The Birds and the Beasts Were There

5 Morgan

Addiction to bird-watching may happen very suddenly as it did to me, or it may be a slower and quieter thing, as in my husband’s case.

From the beginning he adjusted well to the necessary changes in our household. He ate our much simpler meals without complaint, he was careful to avoid getting too close to the picture windows, he looked and listened with patience while I pointed out the ordinary birds that were now coming daily to the ledge and the feeders, and the grapes and doughnuts in the trees: house finches, song sparrows, scrub jays, mourning doves, wrentits, mockingbirds and towhees. The brown towhee, Houdunit, was practically a member of the family by this time, but of the rufous-sided towhee we could catch only glimpses as he foraged, both feet at a time, in the underbrush or flew low across the canyon. We had to wait until the following spring to see him right out in the open, singing his wheezy waltz: too-wheee — 1, 2, 3 — too-wheeee — 1, 2, 3 — too-wheee — 1, 2, 3.

On very rare and special occasions the rufous-sided towhee has come up into the tea tree for a furtive bite of doughnut, but to this day he has never appeared on the ledge or any of the feeders. Often, especially just before twilight, we hear his plaintive question: Aaay? Aaay? From bush to bush he goes, asking over and over again, Aaay? What is life? Aaay? How did it start? Aaay? Where will it all end? But nobody ever answers.

Perhaps the nearest thing to an answer appears in the month of May. We catch sight of it as it hurries through the underbrush of the canyon, looking like a large black sparrow. Only the choice of flyway and the white outer tail feathers identify it as a young rufous-sided towhee.

The critical point in my husband’s conversion came one morning in early August. I was in my office working on a book. When I emerged for a tea break I found Ken at the dining-room table with the two field guides open in front of him and my binoculars hanging from his neck. “Have you ever seen a band-tailed pigeon?” he said casually. “There’s one on the feeder in the eucalyptus tree.”

The first band-tailed pigeon is an event, an experience. This is partly because of his size — he’s larger than the domestic pigeon — and partly because he is wild, a bird of the woodlands, not of the city streets or the ledges of office buildings. He also differs from the domestic pigeon in having, at maturity, a white crescent around the nape of his neck and a light grey, sometimes almost white, band at the end of his tail, which is very broad and can be spread out into a fan — hence the common misnomer, fan-tailed pigeon. Unlike all other North American pigeons, and doves, he has a yellow bill with a purplish-black tip, and feet that seem to have been painted to match, yellow with purplish-black toenails. He looks as though the moment of his creation had been a summer morning and the place a wild elderberry bush and one ripe dewy berry had clung to his beak and one to each toenail.

While these birds most frequently nest in oaks, and acorns are a main part of their diet, it is with eucalyptus trees that I associate them. We see them perched in these trees more often than any others. When the blue gum eucalyptus is very young, or when an older tree is putting out new leaves, the leaves are so different in color and shape from the older ones that they appear to belong to a separate family. These leaves are a soft velvety blue-grey, exactly like the plumage of the bandtails perched among them. No doubt this is just a happy accident, though it sometimes seems that the eucalyptus, like a good host trying to please his guest, grows new leaves to match the bandtails.

What is the difference between a pigeon and a dove?

People frequently ask this question and seem disappointed in the answer: there is no difference. The terms are interchangeable, and the birds eating milo and cracked corn on our ledge could just as well be called band-tailed doves and mourning pigeons. Although in general practice smaller birds are known as doves and larger ones as pigeons, this isn’t a rule. The Supreme Court of bird watchers, the American Ornithological Union, lists the domestic pigeon under the name rock dove.

However the columbine grapevine works — perhaps in a kind of pidgin English — it is quick and efficient in spreading the word about a new feeding and watering area. By week’s end our bandtail’s immediate family was well established and every hour brought a new batch of obscure in-laws and fifty-second cousins and friends of friends of friends. They all took an immediate fancy to the birdbath with the continuous drip. They stood on it, they drank from it, immersing their beaks to the nostrils and drawing in the water; they showered, lifting first one wing, then the other, letting the drip trickle down onto their wing pits.

