Group play includes the formation flying of gulls and white pelicans and the berry-passing of cedar waxwings, so baffling to those ornithologists who used to demand a rational explanation for everything. (For a long time, play was considered no explanation at all, let alone a rational one.) The game of passing the berry is practically self-explanatory: a berry — toyon, pepper, eugenia, cotoneaster, pyracantha, to name only a few varieties they eat — is passed along a line of waxwings perched on a telephone wire or the bare bough of a tree. In one such flock I counted over a hundred waxwings, and my hat went off not so much to the birds as to the toyon berry which survived the perilous passage to the end of the line and back again. I have also seen a flock of waxwings chasing and catching snowflakes. Perhaps they were doing it for the moisture, perhaps they were doing it for the heck of it.
The thieving games played by Melanie, the raven described in an earlier chapter, are also played by her crow and magpie cousins, and part of the extracurricular activity of every red-blooded scrub jay and mockingbird is the teasing of dogs and cats.
One of our mockers had a daily rendezvous on the roof with the neighbors’ ginger cat. The cat would stalk the bird around the chimney and through the overhanging branches of the oak tree until the cat tired and lay down to rest. Then it was the bird’s turn. He would swoop down on the sleeping cat, almost grazing its head, and repeating triumphantly, yah, yah, yah. In that yah, yah, yah, I hear echoing the voices of all the small bullied boys who are finally getting their say.
Though the mockers and scrub jays occasionally pestered Brandy, our big German shepherd, and Rolls Royce, our cocker spaniel, it was John, the Scottie, built low to the ground and slowed by age, who was the prime target of their dive-bombing game. But John, canny Scott that he was, had figured out a means of protecting himself, using the principle of: If you can’t lick ’em, go where they can’t follow. Whenever he had to make a sortie into jay or mocker territory, he avoided the open spaces and stuck close to the dense, low-growing shrubbery where he was likely to meet only the occasional wrentit, brown towhee or golden-crowned sparrow.
It is always amazing to me how birds and animals, and to a certain extent the young of the human species, can take faster and more accurate measure of each other than human adults can. Mr. Smith may require a year to discover that Mr. Jones is no friend of his, a fact that had been apparent to the Smith kids for 364 days. Birds learn very quickly not only the difference between a dog and a cat, but the difference between a hungry cat and a well-fed cat, and between a nervous dog and a calm dog. I have seen white-crowned sparrows, house finches, Audubon warblers and California thrashers bathe no more than five feet from where Brandy lay chewing a marrow bone, and on one occasion he actually nudged with his nose a purple finch who was busy eating a doughnut. Wild birds do not accept stroking as a form of friendliness and affection the way domestic animals do. To them such physical contact means extreme danger or death, and so the purple finch, unafraid up to this point, at the touch of Brandy’s nose, went into a state of shock. Puzzled, Brandy picked the bird up and brought it over to me for an explanation. He carried it so carefully that when it recovered its wits a few moments later, it flew out of my hand without a trace of injury. I wish all large creatures could be so gentle, all small ones so confiding.
We were still waiting, though with little hope, for the return of the phainopeplas which had nested in the large pepper tree in the adjacent canyon. The new crop of pepper berries had meanwhile been discovered by the young of the band-tailed pigeons, recognizable by their non-iridescent, unmarked necks. They ate like the cedar waxwings, greedily and in flocks, but they were, at about three-quarters of a pound apiece, considerably larger, so that the delicate, graceful boughs of the pepper tree hung low under the weight of several dozen bandtails.
About this time two things happened which did nothing to raise my rather low opinion of the common sense of band-tailed pigeons and mourning doves.
The first incident concerned a dove. Eight or ten of these birds had taken a special liking to a new hopper-type feeder Ken had hung in the Monterey pine outside the kitchen window. The feeder, which held some twenty pounds, was made of redwood with glass on two sides so you could see when more seed should be added, and it was filled through a hole in the flat roof. This hole was an oblong measuring 1 ½ by 2 ½ inches and the plug for it had long since gone with a wind.
There are households where such small repairs or replacements are made immediately, but ours isn’t among them. One morning a hungry house finch arriving at the feeder and finding it completely taken over by doves tried to reach the seed through the hole in the roof and either accidentally fell in or purposely dropped in. I suspect the latter because he certainly didn’t panic, he just started eating, and when he had breakfasted he made his way out again without any trouble. Several of his friends learned the trick by watching him and we would often see two or three at a time feasting inside the glass walls. With their legs lost from sight among the seeds, they appeared to be floating on top of the grain like tiny sea birds.
The hole-in-the-roof trick was a good one, but like many good tricks its success depended on timing. In the early morning when the feeder was full to the top, the finches came and went as they pleased. As the seed level dropped throughout the day they had increasing difficulty getting out, and by late afternoon any finch foolish enough to enter, had to be rescued. Quite a few of them spent the night inside the feeder before we learned to check it every evening at dusk and make sure it was free of uninvited guests. If it wasn’t, rescue operations were started.
These rescues were complicated by the fact that the feeder had been placed fairly high in the pine tree and the ground underneath was sloping, and if there was any moisture, extremely slippery like all adobe soil. But the chief difficulty turned out to be the feeder itself, which we had bought because it seemed sturdily built. Sturdily built it was, alas. The roof had been put on to stay on, through Atlantic coast hurricanes, Midwestern tornadoes or California earthquakes, and the glass walls had been set in more firmly than our plate-glass picture windows. Faced with our initial rescue, we thought of using a pair of tongs to take hold of the finch and pull him up through the hole in the roof, but the hole was too small, or the tongs too big. Nor was any bird likely to cooperate in such a maneuver.
It was Ken who conceived the idea of reversing the procedure that had caused the trouble in the first place. A bird that had been trapped by the falling of the seed level could very likely be un-trapped by raising the seed level again. And so it came to pass, on a dozen occasions or more, that the twilight scene I saw from the kitchen window included a large man slowly and carefully pouring seed into the roof hole of the feeder while inside the glass walls a small finch gradually rose higher and higher, with a kind of stately dignity that reminded me not of a bird at all, but of a ship passing through one of the locks of the Panama Canal. It seemed to take about the same amount of time, too, especially if I had dinner waiting on the table and Ken had an eight o’clock meeting to make.
People familiar with these nervous, fidgety finches will be puzzled, as we were, by the fact that they didn’t panic. Perhaps they were sodden with food, I don’t know. I do know that four of the rescues involved the same finch, a male easily identified by the peculiar mustard color of his head and chest.
The Panama Canal system was fine for rescuing finches. One afternoon, however, I looked out and saw a most improbable sight — a mourning dove sitting inside the glass walls of the feeder, contentedly pecking away at the seeds. He had managed to squeeze his corpulent twelve inches into an opening that measured 1 ½ by 2 ½ inches, a feat that surely made him the chief contortionist of the dove coterie.