The Birds and the Beasts Were There

9 The Winterlings

Some newcomers to the coast of southern California confess a certain nostalgia for the changes of season they knew back in Pittsburgh or Providence, Peoria or Butte. True, we have summer days in winter, and flowers bloom all year and the reason we find it difficult to grow certain plants is that our climate won’t allow them a time to rest. We have birds all year, too, yet it is the birds who differentiate the reasons most clearly for many of us.

The warbler departing from the New England states at the end of summer leaves a vacuum. In California his place is taken almost immediately. With the coming of autumn we substitute Audubon, myrtle and Townsend warblers for yellow and Wilson and black-throated grey. Summerlings like the black-hooded grosbeaks and western tanagers give way to the winterlings, the ruby-crowned kinglets and purple finches. The hooded and Bullock orioles are replaced by the fox sparrows and the white-crowns and gold-crowns, the turkey vultures by the sharp-shinned hawks. The path of the departing Swainson thrush crosses that of the arriving hermit. On one occasion these two species actually met on our ledge, with no sign of being much interested in each other. Perhaps the traveler was too tired and the embarker too eager to be gone.

The return of birds year after year to the same nesting area has been widely discussed and researched. Not so much has been done on the subject of territorial fidelity to winter quarters, yet almost every Californian with a feeding station is aware how strong this fidelity is among most species. The Audubon warblers and the white-crowned and golden-crowned sparrows come first to mind since they are the most numerous. It is easier, however, to keep records on the less numerous species, the Lincoln sparrow, for instance, which is quite rare in our area.

Every October a pair of Lincoln sparrows appears on the lower terrace and for the next five months they divide their time between the terrace and the ledge, doing their best to dispel the widespread rumors that they are shy and retiring and given to skulking in the underbrush. These birds have not been banded but it seems likely, both from their behavior and the scarcity of the species locally, that they are the same birds year after year. Many of our birdwatching friends have come to the house in order to compare the Lincoln with the song sparrow. The two frequent the same area and can often be seen side by side. At these times the differences show up quite clearly — the Lincoln’s ochre-washed chest, finely streaked with black, is distinctive. Younger song sparrows resemble Lincolns more closely than the older birds do.

Another of our regular winter visitors is unusual not because the species is rare here — we list hundreds of Oregon juncos on every Christmas count — but because these birds are gregarious creatures, always in flocks, and our junco, a female, arrives in October alone, spends the winter alone and leaves again in mid-April, still alone. I frequently see groups of juncos on the adjacent property foraging under the avocado trees, so there are obviously many of them in the neighborhood. Yet, as far as we can tell, only this lone female comes to feed on the ledge.

A ranger-naturalist at Jenny Lake in the Grand Tetons National Park told us of a similar experience he had and showed us the female junco involved, a member of the pink-sided subspecies. She was nesting where she had in previous years, under a small bush right beside the main walk into Jenny Lake Museum. She allowed herself to be lifted off the nest so that we could see her moss-lined bowl of little speckled eggs. As soon as we entered the museum she returned to her eggs, displaying no signs of rancor or nervousness. Since Grand Tetons Park comprises over 300,000 acres it is difficult to understand why she chose a spot where dozens of pairs of feet passed every day. Perhaps she depended on the presence of human beings to discourage enemies of hers that reached much further back in time than man. The ranger said she showed up every June alone, and built her nest and raised her young alone. He and other employees of the park had watched carefully for signs of her mate but no one ever caught sight of him and his existence has to be presumed on the evidence of three lively children.

Our own Oregon junco was responsible for a misunderstanding which probably caused many a raised eyebrow in local circles. It happened one day in November, a time when severe winds often sweep down the canyon, shaking the crowns of the palm trees as if they were feather dusters, and twisting the eucalyptus into frenzied contortionists. We’d been having trouble with our extension phone and had arranged for a repairman to come and look at it. Returning home from downtown I found that the wind had blown open the door of my office. Birdseed was scattered all over the carpeting and in the middle of it, peacefully foraging, was the little female junco. She seemed quite at home, choosing a seed here and a seed there and then flying up to inspect the desk and lamp and bookcase and my writing chair. When I tried to persuade her to go back out the door she merely hopped into the living room. Here she continued her inspection tour of the house, showing signs of uneasiness only when she discovered that the picture window was made of glass and offered her no means of exit.

Birds, like some people, have a tendency to panic when they realize they’re trapped. The junco was more phlegmatic than most but I was afraid this wouldn’t last and I wanted to coax her out of there in a hurry. I opened all openable windows and removed the screens. Her only response to my attempts to help her was to keep fluttering her wings against the same picture window.

