Author Archive | Dan Greaney

There’s Gold in Them Thar Hills!

By Dan Greaney on October 27, 2018 in BirdWords

Golden-crowned Sparrow

Alas, it seems the miners of 160 years ago missed out on most of it. The Golden State holds so much more amber wealth and beauty than just the lustrous mineral.

Golden hues deck our world liberally, often with ephemeral but recurring glory and ache. They join with pinks and grays to brush our skies at dawn and dusk. In spring they gleam from the soft petals of poppies and the burry stripes of the bees who visit them, and the sweet honey that those two together produce; in fall, the hills and fields of dried grass, especially under sun after rain, glow goldenrod, and maples and oaks effuse geysers of leaves radiant with mustard and ochre and burnished apricot; blonde cider flows from foothill orchards, and under foothill streams trout flash their brilliance. Gold shines in the eyes of blackbirds and eagles, and in bright braids from sun-dappled rivers and lakes; and this time of year, every year, from the optimistic caps of brown little birds, like something hopeful in the miner’s pan.

Adult Golden-crowned Sparrow

Golden-crowned sparrows are mostly a camouflage of browns and grays, perfect for hiding in under-brush shadows. But like so much of life, they have their shine, too—just a modest dash of color, for them. Adults wear their golden crowns offset with a circlet of black. Young birds sport a smaller, paler spot of yellow, bordered not by black but a nondescript earth tone, like last year’s leaves. Some observers note that the pinkish bill of young birds goes gray with age, starting with the upper mandible.

First Winter Golden-crowned Sparrow

These sparrows have been northward throughout the summer months. Denizens of the west, they nested from northern British Columbia up into Alaska, as far as the Arctic Circle, where, tucked among grasses and shrubs in boggy meadows, they wove a dense cup lined with feathers or moose hair, perhaps just above spring snow but most often on the ground. They raised a clutch or two with about four eggs in each.

First Winter Golden-crowned Sparrow

Now both parents and fledglings have flown south, centering their winter range right here in northern California. They can be seen at backyard feeders, although they are generally wilder and scarcer than their racier, more numerous cousins, the white-crowned sparrows.

White-crowned Sparrow

Like many sparrows, golden-crowns have a beautiful voice. In our brushy yards and hillsides they can be heard on sunny winter mornings, singing a clear Oh, dear, me! that manages to be both woebegone and beautiful.

Studies on these birds are few, but the sparrows are part of recent measurements of mass bird migrations. Weather radar, with increasing precision, has in the last several years harvested information on not just storm clouds but on clouds of birds. The researchers report spring migrations over the US/Canada border at about 2.6 billion birds. The return trip, coming south in autumn with a new season of surviving fledglings, numbers about 4 billion.

Those nesting seasons are immeasurably valuable. They keep the gold recurring in California.

A Burning Question Beyond a Bird’s-eye View

By Dan Greaney on October 3, 2018 in BirdWords

Osprey Adult Shading Young

Something’s wrong, and the birds can’t figure it out. Day to day and year to year, it’s hotter. The birds go about their daily lives as they always have, and their days are too few, their minds too scripted, to even see that there’s a change. But they pant more. Vigor wanes, and they sing less. Rather than snuggling down to warm their eggs and chirp gently to the young inside, they stand over the eggs to shade them. Nestlings die from dehydration and heat exhaustion.

And then the fires hit. Most nestlings had already fledged this year, so at least for the mobile songbirds, and probably for most of the quail, turkeys, grouse, and roadrunners, too, escape was possible—a little by foot, and a lot by flight. Of course not all survived the firestorms, but Shasta Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation reported a single avian burn victim, a Great-horned Owl with scalded feet.

Carr Fire Burned House

Where did they fly? People who lost their homes might be able to tell you: wherever they could. But housing grows short. Even where humane values are diligently exercised there is upheaval. And birds are not particularly humane. They are birds, after all, not people.

Even with their best quail-like fellowship, they must crowd into smaller areas where there is still water to drink and vegetation to support the insects they feed on. But not all those places are seasonally ready to support them. The berries may not have ripened, and the fall salmon are not yet decaying along the riverbanks. Disease spreads more readily.

American and Lesser Goldfinches

Then comes the smoke. Most birds don’t live that long, so they may be protected from longer-term ailments like lung cancer. But like children they breathe quickly, so are probably more prone to asthma and bronchial infections, and may suffer similarly with reduced lung, heart, and brain functions.

People try to cope. We don N95 masks, or pretend we’re too rugged or bully to need them. Homeowners negotiate with insurance companies. The Chamber of Commerce and the EDC advertise business relief loans.

Birdhouse In Burn

The feathered things cope more primitively. They fly. They cannot make complex plans, or contemplate next year, or the likelihood of more heat, or the reality that their homes and livelihoods are gone up in smoke, leaving skeletons of trees and dead ash on the ground that once sustained them; or consider the years and generations following, and how the hundreds of thousands of acres burned and the millions more wilting in heat and drought will change resources for food or housing or the animal joy of singing.

