The Birds and the Beasts Were There

8 Wolves and Waxwings

The flood began in February. It was as if some well-intentioned but muddleheaded weatherlord had made a belated study of the low precipitation figures for the last three years and decided to even things up a bit for Santa Barbara. More rain fell, eighteen inches, than during an average year, and the month became the wettest since weather records were started in 1867. The birds were also the wettest since 1867. Differences seemed to dissolve in water and one soggy bird looked very much like another. Even those distinctive dandies, the waxwings, could be identified from a distance only by their dumpy little legs. Their crests looked like water-flattened cowlicks and their sleek beige coats were black and blotched.

The only birds that didn’t change in looks were those colored mainly black and white. The acorn woodpeckers were so unique in appearance that no mere foot and a half of rain could alter them, and the bold stripings of the white-crowned sparrows simply became exaggerated, with the black turning blacker and the white whiter. The same was true of the little black-throated grey warbler who had decided to spend the winter with us. Every now and then he would forage in the cotoneaster outside my office door and I would see the glitter of his golden eye jewel like a tear caught before it fell.

Readers familiar with our area will perhaps wonder why I omitted mentioning blackbirds in the preceding paragraph. The fact is, though it seems incredible to me now, the only blackbird we had then was a Brewer’s male who would come and perch quietly in a tree to watch the other birds eat. Weeks passed before he himself flew down to feed, and weeks more before he brought a friend and then a friend’s friend. The red-winged blackbirds didn’t discover our feeding station until June of 1962 when it had been established for a year, and another year was to elapse before we had our first brown-headed cowbird. The English sparrows, too, were mercifully slow in discovering us. That winter we had a grand total of five — and didn’t have sense enough to appreciate how grand it was! These last four species, depending somewhat on the season, now make up about seventy-five percent of our bird population and their sheer numbers have become a problem, especially the English sparrows. It is rumored that the breeding season of these birds begins on March 1 and ends on February 28, with a one-day holiday every leap year. My own observations lead me to disagree — our English sparrows don’t observe the holiday.

That month of February marked the first time that I saw the orange crown of the orange-crowned warbler. During or right after a heavy rain this crown is visible because soaking flattens the greenish feather tips that normally conceal the burnt-orange color underneath. There was another first that month: on the 20th, John Glenn took three very quick trips around the world.

The rain continued, interrupted every now and then by an interlude of dazzling sun that turned the eucalyptus leaves to silver and made golden balls out of the pittosporum pods. The waxwings, as usual, had their own idea of how to make the best use of these dry interludes — they bathed, as any chronicler of waxwing eccentricities should have guessed. They bathed as if they’d just been released from some desert prison.

While our creek turned into a roaring river and our yard into a swamp, while we were bailing out our lanai and piling furniture on furniture trying to keep half of it dry, while bridges disappeared, and fences and sections of road, the waxwings fluttered down into the birdbaths like wet autumn leaves and fluttered back up again to the tops of the eucalyptus trees whose blossoms they shared with the Audubon warblers. If I opened the dining-room window while they were using the birdbath just below it, I could hear the flock communicating with each other in their continual whistles so high that many people are unable to register the sound. Of the birds I’ve heard, only the blackpoll warbler reaches as high a pitch. Another of the waxwings’ familiar noises was made not by their vocal chords but by the rush of air through many pairs of wings as they rose in a body to the tops of the trees. It consisted of a long, drawn-out phew.

As the rains went on and on, even the waxwings had to dry out sometimes. I would find them roosting all over the place, on the rafters in the garage, under the eaves, in the woodpile, and once I even found a row of them perched on the handlebar of my bicycle, looking for all the world as if they expected to be taken for a ride. In a fit of compassion, untempered by common sense, I arranged a shelter for them on the porch, an old-fashioned wooden clothes-drying rack left over from the prelaundromat days. I had long since switched from grapes, which were not available, to apples, which were, and during the period that the clothes rack remained on the porch I learned one equation well: apples + waxwings = applesauce.

