The Birds and the Beasts Were There

4 You’re a Stool Pigeon, Mother

At noon the class returned to the Museum of Natural History for lunch. The meal was planned, prepared and served by Junior Aides — a number of girls in their early teens who did volunteer work at the museum during the summer and after school hours. The girls also made up their own menus, which were printed on a blackboard and offered such delicacies as:

We ate outside at redwood picnic tables under a huge live oak tree. Unfortunately there was a heavy infestation of oak moths that year so the Junior Aides were able to add an unexpected item to their menu, oak moth larvae. The wiggly little creatures seemed to hang from every leaf, and the lightest brushing against an overhanging branch netted at least fifty of them on your clothes and in your hair, and naturally the odd one dropped into a sand witch or a dam burger. Some members of the class made fast and shrill departures.

Marie Beals was undismayed. “It’s all good honest protein.”

The oak moth larvae turned out to be the lesser of two evils associated with eating in the museum patio that summer. The other was Melanie.

The name was well chosen since it comes from the Greek word for black, and Melanie was black indeed. Black as coal, black as night, black as ebony or jet, black, in fact, as the raven she was; black of feather, of foot, of bill, of eye, and most definitely, of heart.

I was later told that Melanie had been found when she was about a month old, on Santa Cruz Island, some twenty-five miles offshore from Santa Barbara. Raised as a pet by a family who lived near the museum, Melanie spent her first year developing her wings and practicing the aerial acrobatics of her kind. She stayed close to home since she was fond of her adopted family and knew a good thing when she saw one. There was an additional reason: ravens are very scarce in our area. She was not tempted to join a pair of strong black wings tumbling and soaring and diving in the air, and no male voice, curiously softened and symphonized by love, called her away.

It is almost an axiom that the more intelligent a creature is, the more ways he discovers or invents to amuse himself. By this standard Melanie was a genius. At the beginning of her second spring she found out what sport there was to be had on the grounds of the museum — people to laugh at her, animals to snap at her, caged birds to denounce her. There were little girls to howl if she merely, by the purest accident, pulled out a few strands of hair in an attempt to make off with a barrette or bobby pin, and little boys to shriek if she stole their pocketknives or poked them in the stomach while trying to determine if silver belt buckles were detachable. In all fairness to the children, I would like to draw the reader’s attention to the size of a raven. Melanie was two feet long, and with her wings spread, four feet wide, and her beak measured three inches in length and was one inch deep at the nostril. This is a lot of beak attached to a lot of bird.

A good deal of Melanie’s attention was lavished on middle-aged matrons. She had no particular affection for them as such, but they happened to wear more jewelry than any other class of people. Earrings and necklaces, wristwatches, bracelets, jeweled pins and buttons — Melanie adored them all, not because she was female but because she was a raven. I have never heard a satisfactory explanation of why birds of this family find shiny objects irresistible. Perhaps there is no explanation that can be properly translated from ravenese into humanese.

Melanie’s only legitimate jewelry consisted of a pink plastic name band on her right leg, which was meant to indicate to the general public that she was no ordinary bird. She occasionally chewed the band, not with any intention of getting it off — she could have accomplished this in short order with her powerful beak — but in a lazy, desultory way, like a bored teenager chewing gum in class.

Melanie also had a weakness for nipping ankle socks. Her friends claimed she didn’t know that socks contained ankles or that the owners of same would object vociferously. A class of visiting schoolchildren was worth at least an hour of good clean noisy fun. Some of the noise Melanie supplied personally, since ravens are capable of making a wide variety of sounds. The cost of first aid equipment was running high and the number of excuses for Melanie’s conduct was getting low. The result was inevitable — the museum officials decided to banish Melanie from the grounds. As a member of the staff succinctly put it: “One of these days she’s bound to take a hunk out of somebody who doesn’t want to give a hunk.”

The cooperation of Melanie’s adopted family was, of course, necessary. When Melanie’s misdeeds were spelled out to them, they professed great astonishment: “You can’t mean our Melanie. She’s as gentle as a lamb. There must be another raven around.”

This was possible, but the family finally conceded that it seemed rather unlikely there would be another raven wearing on her right leg a pink plastic ankle band with the name Melanie printed on it. At any rate, Melanie was banished.

Her departure caused many changes around the museum. Visiting classes of schoolchildren were oddly quiet and monotonous. A sudden shriek splitting the air conveyed none of the now-what? excitement of the Melanistic days. The explanation was usually quite dull: a lady had turned her ankle, a Junior Aide had tried to pet the porcupine, a little boy had fallen into the creek or out of a tree.