Band-tailed pigeons share with some other flocking birds a custom that serves the species well in the wild but is not expedient at a feeding station. A bandtail arriving at dawn for breakfast doesn’t immediately go to the feeder and start eating. Instead, he perches in one of the eucalyptus trees, and even though he must be hungry he waits quietly for his friends, now and then thrusting his head forward and back to appraise his surroundings more accurately. When a certain number of birds have arrived, as when a critical mass is reached in nuclear physics, the action starts. Suddenly, like clumsy blue butterflies, the pigeons begin falling out of the trees onto the feeder and the lower terrace. At one of these eucalyptical gatherings of the clan I have counted ninety-eight bandtails.

There must be some kind of signal to start this mass movement. If it’s a voice signal, I’ve never heard it; if it’s kinetic, either I haven’t seen it or don’t recognize it. It seems likely that one of the bandtails is the accepted leader and sets an example for the rest to follow. When he decides to eat, everybody eats — providing the dining area is a two-acre field, not a seed hopper with a perch meant for half a dozen birds.

The lone bandtail is a quiet bird with little to say as he goes about his business. But when twenty or thirty of them attempt to land on a narrow perch the resulting noise sounds as if they were approaching the boozy climax of an avian cocktail party with every guest trying to communicate at once in grunts and clucks and squawks. From a certain distance this cacophony is very human-sounding and I sometimes think that if, instead of a party, they were holding a meeting with rules of procedure to give each of them a turn, I might be able to understand what they meant.

By the end of that first week in August, it was becoming obvious with the arrival of each new in-law and fifty-second cousin that we needed a much larger pigeon feeder, placed in an area apart from the other feeders so that the smaller birds wouldn’t be frightened away. Not that the bandtails were aggressive — I’ve never seen a bandtail indicate rancor toward a bird of another species even in self-defense, and I’ve watched many of them being bullied and birdhandled by acorn woodpeckers, scrub jays, mockingbirds, even house sparrows. The size of the pigeons and their number, however, were discouraging some of the shyer species. The wrentit, the Oregon junco and the song sparrow seemed reluctant to share a table with the bandtails, without having any real cause to fear them.

The second pigeon feeder had a trough placed between two pine trees some distance from the house, and could accommodate twenty pigeons. Almost as soon as Ken had driven in the last nail, we began to learn of the existence of an ornithological principle new to us: people with a six-pigeon feeder have twenty pigeons, people with a twenty-pigeon feeder have fifty, and for people who have two feeders, a ledge and a charge account at the feed store, the sky’s the limit — unless nature steps in and sets a limit of her own. And that is what happened next.

The conclusion of the bird course hadn’t meant the end of my association with Mr. Rett and Marie Beals. Both had been to our house to see the bird-feeding setup, Marie and I went birding together whenever possible, and I frequently visited the Museum of Natural History for advice and information from Mr. Rett. On one of these occasions he asked me if Ken and I had been coming across any dead mourning doves or band-tailed pigeons in our area. Two doves had been brought to the museum, one dead and the other greatly emaciated and unable to eat. Autopsies had in each case revealed a large growth in the throat caused by a protozoan parasite, trichomonas gallinae. Birds so afflicted were unable to eat but they kept trying and regurgitating, thus passing the parasite on to others, especially at a feeding station. He advised me to be on the lookout for dead or emaciated birds, and if I found any, to suspend feeding operations immediately in order to prevent a serious outbreak of trichomoniasis.

I didn’t like the idea of suspending feeding operations. It seemed to me that a well-nourished bird would be more resistant to disease and that a bird already infected would be even more dependent than usual on a steady food supply and lots of fresh clear water. Closing down the station would be a little like closing down a hospital because people were getting sick. Mr. Rett admitted that he’d never witnessed an actual epidemic (or rather, epizootic) outbreak of trichomoniasis, but he’d received government pamphlets warning of such a thing and advising people to beware. I assured him that we would beware.

As the week progressed there were manifest indications that we were losing some of our pigeons: cracked corn and milo left untouched on the lower terrace and in the trough between the pines, fewer and scantier gatherings of the clan in the eucalyptus trees, the sounds of partying more sober and subdued. We found no dead birds but this was not surprising since much of our area is a jungle of underbrush. Here a dead or dying bird could lie undetected or be eaten by a cat, a sharp-shinned or Cooper’s hawk, or a turkey vulture. Whatever the cause, we were rapidly losing our pigeons.