Other birds discovered the rack, too, and it soon became a popular hangout. I counted ten species on it at one time: band-tailed pigeons and mourning doves, waxwings, mockingbirds, jays, English sparrows, house finches, purple finches, white-crowned sparrows and golden-crowned sparrows. Such a close and peaceful assemblage would have been unlikely to occur in good weather when its members had more freedom of choice. In fact, the change in attitude brought about by a prolonged period of storms was apparent not only in the birds’ relationship with each other, but in their relationship to me. In a four-inch rain I was the kindly purveyor of seeds and doughnuts and peanut butter sandwiches, and the birds perched on window ledges and porch railings waiting for a handout and peered in at me over the edge of the roof. A day of sun, however, shrank me down to size. The same creatures who’d almost eaten out of my hand now looked at me as if they had never seen me before and expected the worst.

During the storms we had our first and most intimate experiences with purple finches. Some of these birds, which usually breed at the higher altitudes, come down to the southern California coastal areas for the winter, their numbers varying considerably from year to year according to the availability of food in the mountains. That winter they were almost as common as our permanent residents, the house finches. The two species resemble each other physically, but there are striking differences in behavior. It would, in fact, make more sense if it were the purple finches who pursued a close association with dwellings and people. They are calmer in deportment, quieter in voice, and in general seem more adaptable to human beings.

House finches are nervous, noisy birds, always chipping and chirping and on the move. Their fright reaction to a door opening for the five thousandth time is the same as their reaction when the door opened for the first time. Such behavior is instinctive, but in the case of the purple finches it was quickly modified by experience. They learned that the opening of a particular door meant doughnuts, not disaster, and while instinct always made them fly away, experience kept shortening the distance. By April 23, when the last of them migrated, the flyaway distance had become the merest token foot or two.

The purple finches showed a pronounced weakness for sweets. When I put out the doughnuts in the morning, they avoided the plain kind and went immediately to the ones coated with icing. Instead of pecking at them here and there the way all the other birds did, the finches carefully proceeded to eat every trace of icing off, barely touching what lay underneath. We could always tell which doughnuts had been finch food: they hung naked in the trees like Christmas ornaments with the tinsel worn off.

Purple finches were more numerous at the feeding station that winter than any year since. This was also true of fox sparrows, represented by the three main subspecies, the dusky brown, the rusty and the slaty — by the end of the season a total of about fifteen birds. Subsequent winters have brought no more than one or two fox sparrows at a time and none of them stayed for the season.

In recent years other local birders have found fox sparrows in short supply. On the last five Christmas counts, for instance, a total of only fifty-eight were reported. Contrast this with the estimate, made by W. L. Dawson in the early twenties, that there were present “on a winter day in California anywhere from 20 to 200 million fox sparrows.” Perhaps the reason for the difference can be deduced from another set of figures: in the early twenties the human population of California was three and a half million, today it is nearly twenty million.

Some species, like the mockingbird, have adjusted so well to human intrusion that they are usually seen only in inhabited areas. Mockers appear to be more at home on a T.V. antenna than on a tree top, and better able to cope with cats and dogs than with hawks and owls. Such an adaptation is a much more complicated procedure for birds as innately shy as the fox sparrows. However, another species noted for its shyness is proving surprisingly adaptable. This is the wrentit.

At quite a number of feeding stations in this area, wrentits have become as sociable as titmice. Ours serenade us from the porch railing, their long expressive tails vibrating in rhythm with each note, and in the spring the young ones learn to sing in the lower branches of the ceanothus or elderberry bush. The song, among the easiest of all bird songs to identify, must be difficult to perfect. The summer air rings from dawn to dusk with the sound of wrentits practicing. These music lessons remind me of all the little boys who ever sawed away at a violin and all the little girls who ever blew earnestly into a woodwind.

The wrentit, which used to be our state bird, has been replaced by the California quail. People who deplore the change, point out that the California quail is only one of 165 members of the family of Phasianidae, whereas the wrentit is the only member in the whole world of his family, the Chamaeidae. His scientific name, Chamaea fasdata, means “fastened to the ground.” Because of his weak flight and home-loving nature, the name may almost be taken literally. Indeed, the porch railing of the second floor of our house is a veritable Matterhorn for the wrentit.

