The Birds and the Beasts Were There

7 A Tempest of Tanagers

The western tanager is a symbol for me of the strangeness and beauty of my first year of bird-watching. It is as effective as a time machine. At the sight of one of these birds I am instantly transported back to an August morning several years ago.

It was a summer of extremes. Along the shore the fogs were thick enough to stop traffic and virtually close the airport, yet a mile and a half crow’s flight away, in the foothills, we were having a heat wave. Santa Barbara’s heat waves are not publicly acknowledged since the official thermometer is down at the wharf. It is more or less amusing to sit in a 90° living room reading in the evening paper about how the rest of the nation sweltered while Santa Barbara remained “cool and comfortable with a midday high of 70°.”

Officially recognized or not, the heat wave, and the drought that went with it, continued. Most of the streams had long since dried up, and ours at the bottom of the canyon had only a trickle of water left in it. This, plus the containers of water we’d put out, in various sizes and at various heights, attracted a great many birds since water was in shorter supply than food.

The first tanager appeared on August 15, a male still wearing the brilliant red hood of his breeding plumage. I had never seen a western tanager before, and after I watched him drink and bathe and depart, I consulted the local checklist of birds. On the checklist then in use in Santa Barbara, the western tanager was marked as a local resident. Such a list is practically a bible to the new bird-watcher. Certainly I had no wish or reason to question it. So when the tanager appeared again the next day, with a couple of his relatives, I assumed that these were simply birds who lived in the area and were discovering our feeding station for the first time.

The three tanagers, all of them males, sat in the tea tree eating grapes. Since the occasion in early summer when I first put out grapes as substitutes for cherries, every day I’d been fastening a small bunch of them in the tea tree. They were eaten by the house finches, California thrashers, mockers and hooded orioles, but not avidly. There were always some left over for the silver-grey rats that streaked up and down the tree after dark like ribbons of light.

The tanagers seemed hungrier than the other birds. Perhaps they actually were, or perhaps the grapes were a particular treat — a child eating a plate of ice cream can look a lot hungrier than one eating a plate of spinach. At any rate the bunch of grapes was gone in no time. Though the slightest movement at one of the picture windows made the birds fly away, they came back immediately and hung around the tea tree, almost as if they were waiting for others to arrive.

They were, and others did — a mixed group of adult and immature males. I put out the last of the grapes I had on hand. When these were eaten, the birds turned to the other edibles in the tea tree: doughnuts, a banana, half a coconut shell filled with peanut butter and corn meal mixture.

At that point Ken and I had no misgivings whatever. We were delighted to be hosts to such beautiful birds and we proved it by making a quick trip to the store for more grapes. The grapes were a little over-ripe and on the way home a large number of them fell off their stems into the bottom of the paper bag. I washed them all thoroughly, as usual, wondering how to serve loose grapes to birds obviously accustomed to picking their own. The tanagers were wild creatures, easily alarmed, quite the opposite of the tame and trustful hooded orioles, though the females of these two species look quite similar to the untrained eye. I doubted that the tanagers would come down to the ledge to gather loose grapes so I had the idea of impaling the grapes on the twigs of a two-foot plastic tree we’d bought the previous Christmas to serve holiday delicacies to guests. I took the tree out of storage. It was still going to feed guests; they would merely be of another kind.

I fastened the tree to the far end of the porch railing. When its crystal-clear boughs were trimmed with blue and green grapes it looked very enticing. The birds agreed. It was picked clean within half an hour. I put out a fresh supply and the same thing happened again, in even less time. As the week ended I began to realize that I had spent the greater part of it sticking grapes on a plastic tree.

I had also succeeded in putting a large dent in my food budget. The band-tailed pigeons were a serious enough problem but at least it was relatively easy to fill a hopper with grain, and the grain used, milo, cost only a little over four dollars for a hundred pounds. Grapes, which had to be tied with twine or fastened with pipe cleaners or impaled on plastic twigs, caused considerably more trouble and expense. Nor was the situation likely to improve. Later in the season grapes, if they were available at all, would be prohibitively priced.