Birds don’t have the capacity to grasp or modify the underlying conditions that cause suffering—to address resources with a deliberate eye to health, wildlife, a sustainable economy, climate change, and general well-being. They can’t discern the world beyond their own visceral and short-term needs. The burning question is, can we?

Redding’s Miracle of the Swallows

By Dan Greaney on July 28, 2018 in Birds, BirdWords

Cliff Swallow photo courtesy David Bogener

Late July, and you may see no more of Cliff Swallows than their orange rumps, heading south.

For a couple of months they have eddied around North State bridges like summer snowflakes. But now nesting is done. Roomfuls of flying insects have been caught and turned into feathers and warm heartbeats. Winter remains distant, so young birds and vagrant souls may roam with no sense of urgency.

Cliff Swallows In Flight

But the flocks will tend south, to the clime that history tells them is home. For cliff swallows this is deep into South America, a 6000 mile flight to where they may be seen hawking insects over Argentinian grasslands.

Cliff Swallow In Flight

Throughout most of North America, these are the swallows that build their gourd-shaped nests of mud, cemented under eaves, sills, and bridges. In Redding, they have long colonized the old Monolith at Turtle Bay. With recent developments, house sparrows have taken over those nests, and the swallows have moved to both the Sundial and Highway 44 bridges.

Cliff Swallow at Nest

Architecture like the Sundial Bridge is a boon to cliff swallows. The bridge provides the ceilings and cornices where the birds can construct their nests beyond reach of terrestrial predators. The shoreline provides mud that the swallows can carry, one beakload at a time, to form their crèches. The river also hosts its salmon-fest of insects, which the swirling clouds of swallows catch in flight to feed their young.

Similar conditions made them and the Mission of San Juan Capistrano famous a century ago through the legend created by Fr. O’Sullivan, and recorded in his book Capistrano Nights:

One day, while walking through town, Father O’Sullivan saw a shopkeeper, broomstick in hand, knocking down the conically shaped mud swallow nests that were under the eaves of his shop. The birds were darting back and forth through the air squealing over the destruction of their homes.

“What in the world are you doing?” O’Sullivan asked.

“Why, these dirty birds are a nuisance and I am getting rid of them!” the shopkeeper responded.

“But where can they go?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” he replied, slashing away with his pole. “But they’ve no business here, destroying my property.”

Father O’Sullivan then said, “Come on swallows, I’ll give you shelter. Come to the Mission. There’s room enough there for all.”

The very next morning, Father O’Sullivan discovered the swallows busy building their nests outside Father Junípero Serra’s Church.

Since then, generations of tourists have marveled at the annual “Miracle of the Swallows.” Indeed, when 1990’s renovation cleaned out the nests and chased the swallows off, Capistrano undertook substantial efforts to coax the birds back.

Here in the North State our development has created our own “Miracle of the Swallows.” Their nesting success allows the hope that we will see them swirling here again each spring!

Cowbirds Pose a Challenge

By Dan Greaney on July 3, 2018 in BirdWords

Brown-headed Cowbird Male photo courtesy David Bogener

Some folks have difficulty maintaining a charitable attitude toward cowbirds, and it’s an understandable challenge.

The birds aren’t especially ugly or messy or anything like that. You can see them herding with other blackbirds. They’re the slightly smaller ones—the females a muted mouse-gray, the males a glossy black with the brown heads that give them their name: brown-headed cowbirds.

Flapping overhead they cry a distinctive zeet-zeet-zeeet, rising on the third syllable. Or you may see several males at a treetop, chortling in the morning sun, or on a park lawn bowing to the females in spread-winged courtship.

Brown-headed Cowbirds in Courtship by Jan Malik CC

Formerly they followed bison, feeding on grains and insects that the grazers stirred up. Now they often associate with cattle, where they are joined by other blackbirds.

But bison were ramblers, and cowbirds wandered with them; and wandering is not conducive to child-rearing. Cowbirds adapted.

They learned to watch for available homes where they could leave their eggs for stable fostering. In as little as an open minute, a mother cowbird can lay her egg in another’s nest, preferably one where incubation has not yet begun. She may quickly devour an existing egg there, or, if some nestlings have already hatched, toss them out to die, promoting a new nesting attempt by the host with her own egg as the oldest. The cowbird story grows no less brutish from there.

House Finch nest with Brown-headed Cowbird Egg and Hatched Cowbird Chick

Often laid into nests with smaller eggs, cowbirds usually hatch first and bigger than their foster siblings. Scarcely functional themselves, they may, like their mothers, overtly push or yank their unfeathered nestmates over the edge to certain death. This behavior, however, is rare; cowbirds grow most quickly along with a couple nestmates. Their collective begging seems to motivate parental food deliveries, and the cowbird then uses its dominating bulk and gaping red mouth to gather the lion’s share. Its out-sized appetite can leave the smaller nestlings undernourished and weakling.

