Whether or not it was the same male, the same procedure started again: the lady began gathering cotton and shredding leaves and bits of paper, and on May 10, she brought the male to the doughnut. They ate together for a couple of weeks as they had in March, then she began coming alone. During the raising of the second brood her visits weren’t nearly so frequent, probably because our place was one vast nursery by this time and so many young of the larger species were being fed there that the little bushtit was intimidated. In the middle of June she stopped coming altogether.
During the summer, flocks of bushtits began to form again, starting with family groups — the young being recognizable by their shorter tails and less skillful acrobatics — and getting larger and noisier as the weeks passed. Their constant twittering, which is the way the members keep in touch as they forage from bush to bush, changed only when the sparrow hawk from the adjacent canyon came over to visit. I’ve never seen any sparrow hawk in this area show the slightest interest in catching a bushtit, but evidently he represents an old and respected enemy, for at the sight of him the tiny birds began issuing their alarm cry, high, shrill, pulsating notes that seemed to be coming from anywhere and everywhere, like the singing of tree frogs. Our visitor was apparently offended by such an unfriendly greeting and he never stayed more than a few minutes, long enough for a short bath and a quick shake.
That fall and winter, watching the bushtits as they went through the front yard combing the arbutus and eugenias and pyracanthas, I would look at them and wonder which one was the little lady I had seen so often and so intimately for a third of the year. When the little birds passed through the backyard, however, I had no need to wonder. The flock would forage as usual through the cotoneaster and the tea tree, but then, as it passed my office window on the way to the elderberry bush, one small grey form would detach itself from the group. Having been alerted by the sound of the birds’ twittering, I was always ready to catch the first gleam of two golden eyes and watch as the little female lit on the doughnut in the soap bark tree. There was a kind of furtive joy in her manner. Aphids and scale were all very well for the ordinary bushtit, but not for one who has known the delights of doughnuts and even passed them along to her children.
On these gastronomical side trips she never brought any members of her family or the group; they were strictly private and solitary excursions. Nor in all my weeks of watching did I see any member pay the slightest attention either when she left the group or when she hurried to catch up with it again. Certainly no attempt was made to follow her, although at least one male, possibly two, knew that doughnuts were available and how to reach them. I can offer no explanation for this. Perhaps there isn’t any and we must simply accept the word of the ornithologists who state that the bushtit is an impulsive bird given to whims and fancies. This describes our little female rather welclass="underline" she had a fancy for doughnuts and a whim of steel.
Birders in bushtit country should not merely be content with identifying a flock of these birds. They would do well to observe each individual carefully, since one or two may turn out to be not bushtits at all but other tiny birds who’ve joined up with the flock to forage. In our area these others are mainly warblers. In the company of bushtits I’ve found Townsend warblers, Audubon, myrtle, black-throated grey, orange-crowned, Wilson, yellow and hermit.
Winter arrived and the visits of our small gourmet friend became less frequent. Unlike some species of birds which have a regular routine you can set your watch by, bushtits are spasmodic foragers. When the flock passed quite close to the house, our friend would pause for a bite of doughnut; when the foraging was too far away to permit her to rejoin the other members of her group easily, she played it safe and stayed with them.
In midwinter the roving bands of bushtits began to get smaller as pairs formed and left the group. The first week in February, I caught sight of a male bushtit cocking an inquisitive black eye at the cornucopia. The next morning, in a heavy rain, two of them arrived together, male and female. And high in the air the red-shouldered hawk was screaming at his mate, ordering her to come here, come here, come here. From the acacias down by the creek the song sparrow was pressing for Presbyterians and the Hutton’s vireo whistling for sweets, sweets, sweets.
“... All over town the doves are nesting, the bandtails and the towhees, the mockers and hummingbirds. And so on... ad, one hopes, infinitum.”
12
Life in the Worm Factory
What distinguishes a bird from all other living creatures? Feathers. And what distinguishes an acorn woodpecker from all other birds? Practically everything.
Acorn woodpeckers are the characters of our part of the bird world, the true uniques, in appearance, voice, mannerisms, feeding, nesting and care of young. So it was natural enough, I suppose, that they should have been the ones responsible for our going into the worm business.
The word “togetherness” usually conjures up a picture of a large family group celebrating Thanksgiving or Christmas. To me it conjures up the telephone pole beside our driveway, for in it lived a family group that celebrated every day in the year. I don’t know exactly how many members constituted the group — an acorn woodpecker census, as I’ll show later, is not simple, and estimates of numbers tend to be too high since the birds are so noisy — but I would say between seven and nine.
Our road in Montecito is a circle, half a mile around. Three families of woodpeckers lived on this street, approximately equal distances apart. The first family had its headquarters in the top of a dead palm tree. I had almost nothing to do with this group except to watch for it in passing. The second group I came to know better. It used a telephone pole located beside the creek that ran through the neighboring canyon, an area of numerous mature live oaks, any one of which would have made an excellent storage tree, in my opinion. But the woodpeckers didn’t invite my opinion. For their storage tree they had chosen the attic of a pretty little white frame cottage whose owner, Miss Holbrook, fortunately for the birds, was both a nature lover and somewhat deaf.
The third family was ours — or we were theirs, depending on point of view. Less than fifty feet separated the window beside my bed from the excavation in the telephone pole where they slept, if so mild a word can be used to describe the deathlike coma into which they fell with the darkness. I heard their guttural goodnights as they squeezed and squashed into the hole, and in the morning, their throat clearings as their metabolism quickened after the torpor of the night. Their temperatures rose, their bodies warmed, their senses became alert as they returned to life. With life came hunger, and with hunger, the hope that the Millars would be serving breakfast al fresco, as usual. They chose a sentry to keep watch.
Acorn woodpeckers are not the earliest risers in the bird world — based on the records I’ve kept, I would have to give this distinction to the brown towhee — but they were well ahead of me. By the time I opened my eyes the sentry was already perched on a dead branch of the eucalyptus tree, loosening up his voice box with a few rolling notes now and then. The instant I stepped out on the porch, he let go:
Jacob, Jacob, wake up, wake up!
Jack up, jack up, get up, get up!
Yack up, yack up, yack up, yack up, yack up, yack up, yack up, yack up, yack up.
This last sequence is like a crescendo and decrescendo, reaching its height of volume and pitch on the fifth yack up, then decreasing. It sounds so much like a carpenter sawing through a board that I actually mistook it for just that. When we first moved here I used to wonder how our neighbor, a professional man with a demanding job, could afford to spend so much time at home building things.