The following Monday, when I went down to scrub out the drip bath, a bandtail was waiting for me on the terrace. He watched my approach without alarm, making no effort to move away or take cover. When a wild creature departs from its usual behavior pattern like this, you can be pretty sure it’s sick; its survival instincts are not operating. The bird was not emaciated. Frequently on our winter beach walks Ken and I come across oil-soaked and grounded scoters, grebes, gulls and loons. Our friend and fellow birder, John Flavin, who has rescued, cleaned, fed and put back into circulation any number of these creatures, taught us how to predict with some accuracy a bird’s chance of surviving the various steps of this difficult treatment. If the breastbone appears very sharp it means the bird hasn’t eaten for a long time and is a poor risk.

Our bandtail’s breastbone appeared to be well fleshed. I kept the bird under surveillance all morning. Mostly he dozed in the sun, sometimes he picked up a few grains of milo and ate them with no sign of difficulty in swallowing. By noon he was dead.

This was the first bird we lost at our feeding station and it was a blow to me. I had fallen into the habit of accepting the California sun as a fetish that would dissolve disease and hold death in abeyance.

I had to drop in at the veterinarian’s that afternoon to pick up a case of the special diet my Scottie needed, so I decided to take the bandtail with me and find out what had caused its death. If an epidemic was about to start I wanted to be ready for action, preferably immediate and drastic.

The vet, a soft-spoken, pleasant man, was surprised when he opened the carton containing the pigeon — and not one hundred percent delighted. “What am I supposed to do with it?”

“Find out why it died, whether it had trichomoniasis or not.”

“Good grief, what’s that?”

I repeated what Mr. Rett had told me about trichomoniasis. The vet, while examining the pigeon briefly, said he didn’t know very much about avian diseases, except those affecting domestic species like parrots, budgerigars and canaries, but that the bandtail appeared to be young, uninjured and well nourished. This ruled out old age or accident as the cause of death, as well as trichomoniasis.

I said, “Are you positive?”

“There’s no sign of a swelling in the throat.”

I had gone into the vet’s office all set to fight an epidemic and I was not about to leave again without one to fight. “But it could be something equally serious that the other birds might catch?”

“Could be. Diseases caused by bacteria or viruses are usually communicable.”

Bacteria and viruses were more along my line than protozoan parasites, and I warmed to the subject: “What would you do if, for instance, you had a flock of homing pigeons and wanted to prevent the spread of a disease?”

“Well, if there was any urgency about it, I’d give each of them an intramuscular shot of antibiotics.”

The thought of trying to catch several dozen wild pigeons and administer an intramuscular shot of antibiotics to each of them was enough to dampen the enthusiasm of even the keenest epidemic fighter. “What if the urgency wasn’t so great?”

“I’d dissolve the stuff in their drinking water.”

“Suppose they didn’t like the taste and refused to drink it?”

He said he didn’t know if it had any taste but for the sake of science — and a three-dog client who paid her bills promptly — he would find out. He brought from his supply cupboard a plastic bag containing a pink powder. He mixed a little powder in some water, drank it and declared the stuff was delicious and he felt better already. He put the bandtail back in the carton and closed the lid.

“I’m leaving town for a couple of days so I won’t be able to perform an autopsy right away. But I’ll do it as soon as I return. My secretary will call you when there’s something definite to report.”

“The bandtails could all be dead by then.”

“If you’re worried, take along some of the powder. If they’re sick, it’ll help, if they’re not, it won’t hurt.” He wrote the mixing instructions on a piece of paper and gave it to me.

I was halfway home before it occurred to me that getting wild pigeons to accept an antibiotic solution in place of water might be almost as difficult as giving them an intramuscular injection. Our bandtails, unlike the hypothetical homing pigeons I’d mentioned to the veterinarian, were free. They had choices: come or go, take it or leave it. With their swift, direct flight they could range many miles during a day, and if our birdbaths contained a new mixture instead of water, they didn’t have to drink it. There were lots of other birdbaths, and a few creeks which were still flowing, however sluggishly.

