The Birds and the Beasts Were There

13 The Younger Generation and How It Aged Us

All spring and most of the summer the ledge served as a nursery. The personnel changed from week to week as babies grew up and departed voluntarily or were forcibly removed to make room for other babies. Many of the birds in our area have two or more broods. The championship in this department must go to the mourning dove, who lays up to five clutches in a year — although poorly constructed nests on or near the ground result in heavy losses among both eggs and young.

It is a common summer sight to see mated pairs of birds feeding the first batch of babies while building a new nest or fixing up an old nest or otherwise preparing for a second or third batch. One afternoon I was watching a female brown towhee feeding her offspring on the dead limb of an oak tree. A male towhee suddenly appeared, and with the full cooperation of the female, he mounted her quickly and flew away. This was repeated four times at intervals of about ten seconds. Both parents seemed to have forgotten the baby bird who eventually left the scene with some of his bloom of innocence rubbed off.

During the last week of May the hooded oriole, that most patient of fathers, was pestered from dawn to dusk, from pine to pepper, from eucalyptus to eugenia, by his tenacious green daughter. Whenever he managed to elude her for a fraction of a minute she would deftly spear a grape or take a bite of doughnut, but the instant she caught sight of him again she became a quivering, helpless, starving infant. If he was annoyed by her silly posturings he didn’t show it the way many parent birds did, with a swipe of the wing or a sharp peck. He certainly had reason to be annoyed — waiting for him in the nest were two babies who were truly helpless.

They made their debut on the ledge in the middle of June and the sight of them sent me scurrying to consult the bird books: they resembled their drab little mother, as they were supposed to, except that each of them wore an orange skullcap. I’ve been unable to find a reference to such a color quirk in any of my bird books but I saw another example of it that same week when I visited the Krigers’ house. The hooded orioles had nested, as usual, in the banana tree outside their living-room window and one of the second-brood birds was marked exactly like the two at our feeding station.

Our young orioles departed early, still capped in orange and mystery. Was their unusual plumage temporary or permanent? Was it caused by genetic mutation, or some factor like diet, or a substance they came in contact with, like pollen? Were all three of the birds I’d observed males and was the orange color the result of premature activity of the hormones? I suspect this was the case but as an amateur I can afford the luxury of simply saying that I don’t know.

On April 7, the first brood of house finches appeared on the ledge, and about a month later, the second brood. Each young bird wore tufts of feathers that looked like horns. This was appropriate enough, for they were veritable devils, sometimes actually attacking the mother in their attempts to prove they were still babies and needed food and attention. In between broods I watched an interesting little scene which proved to me that the human female isn’t necessarily the only determined woman.

The action took place at B.T.’s feeder, the wooden dish. When the larger birds were busy elsewhere, the smaller birds ate here, in this case a male and female house finch. Some male house finches show a wide color variation and this one was a dingy pumpkin color whereas the majority of his relatives were red. Pumpkin showed no evidence of special appeal or, in fact, of any interest in the little lady eating opposite him, but this didn’t faze her. She had chosen Pumpkin, he was it, and that was that. She quivered seductively in front of him. He looked baffled, then nervous, and finally flew away in alarm. She flew after him, and a few minutes later they were both back and she resumed her attempts to make him think she was irresistible.

She did turn out to be irresistible, but not to the right bird. A second male, Red, watching from a nearby cotoneaster, was enchanted by her performance and indicated as much by swooping down on the feeder, and driving Pumpkin away. Instead of taking this as a compliment, the lady was furious. She turned on Red and pecked at him violently until he flew off. Then she set out after Pumpkin again and brought him back to the feeder.

This scene was repeated twice. The third time another female got into the act and made it clear that she, too, had fallen for Pumpkin’s well-hidden charms. In the animal kingdom it is the peculiar-looking mammal who is shunned, the odd-colored bird who is at the bottom of the pecking order. Pumpkin’s difference only made him more appealing to the ladies. Affairs of the heart, in man, beast or bird, are not always easy to comprehend.

Every April we watched the blackbirds courting. The redwings, their epaulets almost fluorescent, whistled in concert from the tangles of ceanothus their mad and merry Oo-long-tea, whee! The Brewer blackbirds, bodies inflated and wings raised, looked like comical little Draculas as they pursued the females around the ledge. The cowbirds, heads glossy as milk chocolate, sang the gurgling notes which sounded so much like water trickling down a drain that I checked the kitchen plumbing half a dozen times before I discovered that the noise was coming from a bird, not a leaky tap.

