The Birds and the Beasts Were There

12 Life in the Worm Factory

What distinguishes a bird from all other living creatures? Feathers. And what distinguishes an acorn woodpecker from all other birds? Practically everything.

Acorn woodpeckers are the characters of our part of the bird world, the true uniques, in appearance, voice, mannerisms, feeding, nesting and care of young. So it was natural enough, I suppose, that they should have been the ones responsible for our going into the worm business.

The word “togetherness” usually conjures up a picture of a large family group celebrating Thanksgiving or Christmas. To me it conjures up the telephone pole beside our driveway, for in it lived a family group that celebrated every day in the year. I don’t know exactly how many members constituted the group — an acorn woodpecker census, as I’ll show later, is not simple, and estimates of numbers tend to be too high since the birds are so noisy — but I would say between seven and nine.

Our road in Montecito is a circle, half a mile around. Three families of woodpeckers lived on this street, approximately equal distances apart. The first family had its headquarters in the top of a dead palm tree. I had almost nothing to do with this group except to watch for it in passing. The second group I came to know better. It used a telephone pole located beside the creek that ran through the neighboring canyon, an area of numerous mature live oaks, any one of which would have made an excellent storage tree, in my opinion. But the woodpeckers didn’t invite my opinion. For their storage tree they had chosen the attic of a pretty little white frame cottage whose owner, Miss Holbrook, fortunately for the birds, was both a nature lover and somewhat deaf.

The third family was ours — or we were theirs, depending on point of view. Less than fifty feet separated the window beside my bed from the excavation in the telephone pole where they slept, if so mild a word can be used to describe the deathlike coma into which they fell with the darkness. I heard their guttural goodnights as they squeezed and squashed into the hole, and in the morning, their throat clearings as their metabolism quickened after the torpor of the night. Their temperatures rose, their bodies warmed, their senses became alert as they returned to life. With life came hunger, and with hunger, the hope that the Millars would be serving breakfast al fresco, as usual. They chose a sentry to keep watch.

Acorn woodpeckers are not the earliest risers in the bird world — based on the records I’ve kept, I would have to give this distinction to the brown towhee — but they were well ahead of me. By the time I opened my eyes the sentry was already perched on a dead branch of the eucalyptus tree, loosening up his voice box with a few rolling notes now and then. The instant I stepped out on the porch, he let go:

This last sequence is like a crescendo and decrescendo, reaching its height of volume and pitch on the fifth yack up, then decreasing. It sounds so much like a carpenter sawing through a board that I actually mistook it for just that. When we first moved here I used to wonder how our neighbor, a professional man with a demanding job, could afford to spend so much time at home building things.

The sentry’s calls brought immediate responses. Pretty soon the canyon was an echo chamber of noise, for if there was one thing the acorn woodpeckers liked it was a loud and lively family conference. They seemed ready to confer at any time from dawn to dusk, on any subject from soup to sunspots. At least that’s the impression a listener might get from their variety of noises and their range of pitch and volume. They talked to their relatives and friends and to the other species of birds who’d responded to the breakfast call, especially the scrub jays, their chief competitors for acorns, or in this case, doughnuts and bread. They also talked to themselves. Under ordinary circumstances this was done quietly, rather like a person muttering to himself while he tries to solve a personal problem. But there was one bird, a hot-headed male, whose soliloquies could be heard all the way to City Hall. He will be formally introduced later.

Breakfast was served on a corner of the porch railing, in a wooden dish that had once been a salad bowl. A large nail had been driven through the dish to keep it steady and to serve as a spear for two doughnuts. This left room for a couple of pieces of bread, broken into bits, and a few grapes when they were in season. I have never seen woodpeckers go after grapes on the vine — it would be difficult for them to find a proper landing place — but they ate them readily out of the wooden dish, frequently flying across the canyon to hide them behind the loose bark of a blue gum eucalyptus which also served as a hiding place for other choice tidbits. Remembering our little wine-making friend Richard the rat, I used to watch the woodpeckers carefully for signs of tippling. I never saw any. Either they ate the grapes before the process of fermentation started, or, more likely, they forgot about them since they invariably store much more food than they can possibly eat.