The mynah bird, who had taken to using Melanie as a confidante, lapsed into a depressed silence and could not be coaxed into repeating the sentiment he had picked up in some mysterious period of his past:

“You’re a stool pigeon, Mother!”

Meanwhile, Melanie’s fame had spread and people from out of town arrived daily, demanding to see “that trained raven,” and taking a dim view of the fact that they’d driven fifty or sixty miles for nothing more than a mynah bird that wouldn’t talk and a porcupine that couldn’t be petted.

Melanie became, in absentia, a kind of folk heroine whose presence had been unappreciated and motives misunderstood. The same people who’d complained most bitterly about Melanie’s conduct now inquired after her health and hinted at her return. The children who’d screamed the loudest over her advances, now vehemently protested her banishment. Teachers who’d accused Melanie of disrupting their classes, ladies left with a single earring and Junior Aides with ankle scars — everyone wanted Melanie back. So back she came.

For the first couple of days after her return Melanie was a changed character. Showing the modesty becoming a folk heroine, she received the extravagant greetings and compliments of her admirers with quiet dignity, and accepted tidbits of food graciously, hardly even maiming a finger. Perched on the railing of the little bridge over the creek she watched with regal detachment the parade of brightly-colored bobby socks, and ponytails held in place by jeweled clasps. Her performance was so convincing that one patron accused museum officials of feeding her tranquilizers, or of doing away with the real Melanie and trying to palm off on the public an inferior substitute.

It was Melanie herself who prevented this accusation from developing into a full-fledged rumor. Her new role, in spite of the fact that she was so good at it, bored her. She was too intelligent and curious for the docile life. She missed the excitement of children racing for cover, the slamming of doors and the honking of horns and the blowing of whistles.

On the third morning after her return, a group of young girls from an out-of-town boarding school arrived at the museum. The girls were in the charge of two nuns, both of whom wore prayer beads. For poor Melanie this was temptation enough, but there was a greater one, something quite new to her world: one of the girls had attached to the laces of her saddle shoes tiny silver bells that tinkled when she walked. The bells — their gloss, their movement, their enchanting sound — were too much for Melanie.

The girls were strangers to Melanie and she to them. Sensing this, she chose surprise tactics. Without a shadow or a whisper of warning, she swooped into the middle of the class, croaking, lunging with her beak and flapping her huge wings. No two witnesses tell the same story about what happened after that, but stories agree that the scene ended with children scattering in all directions and Melanie soaring over the oak trees, carrying a silver bell in her beak while the mynah bird screamed after her: “You’re a stool pigeon, Mother! You’re a stool pigeon, Mother!”

Darkness set in before the last of the children was finally located, so it was not surprising that two days later the museum received a sharp and rather uncharitable letter from the head of the boarding school. A meeting was held, at which three decisions were made:

The preceding events were, of course, unknown to me when I first met Melanie. She introduced herself by landing, apparently out of nowhere, on the redwood table where Marie Beals and I were having lunch.

Marie was delighted, I was somewhat less so. A raven in the air is one thing, a raven sharing a table with you is another. And to complicate matters, I didn’t even know what kind of bird Melanie was. To me she was simply the biggest, boldest and blackest I’d ever seen. For a full minute she stood motionless, with her eyes on me, like a vampire bat locating in advance the most vulnerable portion of the jugular vein.

“It’s obviously somebody’s pet,” Marie said. “I wonder if it’s hungry.”

Marie tossed a piece of bread on the ground. Melanie didn’t even bother glancing at it. Instead, she walked sedately toward my plate, removed a frankfurter and began to eat it.

Marie watched placidly. “She needs plenty of protein.”

“So do I. That’s my lunch.”

“Ravens, as you probably know, are scavengers. They eat carrion. So do we, if you come right down to it. A frankfurter is simply carrion that’s been cooked.”

Viewed in this light, the loss of my lunch didn’t seem so bad.

Marie, who turned nearly every occasion into a bird lesson, was explaining to me what distinguished the raven from the crow — the heavier beak, the wedge-shaped tail, the shaggy throat feathers. If the two species are seen side by side, the most obvious difference is one of size. But birds are seldom that cooperative, and anyway, using size as a means of identification is chancy. The far raven looks no larger than the near crow. (As an example of this deceptiveness I cite the experience of a friend of mine who was out on a condor survey with a Forest Service official. My friend was taken aback when the official pointed out as a distant condor — wing-spread, 8 ½ to 9 ½ feet — a not so distant turkey vulture — wing-spread, 6 feet.)