In mid-May the baby Brewers appeared and used our ledge as the place where they learned the rudiments of living — how to fly, how to drink and bathe, how to forage for themselves. The ledge made an ideal kindergarten or, more accurately, Brewery. It was high, but with shrubs below and nearby in case of falls; it was safe from daytime predators since the sharp-shinned hawks had moved north to breed and our three dogs kept the area clear of cats and boys with BB guns or slingshots; and there was an abundance of food and fresh water. Most baby blackbirds took their lessons in stride and wingbeat, but a few were unlucky, some were timid and some slow to learn.

The unluckiest of them all struck the wooden gate that separated the ledge from the porch. It was a bad strike. I heard it in my office and I was amazed when I rushed into the living room to see that the bird was still alive on the ledge. He lay on his back, silent, trembling all over. During the next five minutes that were to be the final ones of his short life I witnessed a most touching exhibition of the group solicitude of these birds for their young. More than a dozen blackbirds assembled in as many seconds, most of them males. They surrounded and fussed over the injured baby, trying to coax him to sit up. Even after he died they kept coming back to him to make sure he couldn’t use their help.

Other babies had better luck — and needed it. One afternoon when Ken and I returned home from lunch downtown we heard a commotion on the ledge before we even opened the front door. Its source was a baby Brewer taking his first lesson in flying. How he’d gotten as far as the ledge I don’t know, but one thing seemed absolutely certain — he didn’t intend to go any further. He had taken up his position as close as possible to the wall and was bleating loudly and piteously to be rescued. Meanwhile his father kept talking to him in a reassuring way and swooping back and forth in front of him to show him just how easy flying was. Here’s how it’s done — swoop — Nothing to it at all, really — swoop — Watch this and you’ll get the picture — swoop.

Baby Brewer was not interested in how it was done; he didn’t get the picture and he didn’t swoop. He wanted only to be back in that nice, safe, cozy nest and he so stated clearly, lustily and several hundred times. For the entire afternoon Dad coaxed and swooped while his diffident child clung stubbornly to the ledge. It began to look more and more like a battle of wills than a flying lesson. Whoever won the battle, I knew who’d be the loser. By six o’clock my nerves were cracking and I’d already made a trip to the storeroom and another to the garage in a futile search for a container that would adequately house a baby blackbird. The ledge, safe enough in the daytime, became a different place at night. Rats scampered up and down it, opossums crossed it on their way to and from the tea tree, raccoons climbed it to claim their share of the bread and doughnuts, great horned owls watched it from the television antenna. There was nothing whatever to recommend that ledge to a baby bird and I wished to heaven I had some way of conveying the message to him before the sun went down.

Perhaps it was the sun itself that conveyed the message. As it started to sink behind the eucalyptus trees the little bird mustered all his courage and strength and flew into the privet hedge five feet away. The Wright brothers couldn’t have enjoyed their moment of glory more thoroughly than Baby Brewer. Carried away by his success he swooped across to the tea tree, and from there, about a hundred feet to the neighbors’ roof. The last I saw of him was just before the sun disappeared completely. He was strutting up and down beside the chimney and he looked as though he was congratulating himself: I made it in one swell foop.

The devoted attention the young blackbird received from his father contrasted sharply with the parental treatment the young English sparrows received. They were sent out to fend for themselves at so tender an age that they still showed nestling-yellow at the corners of their mouths. Their flight was weak and wobbly and it often seemed a miracle to me that they could cover as much as a few yards. But it was a case of fly or die, so they flew.

The childhood of these birds was brief and bleak. For most species of animal and bird, playing is a part of growing up for the young, and of staying alive for the middle-aged and old. But I’ve never seen an English sparrow engaged in play. For them, life is real and earnest, and not much fun. Its purpose is simple — more life — and they have no time or energy to waste on anything not directly connected with their purpose. Playfulness, whether the puritans approve or not, is a quality much admired in bird, animal or man, and the reason the English sparrow is so widely despised is probably not because he’s common or has particularly bad habits, but because of his grim, cheerless assembly-line reproduction.