We had some things working for us though. The first was food: the range of the birds was restricted by their desire to stick fairly close to their source of supply, especially of milo. This was their favorite food, more because of its size and shape than its taste. One of nature’s economies was not to bother providing pigeons with much sense of taste because they bolt their food. It goes down the esophagus and into the crop with such speed that even the most sensitive taste bud wouldn’t know what hit it.

The second factor in our favor was habit. Like people, birds develop habit patterns. The bandtails had taken a particular fancy to the drip bath on the lower terrace and to a very large ceramic saucer we kept on the ledge. We let the other birdbaths go dry and substituted, for the smaller birds to use, tin pie plates which the pigeons would only tip over if they tried to stand on them. In the drip bath and the ceramic saucer Ken put the antibiotic solution. The arrangement worked very well. Evidently pigeons’ discernment of color is no more highly developed than their sense of taste, for right from the beginning they treated the pink mixture with the foam on top as if it were the purest water.

For the balance of the week the bandtails drank, bathed in and waded through antibiotic. (So did a lot of the other birds, including Houdunit, the brown towhee, who spent a great deal of time breaking the bubbles with his beak.) Keeping the containers full was quite a job, but we had the satisfaction of seeing that the flock was no longer on the decrease. It had leveled off at about fifty bandtails — all of whom looked healthy, or at any rate not sick. Meanwhile we heard nothing from Miss Ames, the vet’s secretary, who was supposed to call us. On Friday I decided to call her since our supply of the antibiotic wouldn’t last through the weekend. I asked her if I could pick up some more of the stuff.

She hesitated for a moment. “Are you sure you need more? You probably don’t realize how expensive it is. I’ve been making out the bills and just the amount you’ve already used is costing you eleven dollars.”

Miss Ames’s sudden concern for my bank account was unexpected, and when I thought of the whopping bills she’d cheerfully sent me in the past, downright ominous. “Something happened, Miss Ames?”

She admitted that something had happened which probably wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been Tuesday, and if the doctor hadn’t been on the point of departure, and if I hadn’t put the pigeon in a box. “The doctor was leaving just as the rubbish collectors were coming up the driveway for the Tuesday pickup. I was busy in the front office admitting a pair of Schnauzers to board. I thought I heard the doctor say something about refrigerating a pigeon, but by the time I got the Schnauzers settled, I couldn’t find any pigeon...”

Our bandtail had truly been collected.

We never found out what had killed the pigeon. We did learn, a year later, however, what had happened to many of his relatives and friends that autumn.

The following spring and summer brought a sharp increase in the number of bandtails at the feeding station. Some were adults, males and females identical; some were young, easily recognized by their lameness and the lack of a white crescent on the nape of the neck. Then, in early fall, we began to notice the same signs as we had the previous year. Corn and milo were left untouched in the feeders and on the ledge. There were fewer and quieter gatherings of the clan in the eucalyptus trees. Approximately half of our pigeons departed, but no viruses, bacteria or protozoan parasites were involved.

They migrated.

Many volumes have been written on the migration and homing ability of birds. An account of Morgan, the pig-headed pigeon, will add little to the scientific body of evidence, but as a study in determination Morgan’s story deserves telling.

He appeared one late winter in the backyard of Mary and Tom Hyland, who lived on the north side of Santa Barbara. The neighborhood at that time was new, with the shrubbery only half grown and the trees just getting started. In order to compensate for this, the Hylands had gone to great lengths to attract birds.

For birdbaths Tom had arranged a series of saucers, graduated in height and size, the one at the top overflowing into the one below, and so on. Every shrub, tree and flower had been planted to provide various kinds of birds with food, nesting sites or shelter. Even a weed, tree tobacco, was included because hummers and orioles loved its sweet yellow flowers. There were feeders everywhere, for sunflower seeds, for the smaller grains, for bread, for raisins and apples and oranges. Just beyond the yard was a barranca left in its wild state and filled with scrub oak, elderberry, toyon, ceanothus and sycamore trees growing right out of the creek bed. (A birder in our part of southern California can spot creeks a mile away by looking for stands of sycamores. In the dry season this is necessary since the presence or absence of water usually means the presence or absence of birds.)

On my first visit to the Hylands’ backyard I came upon a scene of eerie stillness which, at a feeding station, always indicates the presence of danger. The baths and feeders were all empty, and not a twig moved or a leaf stirred.

