My mnemo for the ancient murrelet is different from any of the others in that it’s in the first person, as if I unconsciously knew, when I made it up, that this murrelet was very special, was, in fact, destined to be my nemesis.
Each time I board a boat the words go through my head — and every ancient murrelet in the channel heads for the open seas:
11
Hanky-Panky
Spring was on its way.
By mid-February the blue gums were in full bloom. Their whitish fuzzy blossoms blew in gusts across our windows and covered the vacant field next door like hoar frost. In the tops of the trees Allen and Anna hummingbirds fought with noisy abandon, and restless flocks of cedar waxwings fed on the bugs and nectar in the flowers as well as the petals themselves. These three species show no seasonal change in plumage, so they were no different from the way they’d been in the fall, except that possibly the waxwings looked a bit sharper after the addition of the marble birdbath to their diet. (The final sliver of the birdbath had been thrown in the trash can.)
It was in the Audubon warblers, occupying the same eucalyptus trees, that real changes were occurring. During the last two weeks of February and the first two of March they were busy donning their traveling togs, dark grey topcoat with black stripes and a white side patch, dashing little yellow cap and solid-black scarf draped with careless elegance across the chest. Mature birds retained their yellow throats and younger birds acquired theirs. This solved one of my problems: during the fall and winter I’d had to strain to differentiate the young Audubons from the myrtles, since both have white throats. The white of the myrtle’s throat extends to outline the cheek somewhat and this species also has a light eyestripe, but neither of these field marks is very noticeable and I had to look at a hundred Audubons to find a myrtle, much rarer in our parts.
The passage of time changed all this. Myrtle and Audubon assumed strictly individualistic plumage, one of nature’s devices to ensure the continuation of the species and prevent hybridization. The myrtles also assumed a characteristic quite funny in such small birds — they became noticeably more aggressive and would go to considerable trouble to clear the ledge of Audubons before settling down to eat. I’ve never seen a myrtle act this way toward any bird except an Audubon or another myrtle. Over many thousands of years he has learned a lesson in survivaclass="underline" the species seeking the same food that he seeks is his enemy, and he has more to fear from a tiny warbler than from any cast of hawks or gathering of eagles.
At the beginning of March the oak trees, too, came into bloom. From a distance they appeared to be covered with dark pink blossoms, but the binoculars revealed that these were actually the new leaves, as yet unfurled, and the real blossoms were the catkins hanging down. These catkins proved a popular food with the white-crowned and gold-crowned sparrows, and later, the brown-headed cowbirds.
The pittosporum undulatum was also in full bloom by now and whole sections of the city were permeated by its poignant sweetness which is to me the loveliest of all flower scents and the one that evokes California and home more than a hundred thousand orange blossoms. The flowers and seeds of this kind of pittosporum, which can grow forty feet in height and nearly that in width, are not particularly attractive to birds but its dense, deep foliage provides excellent cover for them. They use it for protection from weather and predators, and as a safe roost at night. Often at twilight I’ve seen whole flocks of birds disappear into the largest of our pittosporums with scarcely the telltale flutter of a leaf. At this point I wrote in my notebook:
The season of hanky-panky is upon us — male linnets on the porch railing feeding willing females, red-winged blackbirds posturing and singing oo-ka-lee at the Bird Refuge, green-backed finches whistling all over the Botanic Garden, song sparrows calling from the acacias down by the creek, press, press, press, Presbyterians, sometimes giving the Presbyterians one less press. All over town the doves are nesting, the bandtails and the towhees, the mockers and hummingbirds. And so on... ad, one hopes, infinitum.
One does, indeed.
We put out nesting materials, strips of cloth and short lengths of twine hung on the clothesline, yarn unraveled from an old sweater, balls of cotton tied in the trees, or piled in tiny wicker cornucopias left over from Thanksgiving, pieces of kapok placed in the ventilated plastic boxes fresh berries are packed in. The hummingbirds preferred to hover while pulling out shreds of cotton through the interstices of the wicker. Some birds grabbed and flew off before I could raise my binoculars, and others perched on the side of the plastic box or on the clothesline and made their selection with the careful gravity of engineers about to try a new kind of building material. Some particularly fussy linnets, dissatisfied with what I had to offer them, took their business to a house across the canyon. In due time Renée Westermeyer, the lady of the house, reported that the large umbrella she kept on her patio no longer had any tassels on it.
The behavior of a male green-backed goldfinch caused quite a few comments on the part of my bird-watching friends. The goldfinch always brought his industrious little bride with him, and for a very good reason: she did all the work. He would lead her to the clothesline, which was hung with bits of string and colored yarn, and she would begin meticulously testing them for size and texture and color, since she wanted nothing too large or gaudy or rough. Meanwhile, he perched on a twig in the nearby tea tree and preened his feathers. The most he contributed to the proceedings was a lively snatch of song now and then, probably intended to assure her that he was manning the lookout post while she was womanning the nest.
The titmice and orange-crowned warblers were steady customers for the cotton balls in the cornucopia. So was the hooded oriole, but for an entirely different reason. Over a period of about a week I’d watched this bird, a female, gathering the long tough fibers from the leaves of a Washington fan palm in the neighborhood. (Hooded orioles in southern California have such a predilection for building their nests in these trees that they were once called “palm-leaf orioles.”) At the same time, the cornucopia in the tree outside my office was being emptied of cotton balls as fast as I could replenish the supply. I naturally assumed that the balls were being used to make a soft lining in various birds’ nests and I was surprised to find a dozen or so scattered around the patio and at least that many more caught in the boxwood hedge and the bougainvillea. It was as if some bird, perhaps a flicker, whose weight the cornucopia couldn’t support, had been awkwardly trying to land on it anyway, spilling the cotton balls each time I put out a new batch.
Then one morning, as I was sitting down to write, the culprit appeared. It was the female hooded oriole. She landed gracefully on the rim of the cornucopia, picked up a cotton ball in her beak and deliberately dropped it over the side to the ground. When the cornucopia was empty she flew off. I filled it up again. Half an hour later she was back to repeat her performance. No one witnessing it could believe it was anything but a deliberate and well-motivated action — only what was the motivation?