The difference to look for, Marie said, is that of flight pattern: ravens soar like hawks, keeping their wings stiff and straight, while crows flap a great deal, and when they set their wings to glide, the wings are bent upward. Though the habitats of the two species may overlap, in California the crow generally prefers to roam in flocks through the more cultivated areas. The raven is more of a loner, and like many other loners he seeks a mountain fastness or the solitude of the desert.

Melanie was no doubt surprised to hear this but her only comment was a hoarse, low-pitched Grub. She had finished my frankfurter, or cooked carrion, and was walking around the redwood table with the expectant air of a small boy at a circus: will the lion escape from his cage? Will the aerialist fall? Surely the bear will attack his keeper? Will the sword-swallower choke, the fire-eater burn, the elephants stampede?

For Melanie none of these things would have been nearly so exciting as what actually happened. In an effort to put a more comfortable distance between Melanie’s beak and myself I stood up too abruptly and my purse fell off my lap, strewing its contents on the ground — wallet, comb, lipstick, checkbook, pillbox, and my keys for the house, the car and the safe-deposit box. The lipstick was in a gold case trimmed with a green glass emerald, the pillbox was turquoise enamel on copper and the five keys were attached to a silver dollar. It didn’t require more than two seconds for Melanie to decide which item she wanted. Before I even realized what was happening, my key ring was airborne. Up, up, up, over the toyon tree, over the oak, over the sycamore, and to all intents and purposes, out of my life forever.

“Note the speed of a raven,” Marie said, “and its mastery of—”

“Those are my keys.”

“—air currents.”

“I can’t get home without them.”

“Ravens are what are known as static soarers, like the buteo hawks... Your car keys?”

“Yes.”

“Dear me, that is awkward. I was hoping you’d give me a lift as far as the courthouse.”

Melanie had disappeared for a moment, but now she emerged from behind an enormous Monterey pine tree and took up a position on the very top of it. According to Marie, who was watching through binoculars, Melanie still had the key ring in her beak.

“So far, so good,” Marie said. “However, she may have a cache up there — magpies and crows often have special hiding places for their treasures; perhaps ravens do, too. My climbing days, alas, are over.”

“Mine haven’t begun.”

“Well then, there we are, aren’t we?”

There we were, and there we seemed likely to remain.

By this time a small crowd had gathered, including a Junior Aide who told us a little about Melanie’s background, enough to convince me I’d better either call the garage or start walking. The idea of telephoning Ken occurred to me but was quickly cast aside. It is difficult for two professional writers living under the same roof to keep each other’s writing hours inviolate. But it must be done, and Ken and I had long ago worked out a system: he handles emergencies in the morning when I am writing, I handle them in the afternoon when he is writing. It was afternoon.

At this point Melanie looked down, saw the size of her audience and decided to improve the show. With a flirt of her tail she sallied forth from the pine tree. Circling it once to make sure all eyes were on her, she dropped the key ring, did a complete somersault while it was falling, then swooped down and picked it out of the air. Catching a thermal updraft she repeated the performance half a dozen times, each time letting the key ring fall a little longer and a little further. I could almost feel my heart fall with it, but Marie took a more philosophical approach to the new turn of events: “At least it tends to dispel the theory that she has a secret cache in the tree, and that’s all to the good.”

“I still don’t have my keys.”

“Forget about them. Admire the bird’s performance.”

Although it’s always somewhat difficult to admire a performance put on at your own expense, I did my best.

Since that day I’ve never seen any bird engage in such a complicated aerial game involving an object, though I’ve heard that golden eagles will play with stones in a similar fashion, and on a number of occasions I’ve watched them do barrel rolls while attempting to get rid of Swainson’s and red-shouldered hawks. Many birds drop and retrieve in the air, but the objects involved are usually food. I’ve seen ospreys and kingfishers go after fish that have escaped them, white-tailed kites after mice, jays and flycatchers and mockingbirds after insects. But only Melanie have I seen playing with a silver dollar and five keys.

Melanie had the stamina to continue her dazzling display indefinitely. Her span of concentration, however, was short and it was only a matter of time before she got tired of the game. The question was, at what point would she quit, before she dropped the key ring, or after?