One of the first things I noticed about these sparrows at the feeding station was their lack of relationship with any of their fellow boarders. When they came to the ledge to eat, there were no preliminaries, polite or impolite. If other birds were already feeding, the sparrows didn’t try to drive them away, they merely squeezed in beside them and began eating. If the sparrows were there first and other birds arrived and attempted to drive them away, the sparrows, even the very young ones, ignored them. They seemed, in fact, not to comprehend the meaning of the other birds’ actions. Bluff is the main weapon in the arsenal of most birds. They use it and are, in turn, used by it. The sparrows neither used it nor recognized its use. A Brewer blackbird inflated to twice its size and with his white eye glaring may have looked awesome to the finches and tanagers, but to the English sparrows he looked like an inflated blackbird with a white eye. They had no time or taste for bluffing, which is, after all, a kind of game.

In scientific circles it was fashionable for a while to believe that play was confined to the young and that it was merely an exercising of the muscles and a practicing of the skills that would be necessary in adult life. This theory has had to be modified considerably as it became obvious that not all players were young, and not all playing constructive. Play seems to me a natural activity of birds and animals who have energy left over after the necessities of living have been attended to. The chief necessity is food and the kind of food a bird eats regulates the amount of foraging that must be done every day. The mourning dove, whose diet consists mainly of weed seeds, has to spend a great deal of time and energy getting the same amount of nourishment as a scrub jay gets from one meadow mouse or a few protein-rich caterpillars. How the scrub jay uses his consequent leisure is well known to every chronicler of mischief.

All flying looks like fun to the earthbound, and so we must be cautious in singling out a particular action of a bird and calling it play. Yet in some cases play is unmistakable.

One September, Ken and I drove with the Hylands up to Morro Bay to look for some of the birds that require a wilder and rockier coastline than our area provided — wandering tattlers, black oystercatchers, black turnstones and surfbirds. Sometimes a single rock in the Avila region will provide all four species, and one year a very rare American oystercatcher also took up residence there. Going along the bay we stopped to watch the tide coming in across the mudflats. A certain stream was running quite rapidly and on it were a dozen northern phalaropes having the time of their lives. They would ride down the stream for thirty or forty yards, twirling around now and then like little toy boats caught in an eddy. Then they’d fly back up and start over. This was repeated again and again until the stream gradually slowed and stopped and the tide was in and the phalaropes settled down to the serious business of foraging.

Helen and Nelson Metcalf witnessed a similar performance on one of the Columbia River rapids in Washington. The birds on this occasion were four white pelicans. They would rise in the air and fly single file to the head of the rapids, then ride four abreast all the way down to the quiet water. The Metcalfs watched for half an hour. When they departed, the pelicans were still riding the rapids. Brian Roberts has written an account of common eiders repeatedly riding a tide current in a fjord, and R.A. Stoner tells of an Anna’s hummingbird who kept floating down the stream caused by a garden faucet that had been left running. I wonder how many other species of birds indulge in similar games that are unseen or unreported.

Almost all birds fly, but only a few aerial geniuses can soar — that is, rise skyward without wing-flapping, using only winds or thermal updrafts. The white pelican is one. These huge silent birds, which share with the California condor an enormous wingspread, more than eight feet, and a reputation for gentleness and quietness, are capable of fantastic feats of soaring. At the slightest invitation of the wind they will rise high in the air and put on a performance that looks not like mere play but like an inspired and exuberant romp of angels.

White pelicans do not, like condors, cover great distances in the search for food, nor do they have the brown pelican’s habit of spotting a fish from the air and diving down into the water to catch it. They feed while swimming leisurely along the surface, finding small, delicate tidbits which their greedy brown brothers would disdain. It is the simplest and easiest way to forage and the energy they save can be, perhaps must be, used for the kind of activity we call play.

Wood storks are masters of the art of soaring. These large shy birds are normally seen in flocks in regions where there is shallow fresh water like the Florida Everglades and the Louisiana bayous. In late summer, post-breeding dispersal brings a number of them to the Salton Sea in California where they stay for a limited time. They rarely appear as far north and west as Santa Barbara, but one individual threw the rule book overboard and came here to spend two consecutive winters.

His time was divided between our main sloughs, Goleta and Sandyland. He was an excellent example of the way many birds will adjust quickly to such things as air and highway traffic, while remaining extremely wary of people on foot. At Goleta his favorite hangout was below a bluff between the airport and the busy road leading to the university. At Sandyland he stayed as far away from the beach houses as possible, which put him right next to the Los Angeles-San Francisco Freeway. At both sloughs he had for company great blue herons and black-crowned night herons, snowy and common egrets, avocets and the occasional black-necked stilt. He was particularly attracted to the egrets, perhaps because they were white and most resembled his family and friends from whom he’d been separated. The attraction was not mutual.