At this point the doorbell rang announcing the arrival of the telephone repairman. Since birds are much more sensitive to movement than to noise, I stayed where I was and shouted through the door: “Wait on the porch for a minute. I have a junco in here I’m trying to get rid of.”

“Can I help?”

“No thanks, I’ll manage.”

And I finally did, by slowly drawing the drapes across the picture window. The junco proved she knew the exits perfectly and had been just playing a game with me. Pausing only long enough to send me a that’s-not-fair look she made a beeline for the nearest unscreened window. When I opened the drapes she was already back in her place on the ledge.

I let the repairman into the house. He stared around the room with a rather disappointed expression. “I see you got rid of him okay.”

“Yes. She went out the window.”

“A female yet. Which window?”

I pointed to it and he crossed the room and looked down at the patio below.

“Say, that’s some drop, must be twelve to fifteen feet and solid concrete underneath. How about that, eh? These junkies will try anything.”

He was so keen and excited that I didn’t have the heart to set him straight. It has probably become part of his family legend — how he was present the day the dope addict jumped out of the bird addict’s window.

Under special circumstances records of territorial fidelity to winter quarters can be kept without banding the birds. This applied in some degree to our pair of Lincoln sparrows. It applied even more to a bird well known to people living in the East and Midwest, though there had never been a California record of it.

The bird appeared in a willow tree in the yard of Jewell and Russ Kriger about the middle of October, 1961. The willow leaves were still very dense, and at first Jewell was able to catch only a glimpse of the bird, but it was enough to convince her it belonged to a species new in the area. When she finally saw it clearly, she couldn’t believe her eyes and didn’t expect anyone else to believe them either. She spent more than a week studying the bird before she confessed to me on the phone that she had a Baltimore oriole in the willow tree beyond her balcony.

I said what I had to say: “That’s impossible.”

“I know. It’s a male, in perfect plumage, head solid black, belly and rump oranger than oranges.”

I told her I’d be right over, bringing along all my reference books on birds.

When I arrived at the Krigers’ some twenty minutes later, the oriole had left. Jewell was confident though that he would return because his friend was still in the willow tree. She showed me the “friend,” a red-breasted sapsucker, a rather uncommon winter visitor in this region and well worth the trip over just by himself.

The friendship was strictly a one-sided affair, the sapsucker’s opinion of orioles being low, and regrettably, quite justified. As almost everyone who feeds hummingbirds is aware, orioles have a weakness for sweet syrup. So do sapsuckers. But there the similarity ends, for the sapsucker works for his syrup. The oriole, whose beak is not equipped to drill into the bark of trees, does the next best thing — he follows the sapsucker as the jaeger follows the tern and the gull the pelican.

While we were waiting for the Baltimore oriole to rejoin his friend in the willow tree I checked the various books I’d brought with me for references to the species. It was not mentioned at all in Ralph Hoffman’s Birds of the Pacific States, W. L. Dawson’s Birds of California, or Brown and Weston’s Handbook of California Birds. Birds of America, edited by T. Gilbert Pearson, limited the range of the Baltimore oriole to east of the Rockies, and Roger Tory Peterson, in his Field Guide to Western Birds, wrote that any appearance of the species in California or Arizona was accidental. I began to have serious doubts about Jewell’s eyesight.

Through binoculars I watched the sapsucker drill another hole in the already riddled tree — these birds are partial to willows because the wood is soft and juicy. He was young and tousled-looking as if he’d just blown in on a high wind, and the red of his upper parts was duller and darker than in any pictures I’d seen of him. (A year later he was a much sleeker and more beautiful bird.)

Suddenly the sapsucker paused, turned his head, shook himself all over as though in a rage, and flew off. Almost instantly his place at the newly drilled hole was taken by the Baltimore oriole. There wasn’t the slightest doubt about the bird’s identification, every feather was perfect. The solid black head and the orange of the undertail reversed the colors of the hooded oriole, and a thin white wing bar supplanted the broad white patch of the Bullock oriole.

I called Mr. Rett at the Museum of Natural History, told him I was watching a Baltimore oriole in the Krigers’ yard and asked him to send someone from the museum to come and check it.

He sounded quite exasperated. “I can’t send the members of our staff charging off every time a crackpot call comes in. You know what kind of reports we get? — condors perched on rooftops, coppery-tailed trogons fluttering around gardens, cactus wrens in pine trees...”

