I called Ken and he went out immediately and started pouring more seed into the feeder. It soon became obvious that this method wasn’t going to work. Even when the bird was raised to the level of the roof hole he just sat there, lacking the same inducement to squeeze himself out that he’d had to squeeze himself in. The sun began to set and still he gave no indication of wanting to depart. Perhaps he recognized the sound construction of the feeder and thought it was a good place to spend the night, in spite of the man rapping on the glass walls and exhorting him to leave in language that would have been clearly understood by any creature on earth except that symbol of purity and innocence, the dove.
There are times in every marriage when it behooves a wife to walk away, stay out of sight and not answer when her name is called. When I walked back again, half an hour later, the feeder had completely disappeared, the dove was recuperating on the ledge, smoothing his ruffled feathers, and Ken was sweeping off the patio. He glanced up when he heard me coming.
“Funny thing about that feeder,” he said calmly. “It wasn’t as sturdy as it looked. We should try one of the new plastic kind, don’t you think?”
I thought.
Shortly afterward, another event lowered my opinion of the common sense of the dove family. Ken was working one evening in his study when he heard from the adjoining lanai a noise that sounded like the fluttering of wings. We’d had birds in the lanai before — Brandy could open any door in the house and never bothered closing them again — but when Ken went to investigate, there were no birds in sight and the noise had stopped. The same thing happened twice the next morning. By this time Ken was sure that the noise was coming from the chimney of the fireplace. When he looked up the chimney, however, all he saw was a patch of blue sky.
The next afternoon he heard the fluttering sounds again, and again he checked the chimney and found nothing. In spite of his insistence that it was a bird, I said it had to be something else, a bat for instance, since no bird could survive in that chimney for two days and nights without food or water.
I myself could probably survive for a month on the words I’ve had to eat, the preceding statement being a good example. By the use of a flashlight and a few acrobatics Ken discovered the bird hidden in a kind of small alcove inside the chimney. It was a young band-tailed pigeon. The ordeal had left him frazzled and blotched with soot, but he was still strong enough to fight his rescuer and peck him vigorously on the hand before flying off toward the adjacent canyon.
The visit of our uninvited guest raised many questions. Had he gotten into the chimney accidentally or on purpose? If on purpose, what reason could he have had? Was he escaping from something? Birds normally avoid going into any place unless they’re certain of an escape route; and the only local predators I’ve seen attacking bandtails are the sharp-shinned hawks who had gone north two or three months previously. Why didn’t the pigeon simply drop down into the fireplace — less than a yard separated the alcove from the firepit — and try to escape via the lanai? And after he was rescued what did he do first? Eat? Search for water to drink and bathe? Fly as fast and as far away as possible? Attempt to find his friends? Settle down to roost for the balance of the night?
Only one conjecture seems sure to be correct: after two days in a chimney, life in the pepper tree must have looked very good indeed. The small rose-red berry of the California pepper tree consists of a seed surrounded by an almost paper-thin layer of fruit which affords little taste or nourishment. Yet it is a favorite among birds. Some, like the phainopeplas, waxwings, mockingbirds, jays, magpies, blackbirds and finches, eat the berries right from the tree. Others, like the thrushes, thrashers, towhees, white-crowned and golden-crowned sparrows, sometimes even flickers, wait until the berries fall and eat them from the ground.
Visitors occasionally ask if the seeds of the California pepper can be processed and used as a food seasoning like the seeds of South American peppers. They aren’t, but I’m not so sure they can’t be. I know of an instance when an attempt was made, though I wasn’t informed of the results. Every autumn the Botanic Garden offers the public a course on “Trees About Town,” conducted by its learned and lively director, Katherine Muller. At one of these classes I met a woman who was engaged in processing California pepper berries which she intended to experiment with as a condiment. I never saw her again, a fact which I prefer to think of as coincidental rather than consequential.
People who intend to plant a pepper tree to attract birds must be sure they purchase one that will bear. For three years Ken and I nurtured a pepper tree in the hope of eventually attracting another pair of phainopeplas. It thrived but produced no fruit. When I contacted our nurseryman about the situation he said he thought he was doing us a favor by selling us a male tree “which wouldn’t clutter up the yard with those messy berries.”
Of all the baby birds that spring and summer, the most endearing were the black-headed grosbeaks. The first male grosbeak had arrived on March 23 in full breeding plumage, cinnamon and black, with a lemon patch in the center of his belly and under each wing. A week later there were half a dozen males in the neighborhood and two females, more modestly clad than the males, but still vivid with their striped heads and peach-and-coffee bodies. The birds were quiet at this time. There was no singing or sexual display or territorial fighting. They seemed to be calmly sizing up the situation and one another. By what mysterious means they came to an agreement among themselves, biologists will perhaps never know. But a decision was reached: six of the grosbeaks departed, leaving one male and one female.
Then the singing began. There are people who sing and there are others who can be called songsters. And so it is among birds. G-man, our grosbeak, was a true songster. He sang for love and wonder, for pride and joy and to serenade a sunny day, greet a rain, welcome a wind. He sang so often that his lady love was moved to respond with a song of her own, and it was difficult to tell who was singing to whom about what.
Eventually the reasons for the singing appeared, a trio of Baby G’s, bodies fat and round as tennis balls, heads striped brown and beige like their mother’s. Right from the beginning they showed their musical heritage. As they tagged along after their devoted parents in search for food, they did not make a terrible racket like the baby blackbirds or cheep incessantly like the sparrows and house finches. Their soliciting sound was a soft, plaintive, gently aggrieved, “Hey, you!” Every shrub and tree in the yard seemed to be equipped with its own music box which played over and over, “Hey, you! Hey, you! Hey, you!”
The red-shafted flicker normally lays a clutch of half a dozen eggs or more, but that year only one survived to fledgling size. He had two sounds as he followed his parents to the doughnut in the wooden feeder. One was soft like the grosbeaks’, a plaintive and questioning, “Yup yop? Yup yop yop?” The other was a shrieking that can’t be described in words. When I first heard it I thought a murder was taking place on the porch railing. It looked like a murder, too, with the mother flicker thrusting her formidable one-and-a-half-inch beak down the baby’s throat while he screamed like a banshee. This noise, as far as a mere spectator-auditor could tell, was caused by nothing more than excitement.
At intervals throughout the day, one or other of the parent flickers, sometimes both, would bring their son, Yup Yop, to the wooden feeder. He was enormous compared to the other young birds, but he was a terribly spoiled baby. The little wrentits and song sparrows and Wilson’s warblers and goldfinches all fended for themselves while Yup Yop sat helplessly on the railing, refusing to try even a bite of doughnut or bread or a single grape or peanut. As two weeks passed and Yup Yop still clung to his dependence, his parents were at the end of their wits. They had tried coaxing, prodding, pecking and pushing. Now they tried the only other thing they could think of — they flew off and left him.