Once the cotton balls were tossed on the ground she showed no further interest, so it was clear that she didn’t want them as nest-lining. Two theories occur to me, but until some form of oriole communication is discovered they’ll very likely remain theories.
There is a certain family of insects, Aprophorinae, sometimes called froghoppers, whose young are hidden in a spittle of white froth which protects them while they live by sucking sap. I’ve often watched orioles go after these spittle insects in the conifers in our canyon. The foamy masses bear considerable resemblance to cotton, so it’s possible that the female oriole was testing the cotton balls in the cornucopia to see if they contained food, and discovering that they didn’t, chucked them out. This theory seems to me to insult the little lady’s intelligence. Birds may not be the smartest of God’s creatures but where food is concerned they learn fast, and I can’t believe it would have taken that many cotton balls to convince the oriole she was on the wrong track.
What is more, she gave no sign that she was investigating the balls. She grabbed one after another and without hesitation chucked them out as if she was getting rid of them as fast as possible because they represented a threat to her and her family. Most people know the trick of sticking pieces of cotton into the screen of a door or window in order to repel houseflies. The idea behind it is that the houseflies will stay away from the cotton because they mistake it for the nest of a certain wasp that likes housefly meat. Perhaps the hooded oriole was acting under a similar misapprehension. We must give her credit anyway for knowing her business — she successfully raised three broods that spring and summer. And I went through an awful lot of cotton balls. Every bird’s nest in the neighborhood, except the hooded oriole’s, must have been lined by Johnson and Johnson.
The sight of a band of bushtits twittering and tumbling from bush to bush makes it difficult to believe that they could ever settle down to the sober business of raising a family. Yet the bushtits were among the first birds to nest. As early as the middle of January, I’d noticed that the flocks passing through the canyon were getting smaller as the birds were beginning to pair off. One particular couple we came to know very well since they chose one of our oaks as the site for their elaborate nest, the cornucopia as their home-furnishing store and the porch railing as their restaurant.
The bushtit is an insect-eating bird and no garden could have a better friend, especially since scale and aphids make up about one-fifth of his diet. I’m sure our little couple would have been content with this fare if they hadn’t seen so many other birds eating doughnuts and decided to try a taste. One bite and they were addicted. Almost any time of the day I could look out my office window and see them pecking happily away at a doughnut, often at the same time as the yellow-throat and the Bewick’s wren, the Audubon warblers and song sparrows. These are all tiny creatures but none is so tiny as the bushtit. His thumb-sized body and vivacious movements make other birds seem large and clumsy.
On February 13, the bushtits began gathering cotton from the cornucopia. On February 24, I watched them shredding a piece of Kleenex in the front yard, and on March 6, I saw one of them carrying leaves in his beak. While they were engaged in relatively quiet pursuits like these, the difference in the eye color of the male and female was much more noticeable than when the birds are seen only in constantly moving flocks. Getting close enough to bushtits to study them is no problem since they usually ignore the presence of a human being, with good reason — they present no challenging target for the gun or slingshot, no taste treat for the palate, no handsome trophy for the den wall, and so they are indeed fearless of men. Getting these lively little devils to stay still while you study them is another matter.
I’d been watching the flocks in our canyon every day for a long time but it wasn’t until the pair came to taste doughnuts that I became aware of the noticeable difference in eye color, and even then I wasn’t positive which color belonged to which sex. The Peterson field guide simply stated that “females are said to have light eyes, males dark.” I knew this was true of the black-eared bushtit found in New Mexico, but the female of this species is different from the male in plumage as well. In the common bushtit of our area, eye color is the only noticeable difference between the sexes.
The little birds told me which was which, in a very simple and direct way. On March 10, I heard the saucy chatter of a chipmunk from the tangle of ceanothus trees and I picked up my binoculars to look for him. A pair of bushtits wandered into my field of vision, gleaning among the leaves for bugs. At least one of them was gleaning. The other evidently had different things in mind, for he quickly and precisely mounted the first bird, hopped away, returned and mounted again. The whole business didn’t take half a minute, during which time the female showed no reaction whatever. She didn’t stop eating or even turn her head, surely a unique example of sangfroid.
The male’s eyes were as black as beads of jet, the female’s as tawny as topaz. They gave her a look of continual curiosity, like that of a wide-eyed child. It suited her to a T, for nothing in our yard could be kept a secret from this diminutive creature.
She knew where the earwig hid by day beneath a rock, under which leaf the whitefly had laid her eggs and where the young of the black scale crawled along the limbs of the olive trees. She spotted where the spider had hidden his dinner fly in the brush pile, where a gopher’s digging had brought a batch of bugs to the surface and which loquat tree was the scene of a fruit-fly orgy. She knew which citrus tree the ants were using to herd their aphids and from which rosebush the leaf roller had borrowed a leaf for his pupa to occupy in privacy. But all this was insignificant compared to her really important piece of knowledge — where the doughnuts were.
At this season I was putting out a dozen doughnuts at a time in various places around the house and yard. If the bushtit found a purple finch or gold-crowned sparrow already occupying the doughnut in the tea tree, she simply went on to the next one in the cotoneaster, or the next hanging from a nail on the porch or a clothes hook under the dining-room window. Until March 25, she brought her mate with her. After that she came alone. For more than a month, almost every time I looked out a window, I would see her on one doughnut or another and it became obvious that she was eating for two, or five, or even more. Many birds which subsist on seeds and vegetable matter will, when their young are hatched, feed them insects, since the protein is more nourishing and fewer feedings are necessary. But this was my first experience with an insect-eating bird feeding vegetable matter to its young.
As time passed and the female kept appearing alone I began to suspect that her mate had met with some disaster and left her a widow with a family to raise by herself. Male and female bushtits under ordinary conditions share equally the duties of incubation and gathering insects to feed the young. Deprived of assistance, perhaps the female was feeding them what was readily available — doughnuts. I had visions of a weak and sickly brood raised entirely on carbohydrates.
Then, during the third week of April, I happened to see the male and female together gleaning in an oak tree. I like to think that this was the same male and that all the times I waited for him to show up at the doughnuts, he was in fact gathering bugs to provide his children with a more conventional and healthful diet.