Nature has been generous to the acorn woodpecker. He is not dependent, as his relatives are, on the vagaries of insect life, nor is it necessary for him to fight for seeds or vegetation that are in short supply. Our part of California is filled with oaks and acorns, and living has been relatively easy for the woodpeckers dependent on them. Their abundance so testifies. Santa Barbara’s Christmas bird census always lists several hundred of them. In last year’s Christmas bird census Santa Barbara listed 456 — the highest count in the nation.

As soon as the sentry had issued the call for breakfast, he himself came down to the wooden dish to eat. I knew it was a male because he lacked the broad black forehead band that marks the female and is noticeable at a considerable distance. (For some reason this sexual dimorphism is not often mentioned in bird books.) I wasn’t sure whether it was the same male who acted as sentry all the time. On some mornings I noticed a decidedly pink cast to the normally whitish eye, which led me to believe that more than one male bird was involved. I still believe it — not, however, on this evidence. Dr. Mary Erickson, an ornithologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara who has been doing field work on these woodpeckers for a long time, tells me that this pinkish cast is not due to pigmentation but to a suffusion of blood caused by stress or excitement. She has observed it frequently in the eyes of woodpeckers who are being banded.

I knew from the sleekness and brightness of his coat that the sentry was an adult bird. Young birds often show dark eyes — perhaps because their pupils are expanded after time spent in the murkiness of the nest hole — and considerable red in the under-plumage of the chest, neck and head, a reminder of their close relationship with the red-headed woodpecker of the East and Midwest, Melanerpes erythrocephalus. The acorn woodpecker’s scientific name, Melanerpes formicivorus, meaning creeping black anteater, was based on inadequate or faulty information. Ants constitute such a small percentage of the diet that it seems likely they’re ingested by accident while the birds are eating acorns or other nuts and fruits.

The number of these woodpeckers feeding from the wooden dish varied according to the time of year. In spring and summer there were a great many — I didn’t attempt to count individual birds since this was impossible without banding; I simply kept track of how often they monopolized the feeder — and in the fall there were absolutely none. I used to think this was due to post-breeding dispersal, families splitting up and moving from one pole or tree to another pole or tree when the groups became too large and the quarters too unsanitary. These movements did occur every summer, but the birds never went far. When the family in the telephone pole beside our driveway moved, for instance, it was only to the large dead eucalyptus tree on the edge of the property. This location was no further away from the wooden dish than the other, yet in September the birds stopped coming. I would see them hurry past our porch railing as if it were a bird trap and doughnuts were poison bait and I a sinister stranger; I, who for months hadn’t been able to step out of a door without evoking a canyonful of clangorous “good mornings.”

It was as though our house had suddenly been declared off-limits. Perhaps a single woodpecker stopped for a rest, a quick grape or a bite of doughnut during that autumn and the early part of winter, but if he did, I failed to see him. No mere moving from one headquarters to another could account for such a complete reversal in behavior pattern. There had to be another explanation. And there was — staring at me from every twig of every coast live oak tree in the canyon. In September the acorns begin to ripen and fancy tidbits that can’t be properly stored must be forgotten in the interests of the future.

The group worked busily and harmoniously together. New holes were made in the storage tree, in this case a sycamore, and the acorns were pounded in, usually lengthwise, very occasionally sideways, if this was the way they could best be fitted in. I have seen a woodpecker try a particular acorn in a dozen or more different holes until one was found that was the exact fit, an essential part of the proceedings since the hole is intended to serve as a vise to hold the nut securely while they hammer the shells open with their beaks. Anyone skeptical about the skill and efficiency of these birds would do well to visit a storage tree and try to remove an acorn with his hands. Many ancient California Indian tribes, like the Chumash, Yokut and Shoshone, who shared the territory of these woodpeckers before the arrival of the Spaniards, undoubtedly obtained their method for cracking the nuts from watching the birds. The Indians used a hole in a rock instead of a tree, putting the acorns in securely, pointed end down, and hammering open the wider, exposed end. After the nuts were cured and ground, the tannic acid was removed with hot water and the meal was left to harden into cakes. A friend who has tasted one of these cakes, still made by the Yokuts, claims the Indians would have done better to have copied the woodpeckers entirely and eaten the acorns right out of the shell.

Every day when I passed Miss Holbrook’s small white cottage I could hear the woodpeckers at work. Sometimes I stopped to watch them drilling under the eaves as industriously as if the lady of the house was paying them carpenters’ union wages.

