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Thus it was Jane who was responsible for the only good thing ever said about my meal worms: they didn’t crawl all over you. It was Jane, too, who doomed my future as the meal worm queen of the Southwest. She came into the kitchen while I was preparing lunch and announced that B.T. was on the wooden dish again throwing another fit. Since I’d started to keep records of the intensity and duration of B.T.’s fits, I hurried into my office. I saw immediately that the roof was missing from the worm factory. There was no need to ask what had thrown B.T. into a frenzy.

Whether B.T. was simply venting his spleen or whether he was issuing a genuine alarm to warn the other woodpeckers in the canyon against the newfangled poison, I will never know. I do know this: of the meal worms Jane put out, the scrub jay carried away three, the black-headed grosbeak ate one and the rest just disappeared.

That afternoon I dropped in on Adu and Peter Batten to see the latest additions to their household. The most unusual was a week-old lion which Adu was bottle-feeding and which she let me hold. His coat was finer than silk and his paws like velvet pincushions. The only slightly rough thing about him was his tongue. Someday it would have the texture of the coarsest grade of sandpaper and his affectionate kisses would not be so popular.

Another addition was a margay, a spotted wild cat of Central and South America, which looked like a small ocelot. The resemblance almost cost the margay his life since he’d been purchased by some imbecilic woman to attract attention: she intended to parade him on a leash when she wore her ocelot coat. She knew nothing whatever about the care and feeding of animals and made no effort to find out. By the time the Battens got hold of the margay, he was so weak and crippled with rickets he couldn’t even stand up. They treated him with vitamin shots and a special high-nutritive formula made for humans and he was already showing improvement. By the end of summer he was active enough to make a real pest of himself because of his boundless curiosity.

The third new member of the household was a little African bush baby, or galago, a primate about twelve inches long, half of which was tail. Like his nocturnal cousins, the lorises and pottos, he had huge round eyes that gave him a look of continual amazement. In the wild, a bush baby spends the daylight hours sleeping in trees, sometimes in abandoned birds’ nests, but at night he comes alive. He can climb like a monkey and use his front paws the way a human child uses his hands, he can leap like a kangaroo, chirp like a bird, and furl and unfurl his ears like nothing else I know of in the animal kingdom.

The bush baby was shy and disinclined to eat, so Adu was trying to tempt his appetite by offering him his favorite food, grasshoppers. Unfortunately she wasn’t as well equipped as he was for locating and catching grasshoppers, and feeding the bush baby was taking a disproportionate amount of time when she had so many other animals to look after. I suggested that since meal worms were used both as food and medicine for other small monkeys, the bush baby would probably accept them as a substitute for grasshoppers. She agreed and I delivered the worm factory to her that same afternoon.

It is commonly stated that the two happiest days in a couple’s life are the day they acquire a boat and the day they get rid of it. I’ve experienced both of these and neither can compare to the beautiful day that the Hoffman’s Pure Rendered Beef Fat can was removed from the bookcase, the thermostat was turned down to 72° and the Worm Factory became once again my plain and simple office.

Besides a taste for acorns, the acorn woodpeckers share with the scrub jays the ability to live at close quarters with human beings. There is, however, a big difference in their approach: the jays are aggressive and fearless, the woodpeckers simply don’t give a darn. Evidence of this is the fact that Tucker’s Grove, a small oak-studded park where nearly every weekend hundreds of people go for company barbecues or club outings, is a favorite woodpecker haunt. I sat at one of the picnic tables recently and started to count the storage holes in the bark of the ancient live oak above me. I gave up at a thousand. There are probably thirty or forty times that many and the storage tree is still used.

Estimates of the number of woodpeckers living in Tucker’s Grove ran from thirty to sixty. But Jody Bennett, then a graduate student at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who was doing research in the grove on the communal life of acorn woodpeckers, was convinced that these estimates were exaggerated because the birds were so noisy and conspicuous, and that the actual figure was close to twenty. She asked the members of the Santa Barbara Audubon Society to help her take a census. A pair of observers was stationed at each storage tree and nesting site within the eighteen-acre area and an automobile horn signaled the counting to begin and to end. The results surprised everyone but Jody — there were only nineteen woodpeckers in the park. In a subsequent census the figure was the same.

On the days after a large barbecue or picnic at Tucker’s Grove the woodpeckers will fly down to the ground for bits of food, and when the creek is dry they perch on the fountains to drink, but in my experience they cannot be readily tamed like some of the other birds. Their indifference to people is partly a result of nature’s bounty. B.T. knows I am the source of his breakfast doughnut, but he knows, too, that there is an abundance of other food available and that he can afford to keep his freedom and independence, and his inalienable right to rage.

13

The Younger Generation and How It Aged Us

All spring and most of the summer the ledge served as a nursery. The personnel changed from week to week as babies grew up and departed voluntarily or were forcibly removed to make room for other babies. Many of the birds in our area have two or more broods. The championship in this department must go to the mourning dove, who lays up to five clutches in a year — although poorly constructed nests on or near the ground result in heavy losses among both eggs and young.

It is a common summer sight to see mated pairs of birds feeding the first batch of babies while building a new nest or fixing up an old nest or otherwise preparing for a second or third batch. One afternoon I was watching a female brown towhee feeding her offspring on the dead limb of an oak tree. A male towhee suddenly appeared, and with the full cooperation of the female, he mounted her quickly and flew away. This was repeated four times at intervals of about ten seconds. Both parents seemed to have forgotten the baby bird who eventually left the scene with some of his bloom of innocence rubbed off.

During the last week of May the hooded oriole, that most patient of fathers, was pestered from dawn to dusk, from pine to pepper, from eucalyptus to eugenia, by his tenacious green daughter. Whenever he managed to elude her for a fraction of a minute she would deftly spear a grape or take a bite of doughnut, but the instant she caught sight of him again she became a quivering, helpless, starving infant. If he was annoyed by her silly posturings he didn’t show it the way many parent birds did, with a swipe of the wing or a sharp peck. He certainly had reason to be annoyed — waiting for him in the nest were two babies who were truly helpless.

They made their debut on the ledge in the middle of June and the sight of them sent me scurrying to consult the bird books: they resembled their drab little mother, as they were supposed to, except that each of them wore an orange skullcap. I’ve been unable to find a reference to such a color quirk in any of my bird books but I saw another example of it that same week when I visited the Krigers’ house. The hooded orioles had nested, as usual, in the banana tree outside their living-room window and one of the second-brood birds was marked exactly like the two at our feeding station.