Brown-headed Cowbird being fed by Red-eyed Vireo

Brown-headed Cowbird chick being fed by Red-eyed Vireo

It’s a problem in the nest, and becomes a problem in whole bird communities. Today’s cattle and deforested land are more widespread than bison and prairies were, and cowbirds have expanded their range accordingly. In new lands they have found new species to raise their young. Many of the new hosts end up raising just a cowbird. The nest parasites survive; the hosts decline.

Brown-headed Cowbird chick being fed by Chickadee

Freed of the work of child-rearing, a cowbird can lay three dozen eggs or more every year, each in a separate nest. Some host species do not distinguish the cowbird egg from their own. Indeed, many cowbirds seem to specialize in particular hosts, mimicking the coloring of exactly those eggs.

Song Sparrow nest with Cowbird egg

Many species do, however, recognize the parasite egg. Larger birds are sometimes able to discard or puncture cowbird eggs and successfully raise their own. But this resistance is discouraged by cowbirds’ “mafia” behavior. Adult cowbirds are known to pillage nests from which their eggs have been removed.

Smaller birds avoid such bullying by being too small to throw the foreign egg out. Warblers often abandon their invaded nest and build a new one over it. But even if this second attempt is successful, it wastes springtime and reduces the number of clutches of their own that the warblers can hatch.

This apparent cowbird thuggery is, of course, not truly cruel, or rational or immoral at all; it is instinctive, and students of life can respect nature’s blind cleverness in devising its different ways to survive. However, overly successful parasitism is fatal, and although cowbirds have extended their range, their numbers have begun to follow the declines of their host species.

If Birds Could Vote

By Dan Greaney on May 26, 2018 in BirdWords

Greater White-fronted Goose with Ducks

Birds can’t vote, and they shouldn’t. They don’t study the issues.

If they could, however, they probably wouldn’t get too worked up over much of it. They mostly embrace the migrant lifestyle, so immigration isn’t a concern. Cutting Medicare and Social Security to fund tax cuts wouldn’t bother them; after all, they’re not slated to get Medicare or Social Security anyway. As for civil rights in general—well, people may aspire to things like kindness and decency, but birds, honestly, are more known for things like hen-pecking than human compassion or civility.

But if they could understand the issues rather than only suffer them, there’s one area in which birds would likely vote as a fairly united bloc. They’d vote for a healthy environment.

Birds would vote to test chemicals for toxicity. Like humans, birds start gathering toxins in utero. Adults in the US contain over 250 synthetic chemicals, new to the world, in our tissues and fluids, entering us from food, furniture, carpet, clothing, and environmental effluent, through our mouths, lungs, and skin; 70,000 more synthetics are on the market, and we imbibe them in ever-increasing dosages. Current law requires testing for carcinogenic effects only if there is evidence of potential harm, and the EPA is given only 90 days to find that harm. Cancer doesn’t work that fast. But if birds could understand the issue, they would object to this bird-brained process and the 80 million of their feathered kin killed by poisons each year. They would likely vote for synthetic chemicals to be held off the market until there was reasonable assurance that they were safe.

Birds would vote for clean water, too. They need it for healthy food supplies, drinking, and for places to swim. But government powers are reverting to Cleveland-River-on-Fire policies, trying to allow more toxic discharges into water supplies, redefining pesticides as nonpollutants, discontinuing monitoring of toxic discharges so that voters are less aware of the poisoning, and suppressing existing studies that, as the White House recently noted, would be a “public relations nightmare.” Birds with understanding would recognize that gutters run to creeks, to rivers, to all of us, and would want to protect all the waters of the US. They would know that we—birds, people, and trees, now and for our children—rely on clean water.

Clean air would also be a priority. Birds process oxygen even more rapidly than incumbent congressmen do, and those incumbents’ efforts to allow vehicles and industry to dump more mercury, benzene, and nitrous oxides into the air will most emphatically harm the lungs of fast breathers like birds and children.

Birds would also seek to protect grasslands and forests from development and destructive extraction practices. In the last 50 years, American forests have lost a quarter of their birds, and grasslands half. Past Farm Bill provisions have shown promise in curtailing habitat loss, but the current bill in congress allows increased toxic dumping.

And perhaps most emphatically, birds would vote to curb the craziness of climate change. They would recognize that the problems are devastating, with most of their kin expected to lose most of their seasonal range within the lifetime of today’s children; and that there is no good reason to exacerbate droughts, fires, and floods when clean fuels are available if people choose them.

The birds might recognize that they cannot make lifestyle changes or government changes, but they might hope that their more intelligent North American companions will.

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Author Archive | Dan Greaney