Work sessions were sometimes silent, sometimes accompanied by loud and spirited conversation which may have sounded to an untutored ear like quarreling. Actually they were good-natured, gregarious birds. For all their crowded living quarters and communal breeding — things which would have driven the human animal to distraction — I never saw them fight with each other. Although there appeared to be a pecking order at the wooden dish, it was maintained merely by a polite exchange of words:

“That’s my doughnut you’re eating, dear chap.”

“Really? I’m terribly sorry. I’ll leave immediately, old sport.”

They could fight when they wanted to, however, and they often did, their usual adversary being their fellow consumer of acorns, the scrub jay. In battle the woodpeckers took advantage of their proclivity for group action. A single scrub jay eating on the porch railing was, to mix birds and metaphors, a sitting duck for a trio of acorn woodpeckers who took turns dive-bombing him from the roof. No actual physical contact was involved but the harassed jay would nearly always retreat to a more peaceful foraging area. I didn’t waste much sympathy on him. He himself used the dive-bombing technique on other birds whenever he had the chance.

In the meantime the scrub jay, too, was gathering acorns and storing them. His storage method — burying them in the ground, then often as not forgetting where — seemed much inferior to that of the woodpeckers, but was, in fact, a neat piece of ecology. Some acorns would be found and eaten, enabling the jay to survive, and some would be forgotten and reseed, enabling the oaks to survive.

Scrub jays are natural-born buriers. Even when the adobe soil was so dry and hard they had to chisel it like stone, they carried away everything that wasn’t nailed down — bits of bread, potato chips, grapes, peanuts, chunks of apple, pretzels, cheese crackers, cookies, hard-boiled eggs — and used every inch of bare ground they could find. Ours would have been quite a unique neighborhood if all the items they buried had sprouted and grown. Only one did, the sunflower seeds. By June the lower and upper terrace and the adjoining field had turned into a forest of the things. Nor did the jays confine their activities to our property. In fact, a stranger visiting our street for the first time would have thought that half the people living on it had decided to go in for commercial sunflower growing. Where the sunflowers stopped marked the territorial limits of the jays who patronized our feeders.

Give these birds a decent-sized piece of bare earth to work with and their planting is as neat and symmetrical as any human gardener’s. The man living next door had, at the rear of his house, a dirt road which was no longer in use. The jays took on the job of landscaping it. Down the middle of each tire track they planted sunflower seeds, exactly five inches apart.

Something of a more reasonable size might have escaped detection, but as the sunflowers reached five, six, seven feet they practically forced themselves on the property owner’s attention. He was not known as a nature lover, and had, in fact, been somewhat critical of my bandtails landing on his T.V. antenna and cahooing too early in the morning. When we met at the mailbox one noon he mentioned that sunflowers were coming up in his avocado orchard and lemon grove and even in his cutting garden, and he asked me if I’d noticed. I had a choice of admitting that I’d noticed or confessing to total blindness, so I said, yes, I’d seen a few sunflowers coming up here and there.

He gave me a suspicious look. “They’re all over the place. What do you suppose is at the bottom of it?”

“Sunflower seeds,” I said, and retreated before he could pursue the subject further.

People familiar with these noisy, colorful jays might wonder how the man could have missed seeing them at work. The fact is that when a scrub jay is doing something important like burying food or looking for other birds’ nests to rob, stalking a lizard or spying out the acorn caches of the woodpeckers, he is absolutely silent and moves with a practiced stealth which makes him almost invisible.

Planting sunflower seeds became such an obsession with our jays that we rarely saw them eat one. When they did, they anchored the seed firmly with their feet and hammered it open with their beaks, in the manner of titmice, quite different from the way the house finches ate. The finches didn’t use their feet; they simply held the seed in their beaks and sawed it right down the middle. Every few days I had to sweep their neatly halved hulls off the ledge.

All that cool, moist winter the jays planted, and in the sunny spring the sunflowers grew, and in the hot, dry summer they died. None reached fruition and the diligent but luckless farmers never harvested a single seed. Some of the plants were toppled by wind or their own weight; some couldn’t compete with the sturdier natives for what small amount of moisture was available; others were knocked down by dogs and cats or trampled by possums and raccoons and bush bunnies. With the sunflowers died my hope, never too robust, of saving a little money at the feed store. (Not long ago a visiting Easterner was complaining of having to pay fifteen cents a pound for the California-grown sunflower seeds he fed his birds at home. I told him that we Californians paid exactly twice that amount. There are many similar inequities in the price of produce. I once asked an agronomist why, and he replied in about ten thousand words that he didn’t know. He seemed delighted when I suggested the reason might be sunspots.)

While the sunflowers were dying, the baby scrub jays flourished. Perched on the porch railing, waiting their turn at the wooden dish, they were fat and fluffy and oddly quiet. In appearance they resembled the Mexican jay of Arizona and New Mexico more than they did their parents. They lacked the scrub jay’s eyebrow stripe and half-necklace and cobalt-blue head.

Their innocence and docility was quite touching. Soon they would learn that this is not the way of a jay, but for a little time they were gentle creatures bossed around by nearly all the other birds. They were dive-bombed by woodpeckers, crowded out by blackbirds, pecked by towhees and mockers, pushed off the railing by thrashers, even jostled by sparrows, and they never fought back or let out a single squawk of protest. The only noise they made was a very infrequent sound, loud and shrill, that reminded me of a flicker’s. I have heard it no more than a dozen times in our years of operating the feeding station.

There are a number of sounds that can be heard only when you live right in the midst of birds. An excellent example is the goodnight of the acorn woodpeckers, a low-pitched, sleepy mumbling made about half an hour after they’ve disappeared into the telephone pole for the night. The interpreting of bird language, at this stage of our knowledge, must be subjective, so I can only claim that to me this mumbling sounds like the response to a question: “Yes, everything’s fine, now settle down and go to sleep.”

The acorn woodpeckers provided me with another example of special semantic effects, at least one of them did. He was a mature bird, perhaps the head of the clan, certainly old enough to be set in his ways. In his case this meant that he had very strong likes and dislikes in the food department. One afternoon when I was dusting in the living room I saw an object fly over the porch railing that seemed too small to be any bird I knew. Hope, the poet said, springs eternal in the human breast. And if the breast happens to belong to a birder, the hope is often wild and wonderful: a green-backed twinspot or locust finch from Africa — blown a few thousand miles off course — a red avadavat from the East Indies, a yellow-tailed diamond-bird from Australia. I was ready to settle for something found a bit closer to home, like the bee hummingbird of Cuba. The new birdwatcher, and I suspect a few old ones as well, lives in a beautiful world where anything is possible! I grabbed my binoculars and rushed into my office on the track of the unidentified flying object.

The male acorn woodpecker was perched on the rim of the wooden dish which I had had to fill three times that day with bread and doughnuts and grapes. I now understood why. My UFO was no twinspot from Africa or avadavat from the Indies or diamond-bird from Australia, it was a piece of bread from the corner bakery. Our crochety guest had decided not only that he would refuse to eat bread, which satisfied the rest of his family, but that he wouldn’t even tolerate its presence in the same container as decent food. Before taking so much as a peck at the doughnuts or grapes, he tossed out of the dish and over the porch railing every single scrap of bread. It reminded me of the hooded oriole chucking the cotton balls out of the cornucopia, except that the oriole did the job quietly while the woodpecker informed the neighborhood at the top of his lungs what he thought of peasant food like bread and the barbarians who dared serve it to him. Every time I filled the dish that spring he repeated his performance, until he tired of it or else finally accepted the idea of bread. His nickname, B.T., in the beginning stood for Bread Tosser.

One morning as I was gathering together all the bird food, I came across a tin of salted cashews no longer fresh enough for people to eat. Thinking the woodpeckers would be delighted at such a treat I put ten or twelve cashews in the wooden dish instead of grapes. The male sentry flew down and ate as usual, paying no attention to the nuts. The next two woodpeckers, both females, hesitated a few moments over the new item of food, like very good shoppers. Then one took a nut and flew off, the other departed carrying a piece of bread after several pecks at the doughnut.

Then came B.T. Crouching low over the wooden dish he let out a “Jacob?” whose meaning couldn’t have been clearer if he’d spoken it in Harvard English: “What’s this?”

He turned his head to the right and studied the cashews with his left eye, he turned his head to the left and studied them with his right eye. Both eyes agreed: the new stuff was bad.

He told me all about it, me and everyone else in the canyon, shouting at the top of his lungs and moving his body violently up and down and from side to side like a drunken sailor trying madly to compensate for the pitch and toss of the ship under him. His performance lasted nearly five minutes. It didn’t earn him an Academy Award or even a new name. It simply changed the meaning of his old one. B.T. no longer stood for Bread Tosser but for Bad Temper.

Everyone who has watched birds has seen and heard them express anger at the intrusion of people or animals or other birds. B.T.’s anger — rage might be a better word — was different. No other creatures were present: he was reacting entirely to an unfamiliar food. One of our scrub jays reacted in a similar way to a comparable situation involving food. Since the acorn woodpeckers had ganged up to drive him away from the wooden dish on the porch railing, he had taken to eating off the ledge. Every now and then he was unable to resist the sight of a nice fresh doughnut practically asking to be buried and he would attempt to pick it up in his beak and make off with it. Since a whole doughnut weighed almost as much as he did, it simply dropped out of his beak and rolled across the ledge and down onto the patio below.

When food disappears off the ledge, by accident or design, some birds, the house finches for example, adopt an easy-come, easy-go attitude and show no curiosity or further interest in it. Our friend the scrub jay was much too intelligent to believe that doughnuts can disappear into thin air and he immediately hopped to the edge to investigate. When he saw the doughnut lying on the patio he launched into a violent tirade against the offender, and when that failed to evoke a response he dropped down and pecked at it furiously between squawks. It was very much like watching a man curse a hammer that had struck his thumb or break a golf club that had missed a putt or shake his fist at a bowling ball that had zigged instead of zagged. If a bowling ball, a golf club or a hammer can be considered culprits, we can hardly wonder at the jay assigning this role to a doughnut which had escaped from his beak and “flown” off the ledge onto the patio.

Jays are adept at vocal self-expression and their tirades were often triggered by other things. I could expect a brisk tongue-lashing when I was half an hour late putting out breakfast or if I turned on a certain sprinkler that interfered with their foraging or if I let the dogs out at an inconvenient time. The only occasion when it really snowed in our area, a pair of jays sat in one of the Monterey pine trees and squawked from the first snowflake to the last.

Among zoologists there is a tendency not to allow for individual differences of temperament and mentality among members of a species. Yet anyone who runs a feeding station for birds and animals becomes keenly aware of many such differences even if the explanations for them aren’t apparent. Why did one acorn woodpecker readily accept a new food which caused another to throw a fit? Why did some woodpeckers put useless things like stones and eucalyptus pods in the holes that had been drilled for acorns? Why did most of the rats eat the grapes on the spot while one hoarded them to start a winery?

Why, after a dozen Bewick wrens furnished their nests without incident, did the thirteenth wren attempt repeatedly to push into the nesting hole material that was too bulky, and fly into a fury when his efforts were unsuccessful? Why, of all the California thrashers who’ve passed our windows and eaten our food, should there have been one who habitually talked to himself?

These thrasher monologues bore no resemblance to the frenetic protests of B.T. and the scrub jays, and little to the normal voice of the thrasher which is loud and droll and vivacious. They consisted of a series of soft notes, a kind of gentle, absent-minded mumbling that sounded oddly human. I heard it a number of times before I found out who was responsible. When I finally caught him in my binoculars he looked oddly human, too. He was an older bird, as indicated by the curvature and great length of the bill which, some ornithologists suggest, may keep growing throughout a thrasher’s lifetime. He reminded me of an elderly uncle, fussy but benign, making some well-chosen remarks as he went about the complicated business of terrestrial living. He would take a few little running steps — he resorted to flying infrequently and for short distances only — and then he would pause to glance around him, probe a clump of earth, examine a patch of grass, peer under a dead leaf. All this time his throat was vibrating and his beak was opening and closing as he rambled on to himself. Am I sure it was to himself? Well, there was no one there but me, and I prefer to think that thrashers talk to themselves rather than to people. If people overhear, that’s their problem.

During April no psychic powers were needed to make us aware that among the acorn woodpeckers more was going on than met the eye and that it was going on inside the hole in the telephone pole. We had no way of determining whether one or two females laid their eggs in the nest, but on the basis of numbers of different woodpeckers seen entering and leaving we suspected the presence of a double clutch of eggs, and a couple of weeks later, a double batch of young.

These were certainly well attended and fed frequently, though not the kind of diet considered ideal for baby woodpeckers since it was made up entirely of doughnuts and bread, grapes being out of season and unobtainable. The female bushtit had brought up both her broods on doughnuts, but the male had supplemented their diet with insects. On the few occasions that our woodpeckers flew from the pole to catch an insect in midair, the maneuver seemed more like a game than serious foraging; what’s more, the insect was eaten on the spot, not carried into the nest cavity.

I began to worry that the baby woodpeckers, stuffed with carbohydrates but starved for protein, would fail to develop properly and that the parents would abandon them the way the Hylands’ pigeons, Morgan and Dapplegray, had abandoned their ailing offspring. I decided to improve their diet by adding peanuts which I shelled myself. Theoretically, and from the human point of view, this was a great idea: peanuts were close enough to their natural food to be acceptable, as well as richer in oils and protein, so the babies would grow up strong of leg, clear of eye and sleek of plumage. It would probably have worked out fine if the woodpeckers hadn’t had their own idea of how to treat a peanut.

And just how did a woodpecker treat a peanut? He stored it, of course; not where he stored acorns which had to be shelled, but where he stored ready-to-eat food like grapes, in the large blue gum eucalyptus tree across the canyon. Behind its peeling bark went the peanuts I carefully shelled and put out for the baby woodpeckers, who never got so much as a sniff of one. Obviously more drastic measures were called for if I wanted the babies to get enough protein to develop normally. (By the way, that baffling bird B.T. showed as positive a liking for peanuts as he had a dislike for cashews.)

It was about this time that Ken and I were invited to visit for the first time the large aviary operated as a hobby by Paul Vercammen. A partial list of some of his more unusual species included black-cap and great reed warblers, grey wagtails, bullfinches, yellow buntings, stonechats, Mexican flycatchers, white-rumped shamas, golden orioles, saffron and lavender finches, nightingales, Pekin robins, purple sunbirds and emerald tanagers.

We were allowed inside while Paul gave the birds their morning feeding. It was holiday fare, indeed: quartered oranges and apples, peeled bananas, fresh ripe figs, raisins soaked in hot water to make them tender and plump, bread and cake crumbs, pieces of cheese, various cooked vegetables and of course, seeds of all kinds. But the favorite of most birds was what Paul fed them by hand for dessert, meal worms.

Meal worms, chock full of protein and obviously a bird favorite, seemed like the perfect food for our baby woodpeckers. On the way home we stopped at a pet store. Here we learned that meal worms were not worms at all but the larvae of darkling beetles, which were a dime a dozen except in pet stores where they were fifty cents a dozen. During their life cycle these beetles destroyed large quantities of flour and cereal; nevertheless they were bred commercially as food for birds. Some animals, like the smaller monkeys, were also fed meal worms to prevent or to cure arthritis. At the going price of four cents for a one-inch worm, medicine for monkeys seemed to have reached more dizzying heights than medicine for humans who could still get an aspirin tablet for a fraction of a penny.

Used medicinally meal worms were expensive enough. Offered as daily fare at a large feeding station they would have been prohibitive. Even I, who obstinately refused to face the economics of our bird feeding, had to concede that much. We couldn’t put out meal worms for the woodpeckers without the other birds demanding and getting their share. If, as Marie Beals had told me, a single robin consumed sixteen feet of earthworms in a day, he could be expected to consume an equal amount of meal worms, or 192 inches. At four cents an inch this would amount to $7.68 a day for each robin, or $2,803.20 a year — definitely not chicken feed.

There seemed only one reasonable solution: I would become a commercial breeder of darkling beetles. Ken took a very dim view of this idea, but Harry, the man at the pet shop, explained that it was as easy as rolling off a log. The beetles did the work; all I had to do was provide them with suitable living arrangements and food.

