The Birds and the Beasts Were There

10 Mnemos

The bird arriving here in the spring is dominated by one great purpose. He must find a place to breed, a nesting site safe from predators, with food and water available and suitable singing posts to announce his identity and intentions, his charm and vigor and the fact that he has title to a nice piece of real estate. The bird arriving in autumn to spend the winter has only himself to consider and is less affected by changes in his environment. The Krigers’ Baltimore oriole and red-breasted sapsucker have returned to the same willow every winter for six years, though there is now a large house practically on top of the tree and a lively family with a dog and cat in the yard.

The land bird population of our area in the winter remains fairly constant in spite of the encroachments of people. This is due partly to the emerging adaptability of the birds themselves and partly to the fact that every new development, whether it’s an apartment complex, a housing tract, a shopping center or even a parking lot, must be appropriately landscaped. This is, of course, done for the sake of people, not birds, but the birds get the benefit. It is a happy example of serendipity.

If similar arrangements could be made which would indirectly benefit shore birds, their future would look less dim. Every year some wetlands disappear, more sloughs are turned into marinas, more beaches become parking lots, more lakes and rivers are polluted with wastes and pesticides, yet California must provide winter food and sanctuary for thousands upon thousands of shore birds. The hummingbird who has lost his favorite patch of wild tobacco to the bulldozer can easily settle for the fuchsias in the garden of a condominium or the melaleucas planted along a new street. But the egret, deprived of his pond, cannot switch to a swimming pool.

The concept of green belts has been widely accepted, at least in theory. The concept of wet belts, however, is a different matter. We have no local ordinances which guarantee the preservation of a certain percentage of each wet area for the benefit of wildlife, and proposals for such an ordinance have not been seriously considered. To the person blinded by ignorance and fear, a slough is not a place of wonder, it is a breeding ground for mosquitoes, a source of odors and a temptation for children to get their clothes muddy. To the birder a slough is where the great blue heron stands motionless, waiting for a minnow, where the kingfisher rattles from a tree stump and the Forster’s tern hawks for dragonflies or dozes on a piece of driftwood. It is where the snowy egret shuffles through the mud on his big yellow feet and the phalarope spins for her supper like a hungry ballerina; where the black-necked stilt and the greater yellowlegs fold up like jackknives to rest, and the sora rail, silent as a shadow, tracks a frog through the salicornia.

With few exceptions, the birds of the Pacific Ocean and of the shores bordering it are seen by local birders only in the fall and winter. They become so familiar to us in their non-breeding plumage that the first time I saw a dunlin in breeding plumage I thought, for one glorious moment, I’d found a new bird. Sometimes in the spring when the plumages are changing we catch a glimpse of a black-bellied plover in the midst of dressing for the most important occasion of his life, or an avocet just assuming his bridegroom’s blush or a royal tern his black nuptial cap. But in the main we’re accustomed to shore birds at their drabbest and most difficult to identify.

Among birds, as among people, for every rule there’s a rule breaker, and in this case it’s the willet. He looks exactly the same in June as he does in January because he carries his breeding plumage under his wings and all he has to do is raise them in order to be known, and, presumably, loved.

Just as the willet is the exception, so there are exceptions among willets. Some do not develop the hormonic stimulation necessary to instigate migration to the breeding grounds and consequently will remain here for the summer. We became well acquainted with one of these lone birds through our German shepherd, Brandy. Brandy was born in May and in July we took him on his first trip to the quiet beach which he was to visit every day from then on. The shore birds were long since gone and I was surprised to be greeted by the shrill cries of a willet protesting the invasion of his privacy. Brandy, too, was surprised. In his limited experience birds were inoffensive creatures that sat in trees or ate quietly on ledges or porch railings. This squawking fury baffled him and he turned and ran back to Ken for protection.