The uniqueness of the little bird is further emphasized by the fact that he inhabits only the Pacific coastal area from southern Oregon to Baja California. This makes him a more strictly regional bird than the California quail, which has been introduced widely throughout the West.

Perhaps the quail was chosen as replacement because he is more easily seen and more colorful than the wrentit, or perhaps because his greeting sounds so hospitable. On almost any hike you can hear the quail’s cheerful throaty voice urging everyone to “sit right down, sit right down.” Birders new to our area are advised not to take the invitation too seriously — it is frequently issued in a canyon overgrown with poison oak. (Poison oak offers quail some protection which they badly need at nesting time. Surely one of the funniest and most touching sights in the avian world is that of newly hatched quail tagging along behind their parents. One fellow birder, Neva Plank, is responsible for what seems the perfect description of them — “walking walnuts.”)

The adjustability of the innately shy wrentits to human conditions can probably be explained by the fact that these birds are not migratory but live out their entire lives in a small circumscribed area. When your world measures only an acre, you can take better stock of it, get to know what’s poison and what’s meat, where the seeds are and where the cats aren’t, when to fly, when to freeze. The bird that must cover hundreds of miles every spring and fall has no chance for such careful scrutiny. If, in spite of this, he adapts easily and well to the presence of people — like the hooded oriole, the black-headed grosbeak, the white-crowned sparrow — we must attribute it to his inborn good nature. In The Life of Birds Welty states that “tameness, shyness and belligerence commonly run in families and are very likely based on hereditary behavior patterns. Phalaropes, puffbirds, kinglets and titmice are relatively tame, confiding birds, while oyster catchers, roseate spoonbills and redshanks are shy, wild species.”

This brings us back to the cedar waxwings. Watch a large flock of them feeding in a pepper tree and you get the impression that they are the most fidgety and nervous of birds. This impression quickly disappears after you’ve had some experience with them. They show little suspicion and fear of either humans or the various contrivances humans have rigged up to protect their ornamental fruits and berries — dangling twists of metal, strips of cloth, plastic windmills from the dimestore, colored discs and Japanese glass chimes. Several times during that winter I put food out as usual and then, instead of going immediately back into the house, I sat down quietly on the ledge. The length of time I had to wait until the waxwings arrived depended on whether the birds were near enough to see the fresh food. If they were, they came down to the ledge without hesitation — either ignoring or accepting my presence, I’m not sure which — and fed themselves within touching distance of me.

Several accounts have been written of how young or injured waxwings adjust to captivity and become as tame and sometimes as mischievous as parakeets. Their amiability toward human beings extends to other birds as well as to each other. They are courteous and affectionate and they never fight among themselves the way most species of birds and mammals do. A probable reason for this is suggested in A. C. Bent’s Life Histories of North American Birds. Dr. Arthur A. Allen is quoted to the effect that cedar waxwings “have nothing to gain by fighting, for their food is of such a nature that there is either more of it than they could consume before it spoils or else there is none at all. Since they can fly long distances to feeding places, they do not need to defend a feeding territory about their nests.” This, perhaps, might also account for their lack of song.

Writing in the same volume, Winsor Barrett Tyler refers to the waxwing as the perfect gentleman of the bird world. Certainly this is true as far as dress and deportment are concerned, but at the table the waxwing most resembles a high-spirited child, alternating serious eating with playful antics like tossing food into the air and catching it, at the same time keeping up an incessant noise.

I used to share with many other people the impression that these birds were strictly berry eaters. During the winter of 1961–1962, I learned that berries were not even their favorite food when more exotic items were available. The berries on all our cotoneaster and toyon trees were untouched as long as I kept the ledge supplied with apples and doughnuts and waxwing pudding and a mixture we called raisin-mess. The recipe for the latter was given to us by Mr. Rett, who said he’d used it successfully on the museum grounds to attract warblers. A pound of ground raisins was stirred into a pound of melted beef fat — it took a heap of stirring because the two didn’t want to mix — and when the whole sticky mess was cold and set, it was put into suet feeders or into various crannies and crevices in the bark of a tree. I don’t recall that the mixture attracted many warblers but it was an instant hit with the waxwings as well as the opossums, raccoons and rats.