He went on to what I assumed was his standard lecture to crackpot callers: birds often didn’t look exactly like their pictures in the field guides; size was always, and color usually, very deceiving, yellow and orange, for instance. The bird I was watching might well be a Scott’s oriole since one had recently been reported in Montecito.

“I know,” I said coldly. “I reported it. And yellow and orange are no more alike than lemons and oranges.”

“All right, all right, all right. I’ll see if Waldo can make it out there later in the day.”

Arrangements were made for Waldo Abbott to come at two o’clock since the oriole’s time of arrival in the afternoon averaged about two-thirty according to Jewell’s records. Meanwhile the word had spread. Pat Higginson arrived hoping to add a new bird to her list, Mary Hyland staggered in with half a ton of photographic equipment, and shortly before two Waldo arrived, looking like a man determined to be underwhelmed.

Waldo is a very active, restless man, and as long as he was helping Mary move photographic equipment around and set it up, he was content. But the instant he had to sit down quietly in a chair and wait for the oriole he began to show signs of wanting to bolt. We couldn’t risk losing him at this critical juncture so Pat and I had a conference in the kitchen. She suggested that since Waldo was a man who loved food and birds — not necessarily in that order — we should ply him with food and bird questions. Waldo was a born teacher and he could no more walk away from a question than an actor could walk away from an audience. Pat supplied the cookies and coffee, I supplied the questions.

The oriole picked that day to be late. Three o’clock came and no bird, and Waldo was fit to be tied. In fact, Pat and I were seriously considering tying him if nothing else worked. Fortunately we didn’t have to. At three-thirty the red-breasted sapsucker flew into the willow tree, closely followed by his orange-and-black “friend.”

Cameras clicked, and the Baltimore oriole became part of Santa Barbara’s bird history. The colored slides taken by Mary and Waldo that day, of the Baltimore oriole alone and with the sapsucker, were burned in a serious fire started by chemicals in Mr. Rett’s lab, but Mary still has all the negatives. Subsequently, Waldo wrote an article about the oriole which appeared in Condor magazine and which, as far as I know, was the first official report of the bird in California. Since then, this species has been sighted in the state on many occasions. Two years after the appearance of Jewell’s Baltimore oriole, which stayed in her yard all that winter and every winter since, ten members of this species were seen at various places in southern California: Santa Ana, Rancho Park and Point Loma in addition to Montecito.

No single wild bird has become more popular with nature lovers throughout the state than the Krigers’ Baltimore oriole, which came to be affectionately known, at Pat Higginson’s suggestion, by its initials. During fall and winter, birders, in fact whole bird clubs, arrive at the Krigers’ house equipped with binoculars, field guides, sandwiches, and in at least one instance, a sleeping bag. As Easterners prepare for the winter by having their furnaces checked, the Krigers prepare for it by buying up extra quantities of coffee and bracing themselves for a series of telephone calls that usually begin: “Do you still have your B.O.?”

Long-time residents of Santa Barbara know that Olive Mill Road was named for its olive mill, which is still standing and used as a residence; that Parra Grande Lane, in the 1800s, was the site of the world’s largest single grapevine, covering a trellis 100,000 square feet in area; and that Salsipuedes was one of the old town boundaries and meant, “Get out if you can.” Newcomers find out for themselves that Conejo Road has rabbits, Las Encinas oaks, Nogales walnuts, that Overlook Lane overlooks and that in the early spring the Monarch butterflies swarm like bees in the Monterey cypresses of Butterfly Lane.

Local birdwatchers were puzzled by the fact that one small area of Montecito, as soon as the Krigers moved into it, should produce such a number and variety of orioles, both in and out of season. (On one November morning in 1963, for instance, I saw there four kinds of orioles, a hooded, two Bullocks, the adult male Baltimore with a younger male in tow and a male orchard oriole.) It was a happy accident that I discovered, less than a block from the Krigers’ backyard, a small private lane almost hidden by its own lush foliage. A wooden sign indicated its name, Oriole Road. Evidently orioles had been frequenting the neighborhood for a long time, but what kind? Were they merely our rather common summer visitors, the hooded, or the somewhat less common Bullock? Or was it possible that Baltimore orioles had been coming there every winter for years and were simply not spotted by competent observers? Shortage of such observers is underlined by the fact that these flashy, vivid birds, visible half a mile away, have wintered in Montecito since 1961 but have not been reported from any area except the Krigers’ backyard.