My bird records for the next few months are interspersed with reports on Brandy’s development. Watching a German shepherd grow is much like watching a time-lapse sequence in a nature movie, only there’s no trick photography needed to improve on nature. The Brandy that got up in the morning was noticeably larger than the one that had gone to bed the night before. At the end of July he weighed in at twenty-three pounds, a month later he was thirty-six pounds and by the end of October, sixty pounds. (Now, at maturity, he weighs 105 pounds and at low tide he leaves tracks in the wet sand like those of the Abominable Snowman.) These changes did not go unnoticed either by Brandy, who became increasingly bold, or by the willet, who kept a more respectful distance.

Every day our visit to the beach began in the same way. The willet, much keener-eyed than mere dogs and people, would spot us getting out of the car and acknowledge our arrival with a scream of outrage. Hearing it, Brandy would respond with a bellow and go charging down the stone steps in pursuit, taking me with him if I happened to be attached to the other end of the leash.

At first both bird and dog played their parts with wild enthusiasm. The chase was intense and earnest, the escape hairbreadth, the sound effects ear-shattering. But as the weeks passed and the game remained a scoreless tie, the players began to show signs of flagging interest. In the middle of the chase Brandy would catch a scent and go ambling off to investigate a dead sand shark or a decayed lobster claw; and the willet, no longer pursued, would stop to probe for a sand flea or stalk a hermit crab; and the game would be over. The willet could then proceed with his bird business, and Brandy with his dog business, each aware through experience of the other’s habits and capabilities. Eventually the whole thing boiled down to the merest formality.

The willet, catching sight of Brandy at the top of the steps, would shift his feet and open his bill slightly as if to say, Ho hum, here comes that hairy beast again.

And Brandy would answer with the smallest excuse of a bark: I see that feathered fool is still around. Well, so be it.

Left alone to cope with problems of adjustment, animals often do a better job than humans.

Birdwatchers coming to southern California for the first time invariably arrive with a list of birds they most want to see. Some of these most-wanted species, like the acorn woodpecker and Anna’s hummingbird and band-tailed pigeon, are all over the place and could only be missed if you kept your eyes closed and your ears plugged. Others can be found in the right places in abundance, such as the yellow-billed magpie and Laurence’s goldfinch. Still others must be searched for in particular habitats, but can usually be located. Among these are the white-tailed kite, California condor and phainopepla. Others are completely unpredictable and among them I would include most of the pelagic birds.

These creatures have the remoteness and mystery of an element alien to us. Some Sierra Club members are as familiar with Santa Barbara County’s back country as they are with the city — they know every peak and potrero in that vast, rugged wilderness, and every roadless valley and barranca. But even the keenest sailor is a stranger to the sea. A thousand things happen under his keel which he will never know about. The wave he passes which floats a marbled murrelet he will never pass again, and once the ashy petrel fluttering in a water furrow disappears from his view, he could spend a year looking for it and never find it.

It seems impossible for anyone to write as intimately about the pink-footed shearwater or the pigeon guillemot as about the kingbird or the house finch without adding sea water to his veins and eel grass to his diet. (I suspect R.M. Lockley of meeting both these conditions while he was doing his marvelous book on shearwaters.) Simply locating them is chancy enough. We have gone out after shearwaters and found half a million, and we have gone out another year, at the same time, to the same place and under the same conditions, and found none.

Once a pelagic bird is located, the business of identification arises. If the seas are rough — and in our channel they often are — it’s not easy to hang on to the railing of a boat while focusing binoculars, balancing a field guide and trying to keep both them and yourself dry.

There are additional problems. If a black-footed albatross is in the vicinity he can readily be seen since he’s about three feet long and has a seven-foot wingspread. But a great many of the pelagic birds are tiny and the boat has to be practically on top of them before they’re visible floating in the trough of waves or barely skimming the surface of the water to cut down air resistance and conserve their energy. The sailor’s old prayer, “O God, Thy sea is so large and my boat is so small,” should have a birdwatcher’s addition, “and Thy sea birds should be a lot bigger.” The least and the ashy petrels are the size of myrtle warblers and white-crowned sparrows, respectively. Our rare winter visitor, Cassin’s auklet, is no larger than a kingbird. Murrelets and puffins range from the size of towhees to the size of flickers.