Wood storks are very gregarious birds and he obviously missed his own kind. In the early morning and late afternoon he foraged; when there were thermals to ride, he rode them. But the times between, when he had nothing to do, were lonely and hard to fill. It was then that he made his advances to the egrets.

The grace and beauty of the wood stork was apparent only in flight. On land, with his naked grey head and neck showing, he took no prizes, but there was a certain awkward dignity about the great mute bird as he plodded earnestly across the mud toward the egrets. They invariably gave him a look-what-the-tide-brought-in stare and walked away. He followed, they walked away again. Often, after a series of overtures and rebuffs, he would spring into the air on his long black legs and begin circling around the slough, rising higher and higher until he was out of sight. Audubon had a peculiar notion about such flights: he suggested that they were intended to aid the bird’s digestion.

All that winter the wood stork tried and failed to establish a relationship with the egrets. He left in early spring, destination unknown. The following October he returned, once again dividing his time between Goleta and Sandyland sloughs. Though he was still no beauty he looked glossier and whiter than the previous year, and his manner was somewhat more self-assured when he pursued the egrets. As Christmas approached I seemed to detect a slight softening in the attitude of the egrets: their rejection of him seemed not so swift or so final. But this may have been merely a subjective and seasonal piece of sentiment on my part. Peace on earth, including the wet haunts of storks and egrets.

Aerial games are also played by albatrosses, frigatebirds, condors, ravens, vultures, kites, buteos, eagles, falcons, gulls, and terns. Some owls are well equipped to soar, but unable to do so because they are active at night when there are no thermals.

Group play includes the formation flying of gulls and white pelicans and the berry-passing of cedar waxwings, so baffling to those ornithologists who used to demand a rational explanation for everything. (For a long time, play was considered no explanation at all, let alone a rational one.) The game of passing the berry is practically self-explanatory: a berry — toyon, pepper, eugenia, cotoneaster, pyracantha, to name only a few varieties they eat — is passed along a line of waxwings perched on a telephone wire or the bare bough of a tree. In one such flock I counted over a hundred waxwings, and my hat went off not so much to the birds as to the toyon berry which survived the perilous passage to the end of the line and back again. I have also seen a flock of waxwings chasing and catching snowflakes. Perhaps they were doing it for the moisture, perhaps they were doing it for the heck of it.

The thieving games played by Melanie, the raven described in an earlier chapter, are also played by her crow and magpie cousins, and part of the extracurricular activity of every red-blooded scrub jay and mockingbird is the teasing of dogs and cats.

One of our mockers had a daily rendezvous on the roof with the neighbors’ ginger cat. The cat would stalk the bird around the chimney and through the overhanging branches of the oak tree until the cat tired and lay down to rest. Then it was the bird’s turn. He would swoop down on the sleeping cat, almost grazing its head, and repeating triumphantly, yah, yah, yah. In that yah, yah, yah, I hear echoing the voices of all the small bullied boys who are finally getting their say.

Though the mockers and scrub jays occasionally pestered Brandy, our big German shepherd, and Rolls Royce, our cocker spaniel, it was John, the Scottie, built low to the ground and slowed by age, who was the prime target of their dive-bombing game. But John, canny Scott that he was, had figured out a means of protecting himself, using the principle of: If you can’t lick ’em, go where they can’t follow. Whenever he had to make a sortie into jay or mocker territory, he avoided the open spaces and stuck close to the dense, low-growing shrubbery where he was likely to meet only the occasional wrentit, brown towhee or golden-crowned sparrow.

It is always amazing to me how birds and animals, and to a certain extent the young of the human species, can take faster and more accurate measure of each other than human adults can. Mr. Smith may require a year to discover that Mr. Jones is no friend of his, a fact that had been apparent to the Smith kids for 364 days. Birds learn very quickly not only the difference between a dog and a cat, but the difference between a hungry cat and a well-fed cat, and between a nervous dog and a calm dog. I have seen white-crowned sparrows, house finches, Audubon warblers and California thrashers bathe no more than five feet from where Brandy lay chewing a marrow bone, and on one occasion he actually nudged with his nose a purple finch who was busy eating a doughnut. Wild birds do not accept stroking as a form of friendliness and affection the way domestic animals do. To them such physical contact means extreme danger or death, and so the purple finch, unafraid up to this point, at the touch of Brandy’s nose, went into a state of shock. Puzzled, Brandy picked the bird up and brought it over to me for an explanation. He carried it so carefully that when it recovered its wits a few moments later, it flew out of my hand without a trace of injury. I wish all large creatures could be so gentle, all small ones so confiding.