On the same November day that the male orchard oriole visited the Krigers, I learned from Mary Hyland that another male of the same species had been in the yard of Neva Plank, on the other side of town, since the beginning of the month. Mrs. Plank, a birdwatcher, had identified it immediately but hadn’t told anyone except Mary about it because she didn’t want news of the oriole’s presence to get around to any collector. Mary assured Mrs. Plank of my strong anti-collecting stand and I was invited to her house, along with Jewell Kriger and Nelson Metcalf. The orchard oriole, while not as gaudy as Jewell’s B.O., was easier to see because he hung out close to the house in the tecomaria bushes, along with several Allen’s hummingbirds who should have been gone by the end of August.

Tecomaria is also known to gardeners by its scientific name, Tecoma capensis, and by its nickname, cape honeysuckle. Grown either as a vine or a shrub, it is a plant every backyard catering to birds should contain. With its delicate dark-green leaflets that glitter in the sun, and its vivid orange-red flowers that bloom almost all year, it looks like an exotic which requires much care and water. In fact, it thrives on neglect. Like the tree tobacco, another great attraction for birds, especially hummers and orioles, it grows anywhere, reseeds like mad, and needs no summer watering. Credit should be given to the three T’s — tobacco, trumpet and tecomaria — for the part they play in enabling increasing numbers of migrants and breeding birds to remain here all year. But the most credit must go to the eucalyptus trees, of which there are almost a hundred kinds growing in the Santa Barbara region. On a late winter or early spring day the crowns of the larger eucalypts are literally alive with Audubon warblers, hooded and Bullock orioles and cedar waxwings, and in midsummer, when the red-flowered varieties are in bloom, each tree can be heard a block away, so many hummingbirds and bees are battling for its honey.

The orchard oriole, a common nester in the more southerly parts of the East and Midwest, had been seen in California only a few times and Mrs. Plank’s bird was the first record for Santa Barbara. He was dubbed Mr. Chocolate and almost immediately he became as popular as his name. He never failed to show up for visiting birders and pose for his photograph, and he obligingly stayed around for one Audubon Christmas count. I visited him quite frequently during the winter and early spring until his departure in mid-April. This coincided almost exactly with the departure of Jewell’s adult Baltimore, the young Baltimore having left the last week in January, probably out of frustration: he had spent two and a half months trying to imitate the way the adult drank out of the oriole syrup feeder and he never got the hang of it.

The record books for birds are changing year by year. It is difficult to assess how many of these changes are real, caused by variations in climatic conditions, and how many are apparent, caused by an increase in the number of observers and people who attract birds by feeding and appropriate plantings. In the winter of 1964, according to Audubon Field Notes (Vol. 19, No. 3), the following summer species were reported in southern California: fifteen hooded orioles, twenty-nine Bullock orioles, twelve western tanagers and a black-headed grosbeak. The grosbeak and four of the tanagers were at our feeding station. The two species arrived within a day of each other during the first week in December and left a month later. Where they spent the rest of the winter is anybody’s guess, but on March 17, three western tanagers returned, two males and a female, accompanied by a female summer tanager and a male just acquiring his manly plumage — he was the same yellow-green shade as the female except for an orange-pink wash across his chest and orange-pink patches beside his shoulders and on top of his head. It was a day of vicious weather, severe winds, rain, thunder and hail, hardly an ideal occasion to watch birds. But birds often do the unexpected — we had thirty-two species in our yard that day. Some of them must have been rather astonished at the California weather.

The continual presence all winter of Mr. Chocolate, Neva Plank’s orchard oriole, and the way he stuck so close to the house until mid-April, made Santa Barbara birders confident that he would return every year just as Jewell’s B.O. did. In early summer we got the bad news: the Planks’ property had been condemned to make room for a new road connecting the mesa area with the city proper, and the Planks were being forced to move. It was painful for me to picture such a busy and lovingly tended feeding station crushed by bulldozers, and I stayed away from that part of town.

In the fall, preparations began for the annual Christmas bird count. The previous year, 1963, Santa Barbara with its 166 species ranked fifth out of 688 counts made in the United States and Canada. None of us entertained much hope of equaling this figure in 1964. Too many things had happened — a disastrous fire, encroaching subdivisions, disappearing green belts. The reduction of Stow Lake and pond was further complicated by a new housing project and meant virtually the elimination of this region as a good area for waterfowl and shore birds. The Bird Refuge, at the southeastern end of the city, was in poor shape, and while the Santa Barbara Audubon Society was working toward the gigantic task of freshening and aerating the water and landscaping the part adjacent to the railroad tracks, little had been accomplished so far.