Waxwing pudding was served in three old ice trays kept out on the ledge. It was a general name we used for any mixture which had moistened bread as its basis, with various other things added according to what was available — sugar, cornmeal, canned fruit, eggs, raisins, leftover mashed potatoes, spaghetti, stuffed green peppers, suet, peanut butter — no combination was too wild for the waxwings, who ate stuff even the omnivorous scrub jays wouldn’t go near.

As to their manner of eating this mixture I can only say that they wolfed it. Since early childhood I’ve heard this expression but I never really understood what wolfing your food meant until a couple of years ago when Pete and Adu Batten acquired a pair of timber wolves, Thomas and Virginia. I happened to be around at feeding time one day. Virginia was about the size of our German shepherd, Brandy, who weighs 105 pounds; Thomas was considerably larger. Both wolves received a large bowl of horsemeat and kibble, but within a fraction of a minute every scrap of food was gone. It was an unbelievable performance on the part of two animals born and raised in captivity and well fed from the beginning.

Naturalists used to believe that this manner of eating on the part of wolves was necessary to ensure their survival, since in their native environment, the Arctic tundra and the boreal forests of Canada, they often had to go for days without capturing any large prey. Therefore, when such food was available it had to be eaten quickly, before it froze in winter or spoiled in summer. It seemed a beautifully logical theory until Canadian biologist Farley Mowat took up residence with wolves in the wild and learned they lived mainly on mice in summer and rabbits in winter. So much for logic.

Meanwhile, some three thousand miles to the southwest our waxwings wolfed their food.

Paul Vercammen is a local bird fancier who at one time in his aviary kept four cedar waxwings in addition to more exotic species like Lady Amherst and golden pheasants. The latter were fed a scientifically balanced mixture in the form of pellets while Paul went to considerable lengths to supply the waxwings with pyracantha berries. People who have kept more than one pet simultaneously, canine, feline, avian or any other, should be able to guess what happened: the pheasants took a liking to pyracantha berries and the waxwings thrived on pheasant pellets for five years. They’d probably still be doing it if Paul hadn’t given them to the Museum of Natural History where they’re back on a more conventional diet.

There were only a few items of food which our waxwings refused that winter. One of them was dark bread, rye, pumpernickel and the like, and another was chocolate in any form — both of these were also turned down by the other birds unless absolutely nothing else was available. Chocolate doughnuts, and those merely iced with chocolate, were the last to be eaten, and pieces of rye bread were often left around for days. The aversion didn’t extend to wheat bread, no matter how dark, or to ginger cake, which rules out the possibility that the birds were reacting to the color. Since they’re supposed to have a poorly developed sense of smell and taste, I’m at a loss to explain why our birds exhibited the same dislikes year after year.

Apples cut in halves were particular favorites of the waxwings. Every atom of pulp and seed would be eaten until only a spine of core remained holding together the paper-thin shell of skin. When the wind blew, these shells would move back and forth on the ledge like little riderless rocking horses.

In some parts of the country waxwings are known as cherry-birds because of their fondness for this fruit. But in California waxwings are winter birds and their favorite fruit is the firethorn, or pyracantha berry, which resembles not so much a cherry as a small red apple with a soft yellowish pulp. We have pyracanthas planted for the birds as well as toyons, eugenias, cotoneasters and pepper trees. In 1964–1965, a normal year in climate and vegetation, the pyracantha berries were all gone by February 20, the toyons, eugenias and peppers were untouched, and the cotoneasters were dragging on the ground with the weight of their fruit. During the first week of March, the waxwings started in seriously on the cotoneaster outside Ken’s office. By March 5, an estimated 250 to 300 pounds of berries had been consumed and the limbs of the tree had risen off the ground, back to their usual position.

The waxwing appetite is notorious in the bird world. Audubon mentions their eating so heavily that they were unable to fly, and John Tyler writes of numbers of them, in the vineyard regions of northern California, choking to death trying to swallow too many raisins at once. I’ve never witnessed such extremes, even during that wet winter of 1962, though I saw many a bulging beak and distended throat, and many a batch of waxwing pudding disappear within a minute or two.

One Sunday morning in early March, while we were having a respite from the rain, my brother-in-law, Clarence Schlagel, decided to take some pictures of the waxwings feeding on the ledge for his collection of nature slides. He arrived early with all his equipment: technical assistants wife Dorothy and daughter Jane, one plain and one fancy camera, tripod and telescopic lens. After the usual photographer’s fussbudgeting, he ended up dispensing with everything except the plain camera and simply shooting the birds through the plate-glass window. The results, he phoned later in the week to tell us, were fine as far as the waxwings were concerned, but the old ice trays we used as feeders had ruined the pictures aesthetically. Didn’t we have something prettier and more photogenic?

I explained, somewhat sharply, that when you were feeding hundreds of birds daily, you had little time to worry about aesthetics. But my pride was injured, and that afternoon I searched through some cupboards and came across a candy dish I’d been given in my pre-birding days. It was made of Italian marble in the shape of a pedestal birdbath decorated with doves. Clarence dropped in to inspect my discovery and pronounced it perfect — the whiteness of the marble would emphasize the tawny shades of the waxwings grouped picturesquely around it.

I knew enough about waxwings by this time to doubt that they would group picturesquely around anything if someone wanted them to. However, I agreed to try and arrange a more artistic setting, substituting the marble dish for one of the ice trays and putting in it something pretty and colorful instead of the rather repulsive-looking waxwing pudding.

After checking what was available in the house my brother-in-law decided on maraschino cherries. I opened a jar, put half a dozen cherries in the miniature marble birdbath and set it out on the ledge. It looked irresistible, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder and evidently the waxwings weren’t seeing eye to eye with either Clarence or me. For the balance of the day they came as usual, ate their repulsive-looking waxwing pudding and flew off, paying no attention to the beautiful cherries in the elegant dish. I was not only disappointed, I was downright shocked. A newcomer to the bird world, I innocently assumed that things would be more rational there than in other worlds I already knew. Here were cherries and here were cherry-birds — something should be happening.

I told myself that it was probably a matter of the birds getting used to a new object on the ledge and all I had to do was wait. I waited for the rest of the week. Every now and then I’d see three or four waxwings perched on the marble dish or sitting beside it.

The following Sunday, Clarence returned with his photographic paraphernalia and his two assistants to have another try. He wanted to know, whether the waxwings had become accustomed to the marble birdbath by this time and were grouping picturesquely around it. I assured him they were.

“They must make a colorful sight eating the cherries,” he said.

“They might if they were but they’re not,” I said. “They’re eating the birdbath.”

I pulled open the drapes. Most of the waxwings flew off in protest at the interruption, but at least half a dozen remained where they were on the birdbath. Each of them was carefully and vigorously honing its beak, first on one side, then on the other. The little marble doves used as decoration along the rim of the dish had already been honed into oblivion as had part of the base.

Birds, ornithologists point out, are adaptable. But you never know to what.

On April 2, I wrote in my notebook:

I would have lost the bet. October arrived, and November, but no waxwings. By Christmas I had seen two flocks in the neighborhood, neither of which paid any attention to the ledge with its bird bath, its doughnuts, apples and waxwing pudding. January brought a small flock or two every day and this continued through March. They ate our cotoneaster berries, our toyons, pyracanthas, eugenias and eucalyptus blossoms. During the next three winters we must have seen many thousands of waxwings from our house, yet not a single one of them came down to the ledge to bathe, to eat, to hone its bill.

My fellow birders have suggested possible reasons:

It may have been a fluke that the waxwings started eating off the ledge that first winter. A group leader, his curiosity aroused by the sight of other birds eating there, might have decided to come down for a taste. Then, once started, the waxwings simply continued throughout the season.

Possibly the waxwings of 1961–1962 did not return in the other years. (Why not?) Or, if they returned, they forgot about the waxwing pudding. (I wish I could. I tend to remember it most vividly just as I’m setting out to sea in a small boat.)

Perhaps the real reason is the simplest: waxwings are as unpredictable as people.