I soon found out why. Sitting on a fence post waiting for a piece of action, or rather of the actors, was a sharp-shinned hawk. Its plumage marked it as immature, its size as a female. The only other bird in sight was the pigeon, Morgan, on the roofed perch Tom had built for him just outside the living-room door. Even without the hawk’s juvenal plumage as a guide, I’d have estimated both birds to be very young. An adult pigeon would have had sense enough to remove himself, and an adult sharpshin, especially the much larger, stronger female of the species, would have almost surely attacked. There was other evidence, later on, that when Morgan arrived in the Hylands’ backyard in February, he was very young.

He was certainly very hungry. He ate grain out of Tom’s hand while Mary looked on with mixed feelings. The pleasure of seeing a hungry creature eat was marred by the knowledge that pigeons attract pigeons. There were already a great many in the neighborhood and she had been trying to keep them away from the feeders so they wouldn’t drive away the smaller birds, especially the white-throated sparrow which had recently arrived. The white-throated sparrow is a rare winter visitor here, and unlike his common cousins, the whitecrowns and goldcrowns, he is almost never spotted except at a feeding station. Mary wanted him to stay so that her fellow birders would be able to see him.

Perhaps our world is more interesting because so many of our decisions are based on emotions rather than common sense. A friend of ours who breeds dogs tells us that when the time comes to sell a litter, she can bear it only if the pups haven’t been named. I have found this true about birds, too. The death of Old Crip, the departures of Li’l Varmint and Big Boy Blue are more poignant and memorable because these birds were not just a purple finch, a Tennessee warbler and a Steller’s jay — they were our birds and they’d become ours because we’d named them. It may have been the immediate naming of Morgan that made his staying a sure thing.

“He reminds me of Bob Morgan,” Tom said as the pigeon fed out of his hand.

So Morgan he became and as Morgan he remained.

He was no beauty — his plumage could be described as white mottled with black or black mottled with white — but he was faithful. Though I’ve seen geese used as watchdogs, Morgan is the first pigeon I’ve known to assume this role. There was very little traffic in the vicinity of the Hylands’ house, since it was the next to last one on a dead-end street, and perhaps this was why Morgan assumed that that end of the street belonged to him. He would perch on top of the chimney or the telephone pole, moving his head back and forth as our bandtails do when they’re curious. Any approaching car or pedestrian, any dog or cat ambling past on the way to the barranca, Morgan would challenge with a kind of warning grunt, “Who? Who?”

Mary and Tom always knew when someone was coming. The baying of hounds couldn’t have sounded a more effective alarm than Morgan’s rather soft, ominous question, “Who?”

He had other noises, among them a typical coo which he used to communicate with the other pigeons in the neighborhood. At first the Hylands translated this cooing as an invitation to the other birds to come for dinner or at least drop in for a friendly visit. As time went on, however, they were forced to amend the translation.

Human beings with no way of interpreting an animal sound have to judge its intent and meaning by its effect. For example, let’s picture two men standing on a city street. One of them whistles and a cab stops in front of him; the other whistles and the pretty girl passing him blushes or smiles. Without any analysis of pitch or tone, the girl and the cab driver know perfectly well what each whistle means and so does everyone else. If you need proof of this, try using the wrong whistle next time you need a cab.

The Hylands eventually agreed on the translation of Morgan’s pronouncements from the telephone pole: “Listen, you guys, I’ve got a good thing going here. You can come over and look, but don’t louse it up by staying.”

The other pigeons and doves did indeed come over to look, and some even attempted to use the birdbath and steal a few grains of food. When this happened Morgan flew into a terrible rage. He paced back and forth on his perch in a frenzy of activity, flapping his wings, puffing out his feathers, inflating and deflating his throat, from which emerged a weird wild mixture of grunts and clucks. It is no tribute to the brain power of the other pigeons that they got the message and took off.

We have all seen animals exhibit anger in ways that are quite nonhuman. The dog snarls and his hackles rise, the bull lowers his head and charges, the cat spits, the porcupine bristles. But I never expected to see an angry pigeon. Certainly I didn’t imagine that an angry pigeon would look so ludicrously similar to an angry person — the pacing up and down and flailing of arms, the heavy breathing and the wild incoherent speech. To this day I never see a person in a fit of rage without thinking of Morgan.

