Our young orioles departed early, still capped in orange and mystery. Was their unusual plumage temporary or permanent? Was it caused by genetic mutation, or some factor like diet, or a substance they came in contact with, like pollen? Were all three of the birds I’d observed males and was the orange color the result of premature activity of the hormones? I suspect this was the case but as an amateur I can afford the luxury of simply saying that I don’t know.
On April 7, the first brood of house finches appeared on the ledge, and about a month later, the second brood. Each young bird wore tufts of feathers that looked like horns. This was appropriate enough, for they were veritable devils, sometimes actually attacking the mother in their attempts to prove they were still babies and needed food and attention. In between broods I watched an interesting little scene which proved to me that the human female isn’t necessarily the only determined woman.
The action took place at B.T.’s feeder, the wooden dish. When the larger birds were busy elsewhere, the smaller birds ate here, in this case a male and female house finch. Some male house finches show a wide color variation and this one was a dingy pumpkin color whereas the majority of his relatives were red. Pumpkin showed no evidence of special appeal or, in fact, of any interest in the little lady eating opposite him, but this didn’t faze her. She had chosen Pumpkin, he was it, and that was that. She quivered seductively in front of him. He looked baffled, then nervous, and finally flew away in alarm. She flew after him, and a few minutes later they were both back and she resumed her attempts to make him think she was irresistible.
She did turn out to be irresistible, but not to the right bird. A second male, Red, watching from a nearby cotoneaster, was enchanted by her performance and indicated as much by swooping down on the feeder, and driving Pumpkin away. Instead of taking this as a compliment, the lady was furious. She turned on Red and pecked at him violently until he flew off. Then she set out after Pumpkin again and brought him back to the feeder.
This scene was repeated twice. The third time another female got into the act and made it clear that she, too, had fallen for Pumpkin’s well-hidden charms. In the animal kingdom it is the peculiar-looking mammal who is shunned, the odd-colored bird who is at the bottom of the pecking order. Pumpkin’s difference only made him more appealing to the ladies. Affairs of the heart, in man, beast or bird, are not always easy to comprehend.
Every April we watched the blackbirds courting. The redwings, their epaulets almost fluorescent, whistled in concert from the tangles of ceanothus their mad and merry Oo-long-tea, whee! The Brewer blackbirds, bodies inflated and wings raised, looked like comical little Draculas as they pursued the females around the ledge. The cowbirds, heads glossy as milk chocolate, sang the gurgling notes which sounded so much like water trickling down a drain that I checked the kitchen plumbing half a dozen times before I discovered that the noise was coming from a bird, not a leaky tap.
In mid-May the baby Brewers appeared and used our ledge as the place where they learned the rudiments of living — how to fly, how to drink and bathe, how to forage for themselves. The ledge made an ideal kindergarten or, more accurately, Brewery. It was high, but with shrubs below and nearby in case of falls; it was safe from daytime predators since the sharp-shinned hawks had moved north to breed and our three dogs kept the area clear of cats and boys with BB guns or slingshots; and there was an abundance of food and fresh water. Most baby blackbirds took their lessons in stride and wingbeat, but a few were unlucky, some were timid and some slow to learn.
The unluckiest of them all struck the wooden gate that separated the ledge from the porch. It was a bad strike. I heard it in my office and I was amazed when I rushed into the living room to see that the bird was still alive on the ledge. He lay on his back, silent, trembling all over. During the next five minutes that were to be the final ones of his short life I witnessed a most touching exhibition of the group solicitude of these birds for their young. More than a dozen blackbirds assembled in as many seconds, most of them males. They surrounded and fussed over the injured baby, trying to coax him to sit up. Even after he died they kept coming back to him to make sure he couldn’t use their help.
Other babies had better luck — and needed it. One afternoon when Ken and I returned home from lunch downtown we heard a commotion on the ledge before we even opened the front door. Its source was a baby Brewer taking his first lesson in flying. How he’d gotten as far as the ledge I don’t know, but one thing seemed absolutely certain — he didn’t intend to go any further. He had taken up his position as close as possible to the wall and was bleating loudly and piteously to be rescued. Meanwhile his father kept talking to him in a reassuring way and swooping back and forth in front of him to show him just how easy flying was. Here’s how it’s done — swoop — Nothing to it at all, really — swoop — Watch this and you’ll get the picture — swoop.
Baby Brewer was not interested in how it was done; he didn’t get the picture and he didn’t swoop. He wanted only to be back in that nice, safe, cozy nest and he so stated clearly, lustily and several hundred times. For the entire afternoon Dad coaxed and swooped while his diffident child clung stubbornly to the ledge. It began to look more and more like a battle of wills than a flying lesson. Whoever won the battle, I knew who’d be the loser. By six o’clock my nerves were cracking and I’d already made a trip to the storeroom and another to the garage in a futile search for a container that would adequately house a baby blackbird. The ledge, safe enough in the daytime, became a different place at night. Rats scampered up and down it, opossums crossed it on their way to and from the tea tree, raccoons climbed it to claim their share of the bread and doughnuts, great horned owls watched it from the television antenna. There was nothing whatever to recommend that ledge to a baby bird and I wished to heaven I had some way of conveying the message to him before the sun went down.
Perhaps it was the sun itself that conveyed the message. As it started to sink behind the eucalyptus trees the little bird mustered all his courage and strength and flew into the privet hedge five feet away. The Wright brothers couldn’t have enjoyed their moment of glory more thoroughly than Baby Brewer. Carried away by his success he swooped across to the tea tree, and from there, about a hundred feet to the neighbors’ roof. The last I saw of him was just before the sun disappeared completely. He was strutting up and down beside the chimney and he looked as though he was congratulating himself: I made it in one swell foop.
The devoted attention the young blackbird received from his father contrasted sharply with the parental treatment the young English sparrows received. They were sent out to fend for themselves at so tender an age that they still showed nestling-yellow at the corners of their mouths. Their flight was weak and wobbly and it often seemed a miracle to me that they could cover as much as a few yards. But it was a case of fly or die, so they flew.
The childhood of these birds was brief and bleak. For most species of animal and bird, playing is a part of growing up for the young, and of staying alive for the middle-aged and old. But I’ve never seen an English sparrow engaged in play. For them, life is real and earnest, and not much fun. Its purpose is simple — more life — and they have no time or energy to waste on anything not directly connected with their purpose. Playfulness, whether the puritans approve or not, is a quality much admired in bird, animal or man, and the reason the English sparrow is so widely despised is probably not because he’s common or has particularly bad habits, but because of his grim, cheerless assembly-line reproduction.