We were still waiting, though with little hope, for the return of the phainopeplas which had nested in the large pepper tree in the adjacent canyon. The new crop of pepper berries had meanwhile been discovered by the young of the band-tailed pigeons, recognizable by their non-iridescent, unmarked necks. They ate like the cedar waxwings, greedily and in flocks, but they were, at about three-quarters of a pound apiece, considerably larger, so that the delicate, graceful boughs of the pepper tree hung low under the weight of several dozen bandtails.

About this time two things happened which did nothing to raise my rather low opinion of the common sense of band-tailed pigeons and mourning doves.

The first incident concerned a dove. Eight or ten of these birds had taken a special liking to a new hopper-type feeder Ken had hung in the Monterey pine outside the kitchen window. The feeder, which held some twenty pounds, was made of redwood with glass on two sides so you could see when more seed should be added, and it was filled through a hole in the flat roof. This hole was an oblong measuring 1 ½ by 2 ½ inches and the plug for it had long since gone with a wind.

There are households where such small repairs or replacements are made immediately, but ours isn’t among them. One morning a hungry house finch arriving at the feeder and finding it completely taken over by doves tried to reach the seed through the hole in the roof and either accidentally fell in or purposely dropped in. I suspect the latter because he certainly didn’t panic, he just started eating, and when he had breakfasted he made his way out again without any trouble. Several of his friends learned the trick by watching him and we would often see two or three at a time feasting inside the glass walls. With their legs lost from sight among the seeds, they appeared to be floating on top of the grain like tiny sea birds.

The hole-in-the-roof trick was a good one, but like many good tricks its success depended on timing. In the early morning when the feeder was full to the top, the finches came and went as they pleased. As the seed level dropped throughout the day they had increasing difficulty getting out, and by late afternoon any finch foolish enough to enter, had to be rescued. Quite a few of them spent the night inside the feeder before we learned to check it every evening at dusk and make sure it was free of uninvited guests. If it wasn’t, rescue operations were started.

These rescues were complicated by the fact that the feeder had been placed fairly high in the pine tree and the ground underneath was sloping, and if there was any moisture, extremely slippery like all adobe soil. But the chief difficulty turned out to be the feeder itself, which we had bought because it seemed sturdily built. Sturdily built it was, alas. The roof had been put on to stay on, through Atlantic coast hurricanes, Midwestern tornadoes or California earthquakes, and the glass walls had been set in more firmly than our plate-glass picture windows. Faced with our initial rescue, we thought of using a pair of tongs to take hold of the finch and pull him up through the hole in the roof, but the hole was too small, or the tongs too big. Nor was any bird likely to cooperate in such a maneuver.

It was Ken who conceived the idea of reversing the procedure that had caused the trouble in the first place. A bird that had been trapped by the falling of the seed level could very likely be un-trapped by raising the seed level again. And so it came to pass, on a dozen occasions or more, that the twilight scene I saw from the kitchen window included a large man slowly and carefully pouring seed into the roof hole of the feeder while inside the glass walls a small finch gradually rose higher and higher, with a kind of stately dignity that reminded me not of a bird at all, but of a ship passing through one of the locks of the Panama Canal. It seemed to take about the same amount of time, too, especially if I had dinner waiting on the table and Ken had an eight o’clock meeting to make.

People familiar with these nervous, fidgety finches will be puzzled, as we were, by the fact that they didn’t panic. Perhaps they were sodden with food, I don’t know. I do know that four of the rescues involved the same finch, a male easily identified by the peculiar mustard color of his head and chest.

The Panama Canal system was fine for rescuing finches. One afternoon, however, I looked out and saw a most improbable sight — a mourning dove sitting inside the glass walls of the feeder, contentedly pecking away at the seeds. He had managed to squeeze his corpulent twelve inches into an opening that measured 1 ½ by 2 ½ inches, a feat that surely made him the chief contortionist of the dove coterie.

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.

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.