A male red-shafted flicker, at fourteen inches, may look pretty large and conspicuous perched on top of a telephone pole. Surrounded by a 63,985,000-square-mile expanse of water he would change considerably in relative size and visibility. He would also, if he were to become a sea bird, lose his fetching red whisker marks and his handsome wing and tail linings. The plumages of sea birds are confined to somber greys and whites and blacks, and brilliant colors appear only in the hard, horny parts like the red-orange-yellow beaks of puffins and the carmine feet of pigeon guillemots.

For some time I wondered if the albatross, which was the nemesis of a certain mariner, was destined to be mine, too, but after a dozen pelagic trips I finally found one. Meanwhile, my real nemesis has been identified. He is nothing so imposing as an albatross, being only ten inches long and not noted for any special display either in the air or in the water. I have seen all the other members of his family which frequent our area. I have even been on boats when my nemesis was spotted by practically everyone on board, but I missed him by a fraction of a second, the blink of an eye, a sudden lurch of the boat, a binocular lens fogged by salt spray, an ill-timed sandwich in the galley or snatch of conversation in the stern. Whatever the reason, I’ve repeatedly missed seeing the ancient murrelet.

I am prepared for him. I know, without consulting the field guide, exactly what he looks like and how I can instantaneously distinguish him from the two brothers he closely resembles. Even if I sincerely wanted to forget this information, I couldn’t. I am the lifetime victim of my own mnemonic devices.

Birdwatchers used to begin their hobby at a very early age. They had to. In the absence of adequately illustrated field guides and moderately priced, easy-to-carry binoculars, learning about birds was a lengthy process, not unlike learning in general before the invention of the printing press. Then the second quarter of the twentieth century brought vast improvements in color photography and reproduction and in the uses of lightweight metals; the Japanese started manufacturing precision optical instruments within the average man’s price range, Roger Tory Peterson introduced the first of his field guides, and suddenly it was no longer necessary to begin birdwatching at seven or eight. You could begin at forty-five. As I did.

Well aware that I had many years of study and observation to make up, I decided to avail myself of all possible memory aids. I’ve always used mnemonic devices, especially those involving rhyme, so when I was confronted with two pages of warblers to memorize I did the natural thing. From the check list of local birds I picked the warblers seen in our area, omitting those easy to remember, like the yellow, the orange-crowned and the black-throated grey. The rest I put into a poem:

Since these literally deathless lines were written I’ve seen many thousands of Audubon warblers and there is no need to remind myself that they have yellow throats. Yet the warbler ditty is so strongly fixed in my mind that whenever I hear the word Audubon, I silently and automatically add “a yellow.”

Will I, in the next thirty or forty years, be freed from “Audubon a yellow?” It seems unlikely. Getting rid of a mnemonic device requires much more ingenuity than acquiring it — more, in fact, than I have currently in stock. The sight of an egret, a bittern or a heron may inspire other people to compose works of art or to commune with nature, but I find myself repeating the words branded on my cortex:

On the theory that sharing a load lightens it, I would like to pass this couplet along to all new birdwatchers to help them remember that bitterns have naturally short necks, egrets and herons fly with their necks folded, and, by inference of omission, ibises and cranes fly with their necks extended.

Sharing may well be the only answer to my problem. What I need is a dozen or so people going around muttering to themselves:

“It’s Nutty to have a dirty neck.” Or perhaps, “It is common to be half-bald, but poor Forster is all bald.” Or, “Wred wrump, wrock wren.”

The last is self-explanatory. The first refers to the fact that the Nuttall woodpecker has a greater expanse of black around the neck than has his almost-twin, the ladder-backed woodpecker. The second applies to terns in fall plumage when the common tern loses half his black head covering and the Forster’s tern all of it. It helps to remember this if you know, as I do, a man called Forster who is as bald as a tern egg.