I will make no attempt to estimate our tanager population as the month of September ended. I’ll simply confess that I could no longer afford to buy enough grapes to keep the birds fed and I was reduced to asking for discards from the various markets to supplement the grapes I bought. This meant at least one, and often two or three trips a day checking produce departments and being ingratiating to store managers. Patience is not one of my virtues, so I am astonished, on looking over my records, to find the following autumnal note:

“The season for grapes is almost over. When I think of the hours I’ve spent lugging the things — since August 15 — and putting them out in the trees, I begrudge not one minute of them.”

Perhaps happiness is a thing called feeding birds.

Meanwhile the tanagers kept coming. The majority of the new arrivals were females and young males, and traveling with them was the occasional Bullock oriole and hooded oriole, the whitish belly distinguishing the former species from the latter. Among the tanagers themselves there was considerable fighting, frontal jabs and pecks on the rump, and a lone male trying to feed with a group of a dozen females was promptly given the bum’s rush.

Watching the tanagers in the tea tree was a little like watching a movie made in the early twenties, because there was no sound. The birds arrived, ate, drank, communicated, fought and departed without uttering a note. It seemed unnatural to us, accustomed as we were to the forceful comments of the acorn woodpeckers, the scoldings of the wrentits and the bold exposés of the scrub jays. Our tanagers were as silent as color. A year and a half was to pass before I heard one sing and then it was in the mountains near Flagstaff, Arizona, and I mistook the song for a robin’s. W.L. Dawson, whose translations of bird songs I find irresistible, writes the tanager’s thus: piteric whew, we soor a-ary e-erie witooer. Amen.

As the weeks passed the majority of female and young male tanagers over adult males constantly increased. If, as the checklist claimed, the birds were resident in our area, what was happening to all the adult males? I began to suspect that the checklist might be wrong and that the birds we were feeding were not the same ones over and over but were different groups stopping to eat and rest for a day or two before moving on. This would explain why they never became any tamer or more friendly toward us.

A phone call to the Museum of Natural History confirmed my suspicion. While the western tanager has been recorded here every month of the year, it is far more commonly known as a migrant. The spring migration begins as early as the second week in March, and the fall migration goes on until the end of October, though the peaks are mid-April to mid-May, and the last three weeks of September. A few pairs stay to breed in the lowlands but the majority favor the pines and firs of the upper altitudes, as do the hepatic tanagers. The other two species of tanager that migrate to the United States from the tropics both prefer lower altitudes, the summer tanager keeping pretty much to the cottonwoods along streams and the scarlet tanager to oak trees.

At our feeding station we have learned to tell at a glance whether a particular tanager is remaining for a while in the area or whether he is a migrant. The bird which has grown accustomed to the station will grab a grape and fly off the way our permanent residents, the mockingbirds, do. Probably, like the mocker, he is aware of the stiff competition and prefers his meals cafeteria style. The migrating bird, on the other hand, usually stays and eats, restaurant style, in the manner of the black-headed grosbeaks.

The rather belated discovery that our tanagers were migrants did nothing to alleviate the problem of keeping them all fed. October arrived. Most of the summer birds had left, the flycatchers and swallows, the grosbeaks and orioles, the Wilson and yellow warblers and the chat; and some winter ones had already arrived, the white-crowned and golden-crowned sparrows, Audubon’s warblers, hermit thrushes and pine siskins. Still the tanagers kept coming. My hospitality had deteriorated considerably — the plastic tree was long since taken down, scrubbed and stored away for the next Christmas, to serve less greedy, less numerous guests. Now I simply hurled the grapes by the boxful onto the terrace, unwashed, some mouldy, some brown with rot.

It was in October that we became acquainted with Richard the rat — in fact, it might be said that in a roundabout way the tanagers introduced us to him.

We have a wide variety of wildlife in our canyon, but at that point we had seen little of it beyond the rats in the tea tree. There were clues that couldn’t be overlooked, however. Every morsel of food left at night on the ledge or terrace was gone by morning. Sometimes we caught a whiff of musk or there was a sudden rustling in a tree with no wind to explain it. On half a dozen occasions we found the ceramic birdbath on the lower terrace overturned. The last time it broke, and we replaced it with one that was heavier and not so high, and beside it we put a large saucer and filled it with water. I know now that many wild creatures were watching our house every night, familiarizing themselves with us and our dogs and our various routines.

Every wooded canyon attracts rats, and the way the great horned owls haunted our particular canyon led us to believe we had more than our share. The rat we called Richard was not just a member of the pack. He was different, a loner. That he had a splendid reason for being a loner we didn’t discover for some time.

While the other rats were scurrying up and down the tea tree as soon as the sun set, Richard’s scene of action was the cotoneaster tree growing beside the porch outside my office. Here I had experimented with hanging half a coconut shell as a sunflower seed feeder for the finches and titmice. I figured that the voracious scrub jays would find it impossible to land on the shell and so the smaller birds would get their fair share for a change. I was partly right: the jays found it impossible to land on, but they didn’t find it impossible to try to land on, and their efforts made the shell toss and pitch and bounce and rock so vigorously that within five minutes there wasn’t a seed left in it. I abandoned the project and the coconut shell remained empty until Richard discovered it.

I saw him for the first time one night when I was working late. The sky was cloudless, the moon almost full and I could make out the coconut shell in the cotoneaster tree, swaying gently on its wire. Two things were wrong with the picture — first, there wasn’t enough wind to fret a feather; second, I saw hanging from the bottom of the shell what appeared to be another length of wire which hadn’t been present in the afternoon. Curious, I turned the beam of my desk lamp on the tree. Richard was curled up in the coconut shell, eyes closed, tail hanging straight down. His conscience must have been clear indeed because even when I called Ken and the two of us went right out on the porch, Richard didn’t wake up. There was something moving about this wild little creature trusting us enough to go to sleep in such an exposed place. There was something mighty suspicious about it, too, though we didn’t think of it at the time.

The following night Richard was back again for another long, deep sleep. He fitted so neatly into the coconut shell that it might well have been constructed especially for him. I was reminded of all the old movies with tropical settings provided by a potted palm, an imitation cobra and a couple of wicker chairs, the winged and hooded kind that sort of wrap around you or at least meet you halfway. In one of these chairs the rubber planter or civil servant or visiting cad would doze off after a few belts of brandy. The coconut shell bore some resemblance to such a chair, but Richard bore none at all to a rubber planter or civil servant or even visiting cad, and I couldn’t figure out why I was reminded of the old movies. To many people sounds are more evocative than sights — “Darling, they’re playing our song” — and smells more evocative than either sight or sound. Probably the novelty of the whole business dulled my sense of smell because it wasn’t until the end of the week that I became aware of the strange mixture of odors out on the porch. Half the mixture was what you might expect at a busy feeding station, the rest was definitely not.

We were experimenting with a flashlight to see just how much it took to wake Richard up. He didn’t respond to light at all, and didn’t open his eyes even when Ken jiggled the coconut shell up and down and back and forth. Richard had either a weak survival instinct or an optimistic nature, since the area had both bobcats and domestic cats, as well as great horned owls. The odor on the porch was particularly strong that night and not unpleasant, in fact, a little bit like wine.

“Wine,” I said. “Wine.” I pointed at our unconscious guest. “He’s not tame, he doesn’t trust us, he’s not just sleeping — he’s dead drunk. Stoned.”

“That’s impossible. Where would he get any wine?”

“I don’t know. But he got it.”

We let the situation go at that for the night, since neither of us was sure how a drunken rat would react to being suddenly awakened and evicted.

An investigation the next day revealed the picture. The coconut shell, which contained a few seeds and bits of rotting grapes, was serving as Richard’s winery. Whatever grapes the tanagers had left on the terrace to ferment, Richard had been gathering up and depositing in the coconut shell. If wine bottled for humans is aged by the year, Richard’s must have aged by the minute. But it had the same effect. For a certain period every night Richard forgot the cares and casualties of life and dreamed of a world where streets were not paved with gold but upholstered with cat pelts and owl feathers.

Unlike many of his human counterparts Richard was harming nothing but his liver. Still, some changes had to be made. The smell on the porch was increasingly bad — even sober rats tend to be a bit casual in their personal habits — and I found myself opening my office windows less and less. Two steps were agreed on: more careful selection of grapes for the lower terrace and removal of Richard’s coconut shell winery to a place farther from the house and less exposed to his enemies.

We don’t know what happened — whether one or both of these steps mortally offended Richard or whether he succumbed to cirrhosis or less subtle enemies — but we never saw him again, or if we saw him he was merely part of the group and indistinguishable from the rest. The bougainvillaea has long since grown up over the deserted winery.

Richard and the tanagers were only the beginning of what was to be a most unusual fall and winter. New bird-watchers don’t know what to expect and are unable to tell whether or not something is out of the ordinary. I accepted everything that happened as something that had doubtless happened the previous year and would happen again the following year. When Silk and Satin, the pair of phainopeplas that had nested in the pepper tree, departed in the fall I fully expected them to return the next spring. They’d practically been household pets, spending a great deal of time outside Ken’s office windows, eating the berries from the nightshade and the bugs from the tomato plants. The nightshade berries, the bugs, the pepper tree all remain, but the phainopeplas have not come back.

On September 26 a green-tailed towhee arrived, the first of the mountain species to visit us in the lowlands that autumn. We knew him only by his picture in the field guide and were delighted at the lordly way he kept his head feathers raised so that he seemed to be wearing a bright cinnamon crown. The brown towhee, too, raises his crest but not nearly so noticeably or so often. Green-tail stayed for a week. Perhaps because he was out of his element he acted in a much shyer manner than others of his family we’ve since seen in the mountains. He kept to the lower terrace, skulking in and out of the wild blackberry vines and poison oak. We never saw him fly. The green tail, by the way, figures less prominently in the living bird than it does in the scientific name given to it, chlorura chlorura, which is Greek for green tail green tail.

Overlapping the visit of the green-tailed towhee was a male Scott’s oriole in full lemon-and-black plumage. Once again the scene was the lower terrace, where we had arranged the birdbath fed by a continuous drip from a hose. Such a drip may have seemed like a waterfall to the oriole since he is a desert bird rarely found in our region. We very infrequently see Bullock’s or hooded orioles near the birdbaths, perhaps because their diet of insects, fruit and flower nectar provides them with sufficient liquid. But the Scott’s oriole seemed fascinated by water. He perched on the rim of the birdbath or stood under the drip from the hose for long periods of time. Though this species is noted for its persistent and beautiful singing, our guest was as silent as the tanagers whose grapes he shared for four days.

Many of the birds that visit us are equally quiet. They arrive in the fall, their families raised and songs sung, and depart again in the spring before new songs rise in them. Audubon warblers are among our most abundant winter visitors, yet we must go high into the mountains to hear one sing. This is true of other species. On a June morning in Banff National Park I discovered that the new song I was listening to came from an old friend, the ruby-crowned kinglet, whose ordinary winter rattle we hear from nearly every oak tree. And it was at Jenny Lake in the Grand Tetons where I heard my first hermit thrush sing. Everybody knows the robin’s song — except the people who’ve stayed in Santa Barbara all their lives. (At least one pair of robins has attempted to correct this situation by nesting in a park beside the Woman’s Club for the past three years.)

Two of our winter visitors, on the other hand, try to make up for the rest. The white-crowned and golden-crowned sparrows sing every day they are here, at dawn or at dusk, singly or in duet, from tree and thicket and field. To me this is the sound of the California winter, the clear sweet sparrow songs that seem to be rejoicing that our winter is only a pretend one and spring and summer never really leave.

The third week in October brought a varied thrush, shy, melancholy cousin of the robin, to eat the ripening cotoneaster berries, and a Grace’s warbler which, unwarblerlike, perched for a long time in one place as if it were exhausted. It was considerably off course since it’s a bird mainly of the coniferous mountains of Arizona and New Mexico and the only previous sighting of the species in California dated back to 1881.

A Steller’s jay and a mountain chickadee blew in on a windstorm at the end of the month. We couldn’t have asked for a better study in contrasts, the affable little chickadee, for whom I cooked special pancakes, and the large belligerent jay whom I ended up chasing off the ledge with a broom.

The jay’s name, Big Boy Blue, seemed inevitable — even the “frown” lines on his forehead were sky-blue. He decided soon after his arrival to convert the ledge into a private dining room and he went to work right away, announcing his intention in squawks so fierce that they either frightened or shamed the scrub jays into silence. He would take up his position in the tea tree, well hidden, and wait there quietly until the ledge had attracted a reasonable number of customers. Then he would swoop down with an ear-piercing shriek and fly low the entire length of the ledge, scattering birds in all directions. Ordinarily I don’t interfere in bird bickerings but the situation became serious when some of the smaller birds, fleeing in panic before Big Boy’s wrath, struck the window. Many were knocked unconscious and two were killed, and I was forced to begin chasing Big Boy off the ledge and out of the tea tree every time I saw him. In similar situations involving the bird world I have found one thing to be true: the bird invariably wins because he can concentrate all his attention on the problem and I have other things to do.

The sight of me wielding a broom may have reminded Big Boy of Halloween but it certainly didn’t scare him. He simply waited until the doorbell or the phone called the witch back into the house, then he cleared the ledge as usual. Only once did he get his comeuppance and it wasn’t from me. A flock of about seventy-five band-tailed pigeons were perched in the tops of the eucalyptus trees waiting for the descent signal. It was given at the same moment that Big Boy decided to rid the ledge of his competitors. When the sky suddenly opened up and rained pigeons Big Boy must have thought his time of reckoning had arrived because he took flight like a blue bullet and we didn’t see him for the rest of the afternoon. But the next day he was back at his old tricks.

Bribery may not be the best way to handle a bird but it’s more effective and less time-consuming than wielding a broom. I recalled an occasion when I went to the Museum of Natural History to check a bird and saw one of the Museum’s tame scrub jays hopping around the front desk in a welter of peanut shells. If scrub jays liked peanuts it seemed inevitable that Steller’s jays would, too. The museum jays had their peanuts shelled for them. I decided to remove just enough of the shell to show Big Boy there was a treat for him inside, then let him take over from there. The theory was that if we could keep Big Boy busy with some project of his own at the front of the house he would leave the birds feeding on the ledge at the back of the house unmolested.

Jays, having voracious appetites, are highly adaptable to changes in food. The first day I put out some shelled and some partly shelled peanuts. The loose nuts Big Boy hauled away, two or three at a time — the maximum carrying capacity of his beak turned out to be five whole Virginia peanuts. Though he jabbed at the others he couldn’t dislodge them from their shells. Finally he flew down to the side of the road carrying a shell and began dashing it repeatedly on the concrete, the way scrub jays beat caterpillars on the ground to remove their unpalatable fuzz. Eventually the peanuts rolled out. This method worked only as long as the shells were partly removed. Big Boy tried the same thing with peanuts whose shells were intact and nothing at all happened. The shells didn’t crack open because they were too resilient. Big Boy made a very funny picture beating them on the concrete and then hopefully searching the roadway for loose peanuts.

He caught on pretty quickly, though, and changed his tactics. He would carry the shells to the garage roof, which was made of rough shingles and offered sure footing for him. Various crevices held the shells tightly while he jabbed holes in them big enough to allow him to get at the nutmeats. This gentle drumming punctuated the rest of our winter days. Hearing it we would be reassured that the smaller birds were eating unmolested and that Big Boy was flinging himself into his new hobby.

When he departed in February, I missed his noisy company and looked forward to his return. Like many of the unusual birds of that unusual year, the green-tailed towhee, the mountain chickadee, the Grace’s warbler, Big Boy was a creature of the mountains. Other mountain species were seen elsewhere in Santa Barbara during late fall and early winter, a Clark’s nutcracker on Mission Ridge Road, a Townsend’s Solitaire in Montecito, a flock of mountain bluebirds in a field near Goleta slough. Of the seven species only the mountain chickadees have returned. And this is good news because it means that the drought of 1961, which brought the mountain species down to us, has not been repeated.

There were other uncommon birds arriving that fall who made their visits yearly events. I have previously mentioned the yellow-breasted chat who comes at the end of August and remains until the end of September and who, during all that time, never opens his mouth except to eat bananas and grapes. It’s difficult to believe that this is the same bird whose springtime repertoire is so varied that many people, believe he is a true mimic like the mockingbird. If this were the case, the chats found in southern Alberta would have different sounds from the ones found in our Refugio Canyon because of the different kinds of birds and animals to imitate. I haven’t found this to be true.

On the other hand, the mockingbirds that sing from our television antenna and the top of the neighbor’s sequoia tree are easily distinguishable by ear from those around the house where my bird-watching niece, Jane, lives. Her house, over the hill toward the sea, is in an area of open hills with few large trees. Jane’s mockingbirds imitate, as ours never do, the red-tailed hawks and ash-throated flycatchers and green-backed goldfinches, while the notes that characterize our mockers of the woods are missing, the scold of the titmouse and the acorn woodpecker, the lisp of the bushtit.

On October 6, a white-throated sparrow arrived to spend the winter. Though Easterners are well acquainted with this bird he is rare in California and usually seen only at feeding stations. Two days later a lively little band of pine siskins flew in for a stay of two weeks. The comings and goings of these engaging creatures are usually described as erratic, yet every fall they appear here, darting in and out of the feed boxes and hopping and splashing in the birdbaths. So completely do they make themselves at home that it is hard for me to believe my eyes when I look out one morning and find them gone. Often in the case of migrating birds the main group will move on leaving a straggler or two behind. This never happened with the siskins, who arrived together, ate together, bathed together and left together. I am told that they sometimes carry their communality to the extent of nesting together in one tree, though I have no direct knowledge of this. Like most of our other guests that fall, they perform their most important function in the mountains: Santa Barbara is a nice place to visit but they wouldn’t want to love here.

October also brought our first robins and cedar waxwings. In spite of the large number of berried shrubs on our property, cotoneaster, toyon, eugenia and pyracantha, we have never had huge flocks of robins such as I’ve seen in nearby areas. That winter we were hosts to a pair of robins, one of whom, after Big Boy Blue was lured around to the front of the house with peanuts, tried repeatedly to take over the ledge. He didn’t succeed. Short-tempered and peremptory as he was, he lacked Big Boy’s substantial voice and personal force and as soon as be began driving the birds off one end of the ledge, they began congregating at the other end. Perhaps the explanation is simply that birds recognize members of the jay family as their enemies. For all his pomposity the robin is a thrush, no stealer of eggs or eater of nestlings, and he was more of a nuisance than a threat to the other birds.

The arrival of the waxwings presented an entirely different problem. These inoffensive little creatures, gentle as silk, were responsible for more havoc among the other birds than the robins and jays combined. The trouble was caused by their numbers and their gregarious instincts. One waxwing on a birdbath or a food perch still leaves plenty of room for a purple finch, a slaty fox sparrow, a brown towhee and a couple of Audubon warblers. In the world of birds, however, a single waxwing is very rare and seen only at the beginning of the fall season when one is scouting an area in advance, or at the beginning of the spring season when a crippled or diseased bird is left behind by the departing flock.

A hundred waxwings on a ledge, fifty in a birdbath, ten on a doughnut, will drive non-waxwings away more effectively than the tactics of birds twice the size and a dozen times more aggressive. What it boils down to is a matter of room. When there is no more room, other species of birds will simply depart, but the waxwings keep on coming even if they have to land on each other’s backs. Instinct tells them to follow their leader and follow they must, usually with good results but often with disastrous ones. We have had a dozen strike a window in as many seconds, most of them fatally, this in spite of the fact that I was standing at the window, waving them away with a newspaper.

Many similar events have made me a reluctant student of window kills — which of the dozens of species around our house actually hit the windows; what birds are killed, what ones are knocked out but survive, and what ones are tough enough to fly away uninjured, at least in any obvious way, and which birds are repeaters who have impaired faculties from previous strikes or other accidents.

The species that fits every one of the above categories and has more strikes to its discredit than all the others combined, including the waxwings, is the mourning dove. Doves also account for the most fatalities, though the percentage of these is low compared to the great number of strikes. It is a simple matter to keep track of the number because birds of this family have a grey powdery coating on their feathers which adheres to any surface they touch. If a window of our house goes unwashed for a month it becomes a showcase for a parade of glaucous ghosts. More than a dozen outlines of doves can be counted, each as clear as a photocopy. Band-tailed pigeons rank second in number of strikes but do not leave such complete or such distinct impressions on the glass, only half a wing sketched here or a bit of head there.

On any day in winter the mourning doves and band-tailed pigeons make up about ten percent of the birds feeding on our ledge. When ten percent of the population is responsible for over ninety percent of the window strikes we must be concerned with the reason why. All birds are believed to have superb eyesight. Experiments with pigeons have shown that they can differentiate as many as twenty shades of color, and since their eyes are at the sides of their heads, they have a field of vision of about 340°; in other words, they can see everything in their environment except the space occupied by their own bodies (Welty, The Life of Birds). In spite of all this I’m tempted to think that members of this family have some organic or functional weakness of the eye. (Perhaps I should explain at this point that the lighting in our front room is arranged so that no bird can mistake it for a fly through: when the north window is open, the south one is draped, and so on.)

A few of the less serious window strikes involving pigeons and doves may be accounted for by their awkwardness in handling themselves at close quarters, landing or taking off. Most of the fatalities, however, occur when a bird, starting in another part of the canyon, comes at full speed toward our windows in what appears to be nothing less than a suicide attempt. For some time we preserved on glass an example of this kind of strike. It happened in the fall of 1964. While talking to a friend on the telephone I saw a mourning dove fly out from the top of a eucalyptus tree about two hundred feet away. The bird’s flight was very fast and very direct, straight toward our window. It hit head on, its wings raised for the next beat that never came. The sound of the impact was so loud that my friend on the other end of the telephone thought it was some kind of explosion. Certainly death must have been instantaneous, for the dove ricocheted into the heavy underbrush on the canyon slope, leaving behind on the window a perfect record of the last episode in its life.

Of the ghosts on our glass this one was the clearest: feather and foot, head, beak and eyes — in fact, the outlines of its eyes, we discovered, were not outlines at all but the actual eyes themselves which had been jolted out of their sockets and adhered to the glass like glue. For several months we left that part of the window unwashed and while the eyes very gradually shrank in size, the rest of the dove’s memorial remained unfaded by sun, unerased by rain and fog.

The speed of the bird’s flight indicated that it was attempting to escape man or hawk. But it had other and safer directions to take, and plenty of time to alter course. Why did this dove, and many others before and after it, fly directly to their deaths when a lift of just a few feet would have allowed them to clear both the window and the roof?

Hermit thrushes and fox sparrows were responsible for a much greater percentage of window strikes than their small numbers would lead us to expect. Conversely, some species struck rarely or not at all. For seven months of every year there were as many Audubon warblers feeding on our ledge as there were house finches. It might reasonably be assumed that the finches, who spent their entire lives around buildings, would be sophisticated about windows, and that the tree-dwelling warblers would not. The opposite turned out to be true. One Audubon warbler, an immature, died in this manner compared to dozens of house finches. In the winter of 1964–1965 we had seven kinds of sparrows at the feeding station — Lincoln’s, song, golden-crowned, white-crowned, Harris’, English and fox — and only the last named ever struck any of our windows. The record of the icterid family is even better: no strikes among the hundreds of cowbirds, red-winged and tricolor blackbirds, hooded and Bullock orioles. Jays, woodpeckers, mockers and thrashers also have perfect records.

Young birds were more likely to hit the windows than older ones. That spring three baby grosbeaks struck, and only one survived after about a twenty-minute period of semi-consciousness. The experts tell me, by the way, that when a bird is injured by a window strike it should be left strictly alone. Handling it, no matter how gently, may result in a fatal stroke or heart attack caused by fear.

During the past year we tried a system for preventing window kills which has worked very well for the smaller birds but has had no appreciable effect on the doves and pigeons. After the windows are washed on the outside we deliberately “spot” them, either with a hose or with one of the water pistols we keep around the house to discourage dog fights. The resulting stains mar the windows somewhat, but serve as caution signals for birds without interfering too much with the pleasure of watching them.

As the month of October continued I began to notice not so much a decrease in the number of tanagers as a decrease in the number of trips I had to make to the market for grapes. By the middle of the month the females and immatures going through were drably dressed for travel and the few males had lost all trace of their red heads of springtime. On October 22, I counted only five tanagers, and the following day, none at all. A lone bird appeared November 5, either a late migrant arriving, or a bird who hadn’t been able to keep pace with his group and had come back for more rest and food. He stayed for two days. His departure marked the end of the tanager migration. It had covered a period of eighty-three days and involved countless birds. The word countless is the only applicable one since we had no way of knowing which birds ate and departed, and which stayed for a day or two, or a week, or even longer.

Without the tanagers the terrace looked strangely colorless and still. Grapes rotted and mildewed in the shade, and shriveled to raisins in the sun. At the market I would be asked how all the tanagers were, and I would have to say I didn’t know, they had gone. Where? I wasn’t sure but the book said they wintered from Mexico to Costa Rica. Would they be back? Of course, I replied, and I believed it. Tanagers migrated every year, there was no reason why they shouldn’t visit us again the next fall and the one after. As a new birdwatcher, I had no way of knowing that what brought the tanagers our way in the fall of 1961 was an unusual set of circumstances which probably wouldn’t be repeated in our lifetime.

The first reference I found to such a migration was in Birds of America, edited by T. Gilbert Pearson:

A. C. Bent, in the tanager volume of his Life Histories of North American Birds, gives an account of a large migration in southern California, from April 23 to May 16 in 1896, and of another in 1903, in Pasadena, with the greatest number occurring the last three weeks in May.

In Birds of California, W. L. Dawson mentions the spring of 1912 as a very unusual one, when the birds “fairly swarmed,” and “one could have seen a hundred adult males in the course of an afternoon’s drive.” In the next paragraph he tells of a lady in Montecito — the part of Santa Barbara where we live — who during that spring had an arrangement for feeding halved oranges to the tanagers and as many as twelve birds would feed at the same time. Dawson adds, “Never was a more distinguished array of beauty at a single function — not in Montecito even.” I think we did as well in 1961 but it was much too late to invite Mr. Dawson.

The three heavy migrations mentioned took place in the spring and covered a period of less than a month. Ours was a fall migration and from the first arrival to the last departure a period of nearly three months elapsed. Why? The passage I quoted previously from T. Gilbert Pearson, in Birds of America, suggests that the mountain areas may be short of food in certain years and the tanagers have to move down into the lowlands. A study of our rainfall figures supports this theory.

The lush and varied foliage of Santa Barbara proper gives no indication that ours is a semi-arid region with an average yearly rainfall of 17.7 inches, all but a trace of which falls between November 1 and May 1. Our total rainfall for the last hundred Julys, for instance, measures a little over two inches, and for the same number of Augusts, less than two and a half inches. Total, not average. The native plants have adapted to this schedule and survive and even flourish throughout the dry summer months if they have received enough moisture during the winter and early spring. A flood year, 1958, brought nearly twice the normal amount of rain and more than the total rainfall of the three drought years that followed. Mere figures don’t give an adequate picture, however. For instance, in the season of 1960–1961 we had 9.99 inches of rain. This wouldn’t be so bad if it had been distributed fairly evenly over our six-month rainy season, but nearly all of it fell in November. By the middle of August, 1961, the third of three drought years, creek beds were as dry as the Mojave Desert, and in the mountains all but the toughest shrubs and trees were blighted, their leaves crisped and their fruits withered by unmitigated sun. What was worse still for the birds, insects were in short supply, especially the wasps and other hymenoptera which make up a much larger percentage of the tanager’s diet than fruits of any kind.

So the tanagers came down from the mountains. And came and came and came...