That first year Morgan fitted smoothly into the Hylands’ routine. He guarded the premises and kept other pigeons away, he followed Mary around as she worked in the garden and he superintended Tom washing the car. As summer progressed and the weather grew warmer, Morgan spent the hottest part of the day in the house, sleeping beside the heirloom clock on the ledge of the brick fireplace, or up on the cornice above the living-room drapes.

Everything went well until the following spring. The Hylands noticed no change in Morgan’s vocal efforts. That such a change had taken place, however, was clearly indicated by the behavior of the other pigeons. Some of them began to come quite boldly into the yard to eat and drink, and a small dapple grey one even landed on Morgan’s perch. Morgan was furious, naturally, since he happened to be on it at the time, but almost immediately his rage turned into display. Indeed, many of the same ploys that had been used to indicate anger now served to show what a fine, strong, handsome fellow he was — the pacing (now an obvious strutting), the inflated neck, the wing flapping.

The Hylands watched the budding romance with considerable misgiving. Their fondness for Morgan did not blind them to his faults. He was, for one thing, set in his ways like an old bachelor and resisted the slightest change in his routine. As for Dapplegray, his mate, she was not so much smitten by Morgan as she was by his perch, which she’d been eyeing covetously for months from a neighbor’s roof.

As if to invalidate the Hylands’ low opinion, Morgan and his bride started to set up housekeeping. Pigeons and doves are inept nest builders anyway and the efforts of Morgan and Dapplegray were pathetic. Dapplegray wanted to build right on the much-admired perch, but the sticks she brought simply fell down. Eventually a nest of sorts was put together, though it was precariously situated on a tiny ledge under the eaves.

Mary Hyland, who had strong nest-building instincts of her own, refused to tolerate such sloppy housekeeping and went to the pet-supply store and bought a substitute nest of the kind used by raisers of homing pigeons. But every attempt to persuade Morgan and Dapplegray to use it came to nothing. Morgan, in fact, attacked the substitute nest as if it were a rival and eventually Dapplegray laid two white eggs on the meager pile of twigs under the eaves. One rolled out almost immediately. The other, incubated by both parents, hatched in about three weeks.

The fledgling appeared healthy and Morgan and Dapplegray were attentive to its needs. It was, nevertheless, doomed, its fate having been decided at the time Morgan refused to accept the substitute nest. Dapplegray’s flimsy cluster of sticks had been fairly adequate as an incubator; as a nursery it wasn’t. Fledglings develop at a very rapid rate. In order to carry this increasing weight, their legs must grow correspondingly strong and they can’t do this without proper support in the nest.

As soon as Morgan and Dapplegray became aware that their offspring was crippled they abandoned it. The Hylands made an attempt to feed the little creature themselves and when that failed they took it to the Museum of Natural History, where the trouble was explained to them. The fledgling was straddle-legged and would not survive.

Meanwhile Dapplegray had already started building another nest on the opposite side of the house. What was the seventh or eighth twig to Dapplegray was the last straw for the Hylands. They could visualize a whole series of inadequate nests and crippled babies left to starve. Morgan and Dapplegray were given one more chance to accept the nest from the pet shop. When they refused, Tom built a trap and baited it with Dapplegray’s favorite food, Spanish peanuts. Dapplegray made no fuss as the trap door closed behind her. Either she was so crazy about the peanuts she didn’t care what was happening, or else she was rather relieved to be getting out of a situation she couldn’t handle. Tom drove her down to the wharf and released her in the middle of one of the flocks of pigeons that hang out along the waterfront.

It was the Hylands’ hope that Morgan; deprived of his mate, would return to the innocence of his youth, the uncluttered days before Dapplegray. Morgan had other ideas. The day after Dapplegray’s enforced farewell, her successor was ensconced on Morgan’s perch and the whole sequence began again — the collection of sticks and twigs and the refusal of a substitute nest. After a long discussion it was decided that in fairness to all — the smaller birds which Morgan kept chasing away, the Hylands themselves and Morgan’s future progeny — Morgan should be taken to the Bird Refuge, another pigeon hangout.

The trap was set, Morgan entered without hesitation and the trip down to the Bird Refuge began. It was a sad occasion, with Mary moist-eyed in the front seat and Morgan moping in the back. At least the Hylands assumed he was moping. My own feeling is that he must have been quietly memorizing the landscape because when Mary and Tom arrived home, Morgan was already on his perch waiting for them.

“Who?” he asked when the car drove in. “Who? Who?”

“Who do you think,” Tom said crossly.

Morgan’s second trip, to Carpinteria twelve miles away, was more of a workout for him but still no real problem. It was becoming increasingly clear that more drastic distances would be necessary. The Hylands had, for a long time, been planning a visit to the Southern California Audubon Center at El Monte, about 110 miles south of their home. Morgan accompanied them, settling down to enjoy the trip as if he’d planned it himself.

The Hylands’ return without Morgan seemed final. Mary removed his food dish from the patio and Tom took down his perch and stored it in the garage. For a few days Morgan’s new mate hung around, but then she, too, departed and there was no reminder left of Morgan except a little pile of sticks on the ledge under the eaves.

It was the middle of May by this time, and with Morgan and his pals no longer hanging around, a number of the small migrant birds were coming in to eat and bathe. Some, like the black-headed grosbeaks, brought their fat, fuzzy balls of babies, while others, like the male hooded oriole, came alone to filch the honey water out of the hummingbird feeder. Though the Hylands bought a special oriole feeder for him and he learned to use it, he kept returning to the hummingbird feeder as if making sure their food was no sweeter than his.

This tendency of certain birds to drink or attempt to drink hummingbird mixture varies from neighborhood to neighborhood. Some people are forced to take down their hummingbird feeders because the house finches empty them as fast as they’re filled. Others claim that the house finches don’t go near their hummingbird feeders, and only on one occasion have I observed a house finch trying to drink from ours. In the summer the hooded and the Bullock’s orioles use it by perching on the spout, in the winter the Audubon warblers use it by hovering, not very successfully, hummingbird style. Sometimes I see an orange-crowned warbler take a sip, and very infrequently, a plain titmouse, this latter species being one of the few which don’t show a pronounced weakness for sweet things when they’re available.

On the first Saturday in June, the Hylands returned from a shopping trip downtown to be greeted by a familiar sound from the top of the chimney: “Who? Who?”

Mary quickly rolled up the car windows, but it was too late. Tom had already heard. “Good Lord,” he said, “it can’t be Morgan.”

But good Lord, it was. Nor had he come back alone. Somewhere in the course of his 110-mile, nineteen-day journey from El Monte he’d picked up a lady friend who was now sharing the chimney with him. She might have been one of the neighborhood belles like Dapplegray or she might have flown all the way from El Monte with him, led on by pigeon pleas and promises. In any case the twig gathering began again, again the nesting site was the tiny ledge under the eaves, and again the Hylands decided that Morgan must go and stay gone.

This time their preparations were more careful, based on greater awareness of Morgan’s capabilities. Through a friend they contacted a pigeon fancier in Bakersfield, some 150 miles inland. He agreed to take Morgan and his new mate, and keep them penned with his other pigeons for two or three months before releasing them. After this long a period he was sure that Morgan’s home ties with Santa Barbara would be cut and new ones formed with Bakersfield.

He was correct. Somewhere on the outskirts of Bakersfield right now one pig-headed pigeon is flying fancy free.

As this is being written it is March and many of our bandtails are getting ready to nest. Mates have been chosen and display is the order of the day. An important part of this display involves the male flying out from a eucalyptus branch, making a soft buzzing sound and wiggling his wings as he passes the female, a maneuver that should remind you, according to your age group, of human displays like the shimmy and the watusi. The male bandtail also uses inflation (to a lesser extent than the domestic pigeon) and a mating call that sounds like ca--hoo, the ca part being more like an inhalation of air than an intentional sound. Though it is not particularly loud it has a carrying quality, especially in a canyon area like ours. All day long the ca-hoos of the bandtails mingle with the incessant oo-hoo-hoos of the mourning doves. As the sun begins to set — sometimes even before — the great horned owls start in, hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo, and a little later the screech owls, with their tremulous hoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoo, until our canyon becomes a veritable hoos’ hoo in America.