“Black-capped Hutton rang his solitary bell.” That sentence could be the beginning of a somber English mystery that takes place in an isolated country house. Actually it’s a list of the vireos which have wing bars, the black-capped, Hutton, solitary and Bell.

I find this an easy way to distinguish the downy from the hairy woodpecker when I don’t want to put my trust in the difference in size.

is not going to help you identify a cuckoo, but you might use it as a conversational gambit some day when you’re desperate. Another along the same line goes:

With this tucked in a corner of your mind, if you should ever find yourself on an uninhabited sea island and detect the odor of musk, you’ll be able to deduce that there must be a shearwater, fulmar or petrel somewhere upwind. Conversely, if you don’t know what musk smells like and want to find out, go look for an uninhabited island with shearwaters, fulmars, or petrels on it. In either case you are prepared. If you’d rather just forget the whole thing, do so. I can’t.

The preceding memory aids were based on rhyme, alliteration, plays on words and allusions. Once in a while I’ve managed to use a combination of methods, as in:

This is just another way of saying that Gambel’s is the only North American quail which has a black belly button, a piece of information not eagerly sought after, perhaps, but useful to a new birder caught in quail country without a field guide — possibly the same birder who goes to the uninhabited sea island to locate a shearwater, fulmar or petrel in order to find out what musk smells like.

For the sake of the rhyme it would naturally be much better if white-tailed ptarmigans sounded like dogs or hogs. But they don’t, so this has to stand as an example of a mnemonic device, or mnemo, that works because of its defect: it has no rhyme where one is expected.

Sometimes I must resort to a mnemo when, in spite of repeated studying, I find it impossible to distinguish between two birds of similar appearance. This was the case when Ken and I decided to take a trip to southern Arizona in May of 1965. Our plans were along the same lines as those of other birding trips but a little more elaborate. All available books were consulted, checklists were sent for, and Mary Hyland lent me the journal she kept when she and Tom covered the area. From these various sources I made a list divided into two sections: birds I’d see simply by keeping my eyes open, and birds I’d be likely to find only with patience, luck and good weather.

In the latter group were two species of sparrow, Cassin’s and Botteri’s, found in the same arid habitat and almost identical in appearance. The situation demanded a mnemo. I hereby share it with any reader who might find himself confronted by two look-alike sparrows in a patch of sacaton grass in the southwestern desert:

While most of my mnemos are applied to birds, I’ve also used them on birdwatchers. I recall my initial meeting, at a Western Audubon Conference at Asilomar, with that delightful pair of birders, Captain Elgin B. Hurlbert, U.S.N. Ret., and his wife. The name, which was uncommon enough, was complicated by the fact that Captain Hurlbert was called by a most unusual nickname. Drastic measures were called for. I wrote on my mnemo pad: “If the ox whinnies, hurl it, Bert.” The picture of the great beast flying through the air is so vivid in my mind that I know I’ll never be able to avoid seeing it every time I meet Oxy Hurlbert and his wife, Wini.

Mnemos are of special importance in the case of pelagic birds because the watcher is already at a disadvantage trying to focus on a moving object from a moving object. If he has to stop and look up a picture in a field guide, he is doubling the disadvantage. It is much easier to use a mnemo, one that will call your attention immediately to that aspect of the bird which distinguishes him from all others.

The murrelets are a case in point. Three species are seen in local waters in the winter, Xantus’, the marbled and the ancient. They appear mainly in pairs or small groups, floating in the furrows between waves or skimming along the surface or diving into the water in alarm at the sight of a boat. All are towhee-sized and colored dark above and white below. I had no trouble with the first two species:

My mnemo for the ancient murrelet is different from any of the others in that it’s in the first person, as if I unconsciously knew, when I made it up, that this murrelet was very special, was, in fact, destined to be my nemesis.

Each time I board a boat the words go through my head — and every ancient murrelet in the channel heads for the open seas: