“That’s my doughnut you’re eating, dear chap.”
“Really? I’m terribly sorry. I’ll leave immediately, old sport.”
They could fight when they wanted to, however, and they often did, their usual adversary being their fellow consumer of acorns, the scrub jay. In battle the woodpeckers took advantage of their proclivity for group action. A single scrub jay eating on the porch railing was, to mix birds and metaphors, a sitting duck for a trio of acorn woodpeckers who took turns dive-bombing him from the roof. No actual physical contact was involved but the harassed jay would nearly always retreat to a more peaceful foraging area. I didn’t waste much sympathy on him. He himself used the dive-bombing technique on other birds whenever he had the chance.
In the meantime the scrub jay, too, was gathering acorns and storing them. His storage method — burying them in the ground, then often as not forgetting where — seemed much inferior to that of the woodpeckers, but was, in fact, a neat piece of ecology. Some acorns would be found and eaten, enabling the jay to survive, and some would be forgotten and reseed, enabling the oaks to survive.
Scrub jays are natural-born buriers. Even when the adobe soil was so dry and hard they had to chisel it like stone, they carried away everything that wasn’t nailed down — bits of bread, potato chips, grapes, peanuts, chunks of apple, pretzels, cheese crackers, cookies, hard-boiled eggs — and used every inch of bare ground they could find. Ours would have been quite a unique neighborhood if all the items they buried had sprouted and grown. Only one did, the sunflower seeds. By June the lower and upper terrace and the adjoining field had turned into a forest of the things. Nor did the jays confine their activities to our property. In fact, a stranger visiting our street for the first time would have thought that half the people living on it had decided to go in for commercial sunflower growing. Where the sunflowers stopped marked the territorial limits of the jays who patronized our feeders.
Give these birds a decent-sized piece of bare earth to work with and their planting is as neat and symmetrical as any human gardener’s. The man living next door had, at the rear of his house, a dirt road which was no longer in use. The jays took on the job of landscaping it. Down the middle of each tire track they planted sunflower seeds, exactly five inches apart.
Something of a more reasonable size might have escaped detection, but as the sunflowers reached five, six, seven feet they practically forced themselves on the property owner’s attention. He was not known as a nature lover, and had, in fact, been somewhat critical of my bandtails landing on his T.V. antenna and cahooing too early in the morning. When we met at the mailbox one noon he mentioned that sunflowers were coming up in his avocado orchard and lemon grove and even in his cutting garden, and he asked me if I’d noticed. I had a choice of admitting that I’d noticed or confessing to total blindness, so I said, yes, I’d seen a few sunflowers coming up here and there.
He gave me a suspicious look. “They’re all over the place. What do you suppose is at the bottom of it?”
“Sunflower seeds,” I said, and retreated before he could pursue the subject further.
People familiar with these noisy, colorful jays might wonder how the man could have missed seeing them at work. The fact is that when a scrub jay is doing something important like burying food or looking for other birds’ nests to rob, stalking a lizard or spying out the acorn caches of the woodpeckers, he is absolutely silent and moves with a practiced stealth which makes him almost invisible.
Planting sunflower seeds became such an obsession with our jays that we rarely saw them eat one. When they did, they anchored the seed firmly with their feet and hammered it open with their beaks, in the manner of titmice, quite different from the way the house finches ate. The finches didn’t use their feet; they simply held the seed in their beaks and sawed it right down the middle. Every few days I had to sweep their neatly halved hulls off the ledge.
All that cool, moist winter the jays planted, and in the sunny spring the sunflowers grew, and in the hot, dry summer they died. None reached fruition and the diligent but luckless farmers never harvested a single seed. Some of the plants were toppled by wind or their own weight; some couldn’t compete with the sturdier natives for what small amount of moisture was available; others were knocked down by dogs and cats or trampled by possums and raccoons and bush bunnies. With the sunflowers died my hope, never too robust, of saving a little money at the feed store. (Not long ago a visiting Easterner was complaining of having to pay fifteen cents a pound for the California-grown sunflower seeds he fed his birds at home. I told him that we Californians paid exactly twice that amount. There are many similar inequities in the price of produce. I once asked an agronomist why, and he replied in about ten thousand words that he didn’t know. He seemed delighted when I suggested the reason might be sunspots.)
While the sunflowers were dying, the baby scrub jays flourished. Perched on the porch railing, waiting their turn at the wooden dish, they were fat and fluffy and oddly quiet. In appearance they resembled the Mexican jay of Arizona and New Mexico more than they did their parents. They lacked the scrub jay’s eyebrow stripe and half-necklace and cobalt-blue head.
Their innocence and docility was quite touching. Soon they would learn that this is not the way of a jay, but for a little time they were gentle creatures bossed around by nearly all the other birds. They were dive-bombed by woodpeckers, crowded out by blackbirds, pecked by towhees and mockers, pushed off the railing by thrashers, even jostled by sparrows, and they never fought back or let out a single squawk of protest. The only noise they made was a very infrequent sound, loud and shrill, that reminded me of a flicker’s. I have heard it no more than a dozen times in our years of operating the feeding station.
There are a number of sounds that can be heard only when you live right in the midst of birds. An excellent example is the goodnight of the acorn woodpeckers, a low-pitched, sleepy mumbling made about half an hour after they’ve disappeared into the telephone pole for the night. The interpreting of bird language, at this stage of our knowledge, must be subjective, so I can only claim that to me this mumbling sounds like the response to a question: “Yes, everything’s fine, now settle down and go to sleep.”
The acorn woodpeckers provided me with another example of special semantic effects, at least one of them did. He was a mature bird, perhaps the head of the clan, certainly old enough to be set in his ways. In his case this meant that he had very strong likes and dislikes in the food department. One afternoon when I was dusting in the living room I saw an object fly over the porch railing that seemed too small to be any bird I knew. Hope, the poet said, springs eternal in the human breast. And if the breast happens to belong to a birder, the hope is often wild and wonderfuclass="underline" a green-backed twinspot or locust finch from Africa — blown a few thousand miles off course — a red avadavat from the East Indies, a yellow-tailed diamond-bird from Australia. I was ready to settle for something found a bit closer to home, like the bee hummingbird of Cuba. The new birdwatcher, and I suspect a few old ones as well, lives in a beautiful world where anything is possible! I grabbed my binoculars and rushed into my office on the track of the unidentified flying object.
The male acorn woodpecker was perched on the rim of the wooden dish which I had had to fill three times that day with bread and doughnuts and grapes. I now understood why. My UFO was no twinspot from Africa or avadavat from the Indies or diamond-bird from Australia, it was a piece of bread from the corner bakery. Our crochety guest had decided not only that he would refuse to eat bread, which satisfied the rest of his family, but that he wouldn’t even tolerate its presence in the same container as decent food. Before taking so much as a peck at the doughnuts or grapes, he tossed out of the dish and over the porch railing every single scrap of bread. It reminded me of the hooded oriole chucking the cotton balls out of the cornucopia, except that the oriole did the job quietly while the woodpecker informed the neighborhood at the top of his lungs what he thought of peasant food like bread and the barbarians who dared serve it to him. Every time I filled the dish that spring he repeated his performance, until he tired of it or else finally accepted the idea of bread. His nickname, B.T., in the beginning stood for Bread Tosser.