Count day arrived, cold and cloudy, with wind and rain in most sections of the prescribed territorial limits. At noon I got in touch with Nelson Metcalf by prearrangement. We were both discouraged by the morning’s results; it seemed unlikely that we would see more than 140 species. A large portion of the area Jewell and I had covered was devastated by fire and we’d found the number of birds ordinarily common there, like quail and Bewick wrens and wrentits, had decreased; only the Oregon juncos, foraging on the ground among the burned oaks and the skeletons of little mammals, seemed to have increased. Nelson, too, was having bad luck and hadn’t turned up one unusual shore bird or warbler or a single tanager or oriole. During the week an orchard oriole had been reported at Carpinteria, but it was the wrong time and the wrong place as far as the count was concerned since it was seen outside the fifteen-mile-diameter circle and on the wrong day.

It brought us, however, to the subject of Mr. Chocolate and the Planks, who’d moved to a new house on the north side of town. What about the road that had dispossessed them? Was it already built, still under construction, or perhaps not yet started? This last possibility offered a mere wisp of straw but Nelson clutched at it.

He called me late that night. The road remained on the drawing board, and the tecomaria was still untouched by the bulldozers. Fluttering among its glistening leaflets, looking good enough to eat, was Mr. Chocolate. And, as if he alone were not enough, in the same tecomaria was a western tanager and a short distance away, a Bullock oriole. Our count day ended with a total of 155 species, considerably fewer than the preceding year but more than we had anticipated. Santa Barbara was credited with only 154 species in the published report in Audubon Field Notes (Vol. 19, No. 2) due to the omission of half a dozen myrtle warblers — a mistake undoubtedly ours rather than that of the meticulous editor, Allan D. Cruickshank.

The Christmas count always has its surprises and moments of suspense, its triumphs and failures, and most important of all, a new batch of devotees. People who’ve taken part in one count seldom want to miss the next. And the chances are they won’t have to, no matter what area of the United States or Canada they happen to be in when December rolls around. In 1964, over 75° counts were submitted, and some twenty-five were turned down because of rule-breaking, illegibility and other reasons. The number of people participating in a count varied from one, such as Ramon Burron of Cambridge Bay, N. W. Territories, who spent four hours walking five miles in 50°-below-zero weather to record a single species — eleven rock ptarmigans — to the eighty-six counters of Coot Bay-Everglades National Park, Florida, who covered their balmy region on foot, by car, by boat and by airplane to record 174 species.

Dedicated birders frequently participate in more than one count, some in as many as half a dozen. This is especially true in Texas, and I must mention here what birders from other parts of the country learn for themselves, that for sheer verve and vigor the members of the Texas Ornithological Society cannot be surpassed.

Many birdwatchers traveling in December will stop to take part in the nearest count and find themselves in the company of complete strangers, wading through mudflats, climbing cliffs and crossing rivers they didn’t even know existed. Thus, Brooks Atkinson, a New York birdwatcher who used to dabble in drama criticism, was with one of our Santa Barbara groups in 1963. So was retired Navy Captain Elgin Hurlbert with his wife, Wini. They live in Pacific Grove, California, and after taking part in the Monterey Peninsula count, they came down for ours a week later, prior to starting out on a long trailer trip across the country. We lost track of them until more than a year later when the 1964 Christmas count edition of Audubon Field Notes was published, and we found their names listed among the counters both at Bentsen State Park and La Sal Vieja, Texas. A number of birders, wanting to be members just once of a champion count team, have journeyed to Cocoa, Florida, around Christmas time to join Allan Cruickshank’s group, which at one time held the record of 204 species. This record fell in 1966, when Cocoa upped its count to 206 and was tied by San Diego, California.

There are no rules concerning how the prescribed territory is to be covered in a Christmas count. The commonest ways are by car and by foot, but many other modes of transportation have been listed including skis, snowshoes, canoes, horses, airplanes, jeeps, trucks and motorboats. I have bicycled over part of my territory and on one occasion, when sea birds were blanketed by a deep fog, Ken swam three-quarters of a mile in a 52° ocean to get us a pair of horned grebes for our list.

The Audubon Society’s insistence that the Christmas bird count is not a competition seems a bit like claiming that human nature is not human. Of course it’s a competition, even if you’re only competing with your own record of last year or the year before. If you want to go beyond this and compete with Cocoa, Florida, Tomales Bay or San Diego, California, Freeport or Houston, Texas, good luck! You’ll need it.

Old-timers in the field are astonished — some of them disgusted — by the fact that birdwatching has become an accepted form of recreation. Credit for this must go to one man in particular, Roger Tory Peterson. He has made birdwatching respectable and it has made him famous. A fair exchange.