The initial equipment was simple and very cheap, considering what stupendously expensive little creatures — pound for pound in the same class as emeralds — were supposed to emerge from it. I washed and dried a ten-gallon tin can that had once contained beef fat for the birds. It had a tight-fitting lid in which I punctured some small holes for ventilation. Meal worms don’t require much oxygen, they do some of their best work in the middle of hundred-pound sacks of flour. On Harry’s advice I used as a flour substitute duck bran purchased at a feed and grain store for sixty-five cents. I added the meal worms and a large piece of burlap for them to cling to and a quartered apple for moisture. Then I clamped on the lid and put the whole thing down in a storage room on the lower floor where I figured the little creatures could go about their business, and mine, undisturbed.

Like many people new to a commercial venture I had dreams of glory — perhaps eventually I would become known as the meal worm queen of the Southwest — but the dreams were promptly undermined by labor troubles. Because what happened inside that ten-gallon can for the next month was nothing, absolutely nothing. I checked it every day — and every day, nothing. Ken suggested that the creatures might be inhibited by my surveillance, but I began to suspect more basic problems.

I phoned Harry at the pet store and accused him of giving me all-male or all-female stock. He explained that meal worms weren’t fussy about such things but they failed to develop sometimes if they were lonesome. What was probably the matter was that the can was too large for a mere dozen meal worms and they’d probably lost contact and couldn’t find each other.

“They can find each other,” I said coldly. “They’re just not trying.”

Harry had a solution: not a smaller can, of course, but more meal worms. If I could stamp out meal worm loneliness I would be back in business.

I drove down to the pet store. Harry had four dozen meal worms packed in a cardboard carton waiting for me. He assured me he’d picked the liveliest ones he could find and I could expect quick action provided all his instructions had been followed. Did I buy the right kind of bran? Yes. Did I remember the burlap and the pieces of raw apple or potato? Yes. Was I keeping their quarters warm and cosy at about 80°? No. The storage room was about as warm and cosy as the catacombs. I didn’t tell Harry. I just got out of there as fast as possible — before he could sell me a meal worm heater.

The big question then was, where would be the best place in the house to keep a ten-gallon can rather conspicuously labeled “Hoffman’s Pure Rendered Beef Fat”? Two rooms were eliminated immediately. Ken said that much as he liked to share things with his fellow creatures, his study and the lanai adjoining it were too cold. (And, his tone implied, they weren’t going to get any warmer if he could help it.) The kitchen, which seemed a logical place, was eliminated because it was hardly bigger than an orange crate and every nook and cranny was already filled with containers of bird seed, stale bread and doughnuts. For aesthetic reasons the living room was excluded, and since a can of meal worms would, in spite of their name, do nothing to enhance meals, so was the dining room.

The choice finally narrowed down, as I should have known it would, to my office. The meal worms, presumably no longer lonesome with the arrival of four dozen of their friends, were ensconced on top of a bookcase, just above a heating outlet, and my office was known from that time on as the Worm Factory.

Meanwhile the baby woodpeckers who were the reason for the factory’s existence had grown up. They showed no obvious signs of protein starvation or of malnutrition in general. They were fat, contented little creatures as they sat, often three and four at a time, around the rim of the wooden dish on the porch railing. They weren’t easily alarmed; in fact, their confidence in me distressed their parents, who tried to squawk some sense into their heads from the telephone pole or the eucalyptus tree, “Watch out, watch out, watch out!” In this imperfect world we share with the woodpeckers, maturation must include the learning of fears.

If I’d been informed that meal worms were slow and uncooperative and demanded a great deal of heat, I would never have started the project. I was already heartily sick of staring at that big ugly can on top of the bookcase and working in a room that was ten degrees too hot. But I was also reluctant to give up and admit defeat. If the protein was too late for this generation of woodpeckers, it would at least be ready for the next.

In late spring my niece, Jane, came to spend a weekend. She slept in my office, which doubled as a spare bedroom, and I overheard her describing the experience to a friend over the telephone: “It’s called the Worm Factory. No, they don’t crawl all over you, but even if they did it would be okay because they’re pets.”

Thus it was Jane who was responsible for the only good thing ever said about my meal worms: they didn’t crawl all over you. It was Jane, too, who doomed my future as the meal worm queen of the Southwest. She came into the kitchen while I was preparing lunch and announced that B.T. was on the wooden dish again throwing another fit. Since I’d started to keep records of the intensity and duration of B.T.’s fits, I hurried into my office. I saw immediately that the roof was missing from the worm factory. There was no need to ask what had thrown B.T. into a frenzy.