The question was soon answered. One moment my key ring was glinting in the sunlight, the next moment it disappeared somewhere in the middle of the chaparral-covered hillside, and Melanie was flying, empty-beaked, back to the top of the pine tree. A long groan went up from the onlookers and almost immediately they began to disperse as if the show had ended.

There was no use in attempting a search. The hillside was full of ticks and poison oak, and the chances of finding one small key ring in all that brush were minimal. A Junior Aide with the name Connie stitched on the pocket of her working smock claimed that Melanie had extremely sharp eyes and would certainly be able to find the keys if she wanted to. What would make Melanie want to was anybody’s guess.

Meanwhile Melanie remained on her perch on top of the pine tree. Perhaps she was merely resting. More likely, she was wondering what had happened to her audience and how she could get it back again. There is no such thing as an ex-exhibitionist.

Connie, it turned out, was something of an authority on Melanie since she lived with her family in the immediate neighborhood of the museum.

“She used to come to all our barbecues,” Connie said.

And why, I wanted to know, had Melanie stopped?

“She didn’t, we did. We haven’t had a barbecue since last Easter.”

I didn’t ask what had happened last Easter. I felt that under the circumstances I was better off not knowing.

At Connie’s suggestion we decided to try a new tactic based on the fact that Melanie couldn’t stand being ignored. Marie, Connie and I sat down again at the redwood table and pretended to be completely engrossed in the contents of Connie’s social studies textbook. For reasons which will remain forever unknown, the mynah bird chose this moment to start showing off his rather limited vocabulary.

“You’re a stool pigeon, Mother! You’re a stool pigeon, Mother!”

Whether Melanie was galvanized into action by the mynah’s voice or by our ignoring her, we will never be sure. But galvanized she was. She swooped down low over the hillside, and without an instant’s hesitation, located the key ring in the underbush and picked it up.

The speed of her performance raises questions: did she remember where she’d dropped the key ring? Or could she actually see it in the middle of all that brush? I’m inclined to believe she used her memory rather than her eyes, partly because I know how dense the underbrush is in that area and partly because of similar experiences I’ve had with dogs, our German shepherd, Brandy, in particular. Frequently while playing on the beach he loses a ball or a stick, yet he has no trouble finding them when told to. He doesn’t track the object down by smelling — this breed is not very keen-nosed anyway — and his eyesight isn’t half as good as my own. I must conclude that he remembers, not in the human way — where-did-I-drop-that-blinking-ball? — but in his own and Melanie’s way, which we still do not fully understand.

Keepers of parrots, cockatoos, budgerigars and the like usually have tales to tell about the prodigious memory feats of their pets. Usually, too, ornithologists put a grain of salt on these tales. Experiments conducted on wild birds indicate that some species have a remarkable capacity to remember. Joel Carl Welty cites one such experiment in his definitive work, The Life of Birds:

Probably we will never know exactly how Melanie located my key ring with such speed and will have to be content with the fact that she did find it. She landed on the redwood table, wearing the key ring proudly in her beak. Both Marie and I made attempts to grab it away from her, but Melanie let out a reproachful croak and daintily stepped beyond our reach.

“You’ll never get it from her that way,” Connie said. “My dad tried that at Easter and Melanie still has his gold-plated monogrammed bottle opener. If you want her to give up something, you should offer her a substitute. Do you have any jewelry you wouldn’t mind losing?”

Marie wore no jewelry, and all I had on was my wedding ring. I made it clear that I would prefer to walk the six miles home rather than add my wedding ring to Melanie’s collection of trinkets.

We finally decided, after a brief caucus, that we would have to appeal to another aspect of Melanie’s greed. She was always hungry, Connie said, and frankfurters were her particular weakness, especially if they were doused with ketchup or barbecue sauce, perhaps to give them a more authentic carrion appearance. Connie went to the kitchen and returned with two ketchup-covered frankfurters on a paper plate. She put the plate on the ground about ten feet away from Melanie, who had turned her head and was ignoring the whole business.

“She’s not hungry,” I said.

Connie disagreed. “She’s just pretending. Keep watching and be ready to grab the keys when she drops them.”

For the next few minutes Melanie gave an Academy Award performance as she-who-couldn’t-care-less. She took a few dainty steps and gazed pensively up at the sky; she studied the oak trees and the sycamores; she lifted her right foot and examined her name band like a bored young woman consulting her wristwatch; she cocked her head to listen to the mynah bird who was still telling Mother she was a stool pigeon.

