Watching Yup Yop’s initial attempts to feed himself was like watching a human infant’s introduction to solid food. He wasn’t used to the texture and he did considerable head shaking and bill wiping before he showed signs of enjoyment. But he soon became our best customer, and as time passed, the boss of the feeder. This lofty position was strictly the result of his size, since his disposition was like that of his parents, mild and unaggressive. He was extremely wary, though. No matter how often he watched from a distance while I took food out to the ledge or worked around the garden or in my office, I could never get close to him. Perhaps it was because in the not too distant past flickers were shot as game birds and had learned the destructiveness of man. Fifty-five species of birds have been observed using that particular feeder, and of them all, only the crows showed more wariness than the flickers.
Yup Yop was also cautious about planes. If one approached the canyon at what he considered too low an altitude he flattened himself in the wooden feeder and stayed there, looking like a feathered turtle, motionless except for the once-a-second blinking of his eyes. I’ve seen acorn woodpeckers assume this same posture when alarmed, but instead of blinking they moved their heads slowly in a circle the way owls do when they want to examine something.
The month of May was nearly over and we still hadn’t seen hide or feather of the new batch of brown-headed cowbirds. We knew cowbirds to be brood parasites whose eggs were hatched and young were raised by other birds, usually a smaller variety, and we were curious to find out which of our neighborhood species had been so used, or misused. At the Botanic Garden we’d watched a newly fledged cowbird being fed by a tiny orange-crowned warbler and another by an Oregon junco. (The beginning birdwatcher is apt to be thrown for a loss by the appearance of immature cowbirds, particularly since they are seldom pictured in books. Their color is misleading — a sort of lead laced with platinum.) Also near the house of Alice and Charles Richardson in Montecito we’d seen a Hutton’s vireo struggling to feed a cowbird twice its size. But our Oregon junco was gone, there were no nesting vireos of this kind in our immediate neighborhood, and our orange-crowned warblers had already raised a family.
On the ledge, at the other feeders and in the adjoining field, the adult cowbirds associated almost entirely with red-winged blackbirds. No interrelationship between the two species was discernible; they simply showed up in the same place at the same time to eat the same things. With the arrival of the young, however, a baffling picture began to emerge.
The first week in June the baby redwings and cowbirds appeared on the ledge, more than three weeks later than the Brewer’s blackbirds. The close association of the adult cowbirds and redwings and the simultaneous appearance of their young led me to believe that the redwings, in spite of their greater size, were being used as the host birds, and so I paid particular attention to the actions of the young cowbirds.
It turned out to be a disappointing and inconclusive study. In my hours of watching every day for a period of two weeks I didn’t observe a single instance of an adult redwing feeding a young cowbird, or of a cowbird soliciting a redwing or, in fact, of a cowbird soliciting any kind of bird at all, including its own kind. From the moment the young arrived on the ledge they seemed completely self-sufficient, while the redwings were still in the soliciting stage. This suggests that if a host-parasite relationship existed between the two species, the cowbirds’ eggs were laid several days before the redwings’.
In the final week of May the mockingbirds began the first of their nocturnal serenades. The night of May 26, when I was particularly restless, or they were particularly loud, I was awakened at midnight, one-thirty, two, three, four and five-thirty. To those who insist that it is the brightness of the moon which evokes nocturnal song, I can only report that it was foggy all night and that the following morning all planes were grounded until nine-thirty. I have heard many replies to the question of why mockingbirds sing at night. The simplest and perhaps the most satisfactory was given by Ken: “Why not?”
During the hours of darkness the mockers had no vocal competition, but at dawn every baby bird in the neighborhood began sounding its hunger notes. Yup Yop, the flicker, alternately whispered and shrieked, the hooded orioles clucked, the blackbirds remonstrated, “Tut, tut, tut, tut!” The house finches and sparrows cheeped and chattered up and down the ledge; and from the porch railing, the elderberry bushes and the lemon tree, the grosbeaks called softly and plaintively, “Hey you! Hey you!”
These were the sounds of summer as the younger generation grew up and Ken and I grew older.
14
Johnny and the Night Visitors
My life list of birds was growing rapidly, too rapidly. While my greed was assuaged, my common sense warned me of lean pickings ahead since there were only a limited number of birds in our area and a new species seen in the present meant one less in the future. A bird watcher’s Utopia would have to include a system of rationing that would allow you a new bird on your birthday, for instance, another at Christmas, and perhaps a third on the Fourth.
This suggestion was prompted by the appearance on our ledge one Christmas morning of a white-winged dove, a species rare in these parts and new to us. I mentioned to a friend that it was the best present we ever received, and the following Christmas he brought over a three-foot manzanita tree with winter pears wired to its branches and a partridge leashed at its tip with a golden ribbon. The partridge would also have been a new bird for us if it hadn’t been made of clay. A year and a half was to elapse before Kay Ball found us a real partridge on the campus of the University of Alberta at Edmonton.
Our list of Home Visitors, that is, birds seen at or from our feeding station, was also growing rapidly, and not always according to pattern. Some birds which we had good reason to expect since they were frequently seen in the vicinity never showed up, such as the western kingbird, Say’s phoebe, rough-winged swallow, canon wren, loggerhead shrike, western bluebird, lark sparrow. Others arrived which we had no reason to expect — Scott’s oriole, rose-breasted grosbeak, catbird, Grace’s and Tennessee warblers, summer tanager — and one of these, Home Visitor No. 103, was a bird we didn’t even know existed.
I was in the kitchen preparing the dogs’ breakfast one morning when a piercing whistle suddenly split the air. It was as loud as a flicker’s, with a clearer and sweeter tone. When I heard it again I knew it was no bird I knew, perhaps no bird at all, but a boy whistling a signal to a friend. I dropped everything and rushed into the living room for my binoculars. As it turned out, I didn’t need them.
The whistler was perched in the Australian tea tree at the east end of the ledge, eating one of the doughnuts I’d just put out. His brilliant yellow-and-black plumage and long, sharp, cone-shaped bill marked him as an oriole, but he was bigger than any oriole of my acquaintance, including the rare Lichtenstein’s oriole of the Rio Grande delta region of Texas. Our new visitor was about the same length as a scrub jay, though he seemed considerably larger because more of his length was body and less was tail. But the most peculiar thing about him was revealed in a closer study through binoculars: at the outer corner of each yellow eye he had a triangular patch of bare skin, sky-blue in color.