Whether B.T. was simply venting his spleen or whether he was issuing a genuine alarm to warn the other woodpeckers in the canyon against the newfangled poison, I will never know. I do know this: of the meal worms Jane put out, the scrub jay carried away three, the black-headed grosbeak ate one and the rest just disappeared.

That afternoon I dropped in on Adu and Peter Batten to see the latest additions to their household. The most unusual was a week-old lion which Adu was bottle-feeding and which she let me hold. His coat was finer than silk and his paws like velvet pincushions. The only slightly rough thing about him was his tongue. Someday it would have the texture of the coarsest grade of sandpaper and his affectionate kisses would not be so popular.

Another addition was a margay, a spotted wild cat of Central and South America, which looked like a small ocelot. The resemblance almost cost the margay his life since he’d been purchased by some imbecilic woman to attract attention: she intended to parade him on a leash when she wore her ocelot coat. She knew nothing whatever about the care and feeding of animals and made no effort to find out. By the time the Battens got hold of the margay, he was so weak and crippled with rickets he couldn’t even stand up. They treated him with vitamin shots and a special high-nutritive formula made for humans and he was already showing improvement. By the end of summer he was active enough to make a real pest of himself because of his boundless curiosity.

The third new member of the household was a little African bush baby, or galago, a primate about twelve inches long, half of which was tail. Like his nocturnal cousins, the lorises and pottos, he had huge round eyes that gave him a look of continual amazement. In the wild, a bush baby spends the daylight hours sleeping in trees, sometimes in abandoned birds’ nests, but at night he comes alive. He can climb like a monkey and use his front paws the way a human child uses his hands, he can leap like a kangaroo, chirp like a bird, and furl and unfurl his ears like nothing else I know of in the animal kingdom.

The bush baby was shy and disinclined to eat, so Adu was trying to tempt his appetite by offering him his favorite food, grasshoppers. Unfortunately she wasn’t as well equipped as he was for locating and catching grasshoppers, and feeding the bush baby was taking a disproportionate amount of time when she had so many other animals to look after. I suggested that since meal worms were used both as food and medicine for other small monkeys, the bush baby would probably accept them as a substitute for grasshoppers. She agreed and I delivered the worm factory to her that same afternoon.

It is commonly stated that the two happiest days in a couple’s life are the day they acquire a boat and the day they get rid of it. I’ve experienced both of these and neither can compare to the beautiful day that the Hoffman’s Pure Rendered Beef Fat can was removed from the bookcase, the thermostat was turned down to 72° and the Worm Factory became once again my plain and simple office.

Besides a taste for acorns, the acorn woodpeckers share with the scrub jays the ability to live at close quarters with human beings. There is, however, a big difference in their approach: the jays are aggressive and fearless, the woodpeckers simply don’t give a darn. Evidence of this is the fact that Tucker’s Grove, a small oak-studded park where nearly every weekend hundreds of people go for company barbecues or club outings, is a favorite woodpecker haunt. I sat at one of the picnic tables recently and started to count the storage holes in the bark of the ancient live oak above me. I gave up at a thousand. There are probably thirty or forty times that many and the storage tree is still used.

Estimates of the number of woodpeckers living in Tucker’s Grove ran from thirty to sixty. But Jody Bennett, then a graduate student at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who was doing research in the grove on the communal life of acorn woodpeckers, was convinced that these estimates were exaggerated because the birds were so noisy and conspicuous, and that the actual figure was close to twenty. She asked the members of the Santa Barbara Audubon Society to help her take a census. A pair of observers was stationed at each storage tree and nesting site within the eighteen-acre area and an automobile horn signaled the counting to begin and to end. The results surprised everyone but Jody — there were only nineteen woodpeckers in the park. In a subsequent census the figure was the same.

On the days after a large barbecue or picnic at Tucker’s Grove the woodpeckers will fly down to the ground for bits of food, and when the creek is dry they perch on the fountains to drink, but in my experience they cannot be readily tamed like some of the other birds. Their indifference to people is partly a result of nature’s bounty. B.T. knows I am the source of his breakfast doughnut, but he knows, too, that there is an abundance of other food available and that he can afford to keep his freedom and independence, and his inalienable right to rage.