The sky-blue patches simplified the task of identifying the bird. He was a species of South American oriole called a troupial. I found a picture in the Austin-Singer Birds of the World which clearly showed the eye patch, the black hood and tail, the bright underparts and full color. There was one puzzling difference, though — the troupial in the picture was a deep orange, and our visitor was yellow.
I called Waldo Abbott at the Museum of Natural History. He said a bird of similar description had been reported to him by a Mrs. Frank Kennedy who had a feeding station in the center of the city, a block from the courthouse. He’d gone down to see the bird and identified it positively as a troupial. There seemed little doubt that the troupial in Mrs. Kennedy’s fig tree and the one in our tea tree were the same bird, since the two feeding stations were less than three miles apart, as the crow flies. But I had to be sure so I drove over right away.
Mrs. Kennedy didn’t know exactly how long the troupial had been with her. She first became aware that something had been added to her garden by observing that something was being subtracted from it. The succulents planted in redwood tubs and hanging baskets around the patio were disappearing. Apparently healthy plants were reduced to mere stalks within a day or so, and sometimes flowerpots were found overturned. Mrs. Kennedy blamed everything on rodents, which she assumed had been attracted to her yard by the grain she put out for the birds. She set traps, but they remained unsprung while the succulents continued to disappear.
Early one morning in May when she went out to fill the birdbath she found the culprit perched on a redwood tub, stripping off the fleshy new leaves of the sedum it contained. The troupial stared at her with his bright yellow eyes, then whistled. Mrs. Kennedy whistled back, and a pact of friendship was thus simply and immediately formed.
The birds that flocked to Mrs. Kennedy’s feeding station were mainly the common city birds, mourning doves and domestic pigeons, Brewer’s blackbirds and house sparrows. It was natural enough that when the exotic stranger showed up, with his brilliant plumage and bold whistle, he was given a great deal of food and attention. He loved fruit — especially bananas — doughnuts, cake, bread softened with milk or water, and of, course, the leaves of succulents. He had his own feeding tray in the fig tree, apart from the other birds, and defended it vigorously. During the twenty-four hours he spent at our house he had no trouble driving off the scrub jays; perhaps they were too flabbergasted by the sight of the oversized oriole to fight back.
Where had the troupial come from? Although some orioles are long-range migrants, the Baltimore and orchard going as far as South America to winter, and the Bullock to Costa Rica, all the reference books I could find indicated that troupials, like most birds of tropical regions, were non-migratory and stayed pretty close to their part of South America. It seemed reasonable, then, to assume that Trouper had not come to California of his own choice or under his own steam. He was not wearing a leg band, as birds purchased in pet shops usually are, though it was possible that one had been attached and had subsequently worn off with the help of time and the weather and Trouper himself.
I contacted Paul Vercammen, whose private aviary has been described in another chapter. He knew what a troupial was, of course, but he’d never purchased any and they weren’t the kind of birds normally stocked by the local pet stores. Someone wanting a troupial might have to go where the troupials were, Colombia or Venezuela.
The word Venezuela jogged my memory. Maracaibo was the place where Pete and Adu Batten had acquired the first inmate of what was to become their zoo, or to put it more accurately, their collection of pet birds, reptiles and mammals. I called Adu on the phone. She told me that she and Pete had picked up a couple of troupials in Maracaibo some time ago, but they had escaped the previous fall while being transferred from one cage to another. All attempts to find them had failed and they were presumed dead. Both birds had been adult males, bright orange in color.
I told Adu about Trouper and his golden-yellow feathers, and asked if she was positive about the color. She said the birds were orange when they escaped, but they would have had a moult since then and the color of their feathers might be influenced by diet. She used to feed them oranges every day, just as the flamingos were fed a certain kind of shrimp paste to keep their plumage pink. I thought of the sea otters we frequently saw in the kelp beds off the coast of Monterey and the Big Sur. Their very bones are dyed purple by the pigment in the sea urchins that form a large part of their diet.
Adu was pleasantly surprised that a troupial — possibly two — had managed to survive for six months on its own. Or to a considerable extent on its own. Mrs. Kennedy did provide handouts, certainly, but it was Trouper himself who’d discovered the food value of succulents. Or was it the food aspect that had attracted him in the first place? Perhaps, in his native environment, he used succulents as a source of water the way many inhabitants of our California desert do. My private picture of Venezuela had always been that of a vast and lush rainforest. Adu made some corrections in the picture. Though all of Venezuela was very humid, actual rainfall occurred heavily only in the mountain and foothill regions. Maracaibo itself, at sea level, received barely enough rain to support scrub vegetation.
Three of the mysteries about Trouper had been tentatively solved: his place of origin, his fondness for succulents and the color of his plumage.
During the next year Trouper became well known in the neighborhood. Mrs. Kennedy had learned to imitate his whistle — or, more likely, he’d learned to recognize hers, since the bird’s whistle and Mrs. Kennedy’s sounded completely different to me. Anyway they understood each other, and when our Audubon members went to visit him, Mrs. Kennedy was usually able to call him down from the date palm where he took his siestas.
When the spirit moved him Trouper would leave the Kennedys’ place for a few hours — or a few days — and catch up on what was happening in the outside world. He returned from one of these excursions sadder, wiser and without a tail. The life of a bon vivant had made him a bit too casual in his relationship with cats.
We have had many tailless birds at our feeding station during the past five years. Like Trouper, they could all fly fairly well for short distances. None of them stayed long, however. Some, lacking the quick maneuverability made possible by a tail, met an early death; others grew new tails and became once again indistinguishable from their friends and relatives. The longest stay was on the part of a scrub jay who’d been born without the slightest stump of a tail and remained that way. His appearance was apt to mystify visiting birdwatchers who, seeing him in the distance in a bad light, identified him as everything from a quail to a flicker.
To the layman, accustomed to the slow growth rate of such things as human hair and fingernails, it is amazing how quickly a bird can replace pulled-out feathers. The stub of Trouper’s new tail was visible within three days, within three weeks the tail was fully grown again. He was in no hurry for further adventures though. For some time he stuck pretty close to his feeding tray in the fig tree and the fresh batch of succulents Mrs. Kennedy had put around the patio. Then he started out on another series of excursions. He appeared once more at our house and three times at our neighbors’, who had a mission fig tree like the one Trouper was accustomed to. The Museum of Natural History received reports from various parts of town about a strange, large, black and orange-yellow bird with a loud, shrill whistle. It was suggested by one of our Audubon members that we keep track of Trouper’s whereabouts the way a general keeps track of his men in battle, with colored pins and a wall map. I didn’t purchase such elaborate equipment, but I did plot Trouper’s course on an ordinary street map of the city. He kept within a radius of about two and a half miles from home, i.e., Mrs. Kennedy’s, and his most frequent appearances were near East Beach, within a couple of hundred yards of his point of escape.