One of the first things I noticed about these sparrows at the feeding station was their lack of relationship with any of their fellow boarders. When they came to the ledge to eat, there were no preliminaries, polite or impolite. If other birds were already feeding, the sparrows didn’t try to drive them away, they merely squeezed in beside them and began eating. If the sparrows were there first and other birds arrived and attempted to drive them away, the sparrows, even the very young ones, ignored them. They seemed, in fact, not to comprehend the meaning of the other birds’ actions. Bluff is the main weapon in the arsenal of most birds. They use it and are, in turn, used by it. The sparrows neither used it nor recognized its use. A Brewer blackbird inflated to twice its size and with his white eye glaring may have looked awesome to the finches and tanagers, but to the English sparrows he looked like an inflated blackbird with a white eye. They had no time or taste for bluffing, which is, after all, a kind of game.
In scientific circles it was fashionable for a while to believe that play was confined to the young and that it was merely an exercising of the muscles and a practicing of the skills that would be necessary in adult life. This theory has had to be modified considerably as it became obvious that not all players were young, and not all playing constructive. Play seems to me a natural activity of birds and animals who have energy left over after the necessities of living have been attended to. The chief necessity is food and the kind of food a bird eats regulates the amount of foraging that must be done every day. The mourning dove, whose diet consists mainly of weed seeds, has to spend a great deal of time and energy getting the same amount of nourishment as a scrub jay gets from one meadow mouse or a few protein-rich caterpillars. How the scrub jay uses his consequent leisure is well known to every chronicler of mischief.
All flying looks like fun to the earthbound, and so we must be cautious in singling out a particular action of a bird and calling it play. Yet in some cases play is unmistakable.
One September, Ken and I drove with the Hylands up to Morro Bay to look for some of the birds that require a wilder and rockier coastline than our area provided — wandering tattlers, black oystercatchers, black turnstones and surfbirds. Sometimes a single rock in the Avila region will provide all four species, and one year a very rare American oystercatcher also took up residence there. Going along the bay we stopped to watch the tide coming in across the mudflats. A certain stream was running quite rapidly and on it were a dozen northern phalaropes having the time of their lives. They would ride down the stream for thirty or forty yards, twirling around now and then like little toy boats caught in an eddy. Then they’d fly back up and start over. This was repeated again and again until the stream gradually slowed and stopped and the tide was in and the phalaropes settled down to the serious business of foraging.
Helen and Nelson Metcalf witnessed a similar performance on one of the Columbia River rapids in Washington. The birds on this occasion were four white pelicans. They would rise in the air and fly single file to the head of the rapids, then ride four abreast all the way down to the quiet water. The Metcalfs watched for half an hour. When they departed, the pelicans were still riding the rapids. Brian Roberts has written an account of common eiders repeatedly riding a tide current in a fjord, and R.A. Stoner tells of an Anna’s hummingbird who kept floating down the stream caused by a garden faucet that had been left running. I wonder how many other species of birds indulge in similar games that are unseen or unreported.
Almost all birds fly, but only a few aerial geniuses can soar — that is, rise skyward without wing-flapping, using only winds or thermal updrafts. The white pelican is one. These huge silent birds, which share with the California condor an enormous wingspread, more than eight feet, and a reputation for gentleness and quietness, are capable of fantastic feats of soaring. At the slightest invitation of the wind they will rise high in the air and put on a performance that looks not like mere play but like an inspired and exuberant romp of angels.
White pelicans do not, like condors, cover great distances in the search for food, nor do they have the brown pelican’s habit of spotting a fish from the air and diving down into the water to catch it. They feed while swimming leisurely along the surface, finding small, delicate tidbits which their greedy brown brothers would disdain. It is the simplest and easiest way to forage and the energy they save can be, perhaps must be, used for the kind of activity we call play.
Wood storks are masters of the art of soaring. These large shy birds are normally seen in flocks in regions where there is shallow fresh water like the Florida Everglades and the Louisiana bayous. In late summer, post-breeding dispersal brings a number of them to the Salton Sea in California where they stay for a limited time. They rarely appear as far north and west as Santa Barbara, but one individual threw the rule book overboard and came here to spend two consecutive winters.
His time was divided between our main sloughs, Goleta and Sandyland. He was an excellent example of the way many birds will adjust quickly to such things as air and highway traffic, while remaining extremely wary of people on foot. At Goleta his favorite hangout was below a bluff between the airport and the busy road leading to the university. At Sandyland he stayed as far away from the beach houses as possible, which put him right next to the Los Angeles-San Francisco Freeway. At both sloughs he had for company great blue herons and black-crowned night herons, snowy and common egrets, avocets and the occasional black-necked stilt. He was particularly attracted to the egrets, perhaps because they were white and most resembled his family and friends from whom he’d been separated. The attraction was not mutual.
Wood storks are very gregarious birds and he obviously missed his own kind. In the early morning and late afternoon he foraged; when there were thermals to ride, he rode them. But the times between, when he had nothing to do, were lonely and hard to fill. It was then that he made his advances to the egrets.
The grace and beauty of the wood stork was apparent only in flight. On land, with his naked grey head and neck showing, he took no prizes, but there was a certain awkward dignity about the great mute bird as he plodded earnestly across the mud toward the egrets. They invariably gave him a look-what-the-tide-brought-in stare and walked away. He followed, they walked away again. Often, after a series of overtures and rebuffs, he would spring into the air on his long black legs and begin circling around the slough, rising higher and higher until he was out of sight. Audubon had a peculiar notion about such flights: he suggested that they were intended to aid the bird’s digestion.
All that winter the wood stork tried and failed to establish a relationship with the egrets. He left in early spring, destination unknown. The following October he returned, once again dividing his time between Goleta and Sandyland sloughs. Though he was still no beauty he looked glossier and whiter than the previous year, and his manner was somewhat more self-assured when he pursued the egrets. As Christmas approached I seemed to detect a slight softening in the attitude of the egrets: their rejection of him seemed not so swift or so final. But this may have been merely a subjective and seasonal piece of sentiment on my part. Peace on earth, including the wet haunts of storks and egrets.
Aerial games are also played by albatrosses, frigatebirds, condors, ravens, vultures, kites, buteos, eagles, falcons, gulls, and terns. Some owls are well equipped to soar, but unable to do so because they are active at night when there are no thermals.