are literally alive with Audubon warblers, hooded and Bullock orioles and cedar waxwings, and in midsummer, when the red-flowered varieties are in bloom, each tree can be heard a block away, so many hummingbirds and bees are battling for its honey.
The orchard oriole, a common nester in the more southerly parts of the East and Midwest, had been seen in California only a few times and Mrs. Plank’s bird was the first record for Santa Barbara. He was dubbed Mr. Chocolate and almost immediately he became as popular as his name. He never failed to show up for visiting birders and pose for his photograph, and he obligingly stayed around for one Audubon Christmas count. I visited him quite frequently during the winter and early spring until his departure in mid-April. This coincided almost exactly with the departure of Jewell’s adult Baltimore, the young Baltimore having left the last week in January, probably out of frustration: he had spent two and a half months trying to imitate the way the adult drank out of the oriole syrup feeder and he never got the hang of it.
The record books for birds are changing year by year. It is difficult to assess how many of these changes are real, caused by variations in climatic conditions, and how many are apparent, caused by an increase in the number of observers and people who attract birds by feeding and appropriate plantings. In the winter of 1964, according to Audubon Field Notes (Vol. 19, No. 3), the following summer species were reported in southern California: fifteen hooded orioles, twenty-nine Bullock orioles, twelve western tanagers and a black-headed grosbeak. The grosbeak and four of the tanagers were at our feeding station. The two species arrived within a day of each other during the first week in December and left a month later. Where they spent the rest of the winter is anybody’s guess, but on March 17, three western tanagers returned, two males and a female, accompanied by a female summer tanager and a male just acquiring his manly plumage — he was the same yellow-green shade as the female except for an orange-pink wash across his chest and orange-pink patches beside his shoulders and on top of his head. It was a day of vicious weather, severe winds, rain, thunder and hail, hardly an ideal occasion to watch birds. But birds often do the unexpected — we had thirty-two species in our yard that day. Some of them must have been rather astonished at the California weather.
The continual presence all winter of Mr. Chocolate, Neva Plank’s orchard oriole, and the way he stuck so close to the house until mid-April, made Santa Barbara birders confident that he would return every year just as Jewell’s B.O. did. In early summer we got the bad news: the Planks’ property had been condemned to make room for a new road connecting the mesa area with the city proper, and the Planks were being forced to move. It was painful for me to picture such a busy and lovingly tended feeding station crushed by bulldozers, and I stayed away from that part of town.
In the fall, preparations began for the annual Christmas bird count. The previous year, 1963, Santa Barbara with its 166 species ranked fifth out of 688 counts made in the United States and Canada. None of us entertained much hope of equaling this figure in 1964. Too many things had happened — a disastrous fire, encroaching subdivisions, disappearing green belts. The reduction of Stow Lake and pond was further complicated by a new housing project and meant virtually the elimination of this region as a good area for waterfowl and shore birds. The Bird Refuge, at the southeastern end of the city, was in poor shape, and while the Santa Barbara Audubon Society was working toward the gigantic task of freshening and aerating the water and landscaping the part adjacent to the railroad tracks, little had been accomplished so far.
Count day arrived, cold and cloudy, with wind and rain in most sections of the prescribed territorial limits. At noon I got in touch with Nelson Metcalf by prearrangement. We were both discouraged by the morning’s results; it seemed unlikely that we would see more than 140 species. A large portion of the area Jewell and I had covered was devastated by fire and we’d found the number of birds ordinarily common there, like quail and Bewick wrens and wrentits, had decreased; only the Oregon juncos, foraging on the ground among the burned oaks and the skeletons of little mammals, seemed to have increased. Nelson, too, was having bad luck and hadn’t turned up one unusual shore bird or warbler or a single tanager or oriole. During the week an orchard oriole had been reported at Carpinteria, but it was the wrong time and the wrong place as far as the count was concerned since it was seen outside the fifteen-mile-diameter circle and on the wrong day.
It brought us, however, to the subject of Mr. Chocolate and the Planks, who’d moved to a new house on the north side of town. What about the road that had dispossessed them? Was it already built, still under construction, or perhaps not yet started? This last possibility offered a mere wisp of straw but Nelson clutched at it.
He called me late that night. The road remained on the drawing board, and the tecomaria was still untouched by the bulldozers. Fluttering among its glistening leaflets, looking good enough to eat, was Mr. Chocolate. And, as if he alone were not enough, in the same tecomaria was a western tanager and a short distance away, a Bullock oriole. Our count day ended with a total of 155 species, considerably fewer than the preceding year but more than we had anticipated. Santa Barbara was credited with only 154 species in the published report in Audubon Field Notes (Vol. 19, No. 2) due to the omission of half a dozen myrtle warblers — a mistake undoubtedly ours rather than that of the meticulous editor, Allan D. Cruickshank.