Then, suddenly, Melanie plunged to the ground. I think she meant to pick up both frankfurters while still retaining the key ring, but even Melanie’s formidable beak wasn’t capable of managing such a load.

There are probably few times in life when a person is grateful for a ketchup-covered key ring. That was one of them.

Even now, Melanie’s admirers point out that it was a hot summer that year, and if excuses are made for human misconduct during a heat wave, they should certainly be made for corvine delinquency. The fact is that ravens are as impervious to climate as they are to environment. They are at home in the treeless arctic tundra and in thick forests of spruce or alder, in town and country, in the mountains, on the coast and in the desert. While driving through the Mojave Desert in a severe windstorm with the temperature well above 100° F., when it seemed no living creature could exist, I have seen ravens looking as sleek as if they’d just stepped out of a cold shower.

No, it was not the heat that was responsible for Melanie’s repeated indiscretions that summer; it was the restlessness in her bones, the quickening of her blood. Melanie was growing up. While her misdeeds were not planned to call attention to the fact that the time had come when she needed the company of another raven to carry out her purpose in life, this was the effect of them. It was decided that Melanie should be returned to Santa Cruz, the island where she was born.

Her journey across the twenty-five miles of channel was taken in style on a boat borrowed for the occasion by her adopted family. Melanie rode in the galley, sitting part of the time on the refrigerator, the rest on the top bunk. She was very quiet and refused to eat. Perhaps she was seasick or tired. I can’t, however, discount the possibility that she was quietly remembering her first sea voyage and all the things that had since happened to her — and to a lot of others! — and her fine collection of admirers and earrings and silver bells that had to be left behind. Any ornithologist will tell you ravens don’t think, but any friend of Melanie’s will insist they do.

Santa Cruz Island, twenty-three miles long, from two to six and a half miles wide and comprising 62,000 acres, is a ruggedly beautiful area, privately owned and almost completely uninhabited. Conservation organizations, led by the Sierra Club, have been working for some time toward the goal of making Santa Cruz part of our National Park System.

Most of the shoreline of the island, which was once part of the mainland, is composed of cliffs rising straight out of the water. Here and there tides have eaten into the cliffs and formed caves. One of these, Painted Cave, is seventy feet high and can be explored in a small boat when the tide is low and the sea calm — two distinctly different conditions which may or may not occur together. The cave’s inner walls have been painted, not by intrepid Indians, but by the chemical action of salt water on the various rock formations.

Some parts of the island are shale, sandstone and volcanic rock, almost bare of vegetation. A few areas have enough water to support groves of Monterey pines and oaks, in addition to the various chaparral shrubs like ceanothus. These sections are inhabited by a bird that is found nowhere else in the world. The Santa Cruz Island jay, once considered a separate species, is currently listed as a subspecies of the scrub jay.

The differences between the two jays are many: size, color, voice, behavior, body-wing-tail ratio, dimensions of nests and of eggs, even the shape of the beak, which, in the island bird, is the same length but bulkier, almost half an inch deep at the nostril. This jay is heavier, has a longer tail and a sturdier body, but to me the most striking difference is in color. His plumage is a deeper and more vivid blue. Though some of his calls and actions resemble those of our mainland jay, his disposition is gentler, perhaps softened, as Dawson suggests, by the year-round food supply for which there is little competition, the equable climate, warmed in winter and cooled in summer by the sea, and by the lack of human interference with his affairs.

Because his wings are too weak to support his body in any sustained effort of flight, the Santa Cruz Island jay is fated to remain forever on his lonely island. There we see him every May and September when the Santa Barbara Audubon Society crosses the channel to check the migrations of pelagic birds like shearwaters, petrels and alcids. In order to land on the island, permission from the owners is required. This is often tedious, and for our purposes unnecessary, since the straight cliffs of the shoreline permit boats to cruise or anchor very close in. The flirt of a bright tail among the live oaks, a patch of cobalt blue gliding up through the Monterey pines as if it were attached to a sky hook — these mark the Santa Cruz Island jay, a bird unique.

Melanie was released from the galley fifty yards offshore. Rising on her toes like a ballerina, she lifted her great black wings and flew straight toward the land of her birth and of her destiny. She didn’t look back.

Since that day I have visited Santa Cruz Island many times and have seen in the sky bald eagles, peregrine falcons, red-tailed hawks, and of course, ravens, many ravens. But none of them wore a pink plastic band on its right leg. The band is probably gone anyway: she would have long since chewed it off as the last vestige of her flighty youth.