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A Burning Question Beyond a Bird’s-eye View

By on October 3, 2018 in BirdWords
Osprey Covering Young

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?

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Cowbirds Pose a Challenge

By on July 3, 2018 in BirdWords
Brown-headed Cowbird

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

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.

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If Birds Could Vote

By 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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It’s Parenting Season

By on April 28, 2018 in BirdWords
Black-headed Grosbeak Male

Black-headed Grosbeak Male

It’s spring, and the busier the birds and bees are, the better it is for all of us. Part of that busy-ness has to be raising offspring.

Birds take on rearing their children with all the variety and flair of feathers. Many young birds are brought up in two-parent nests; others just by mom, some just by dad; some are raised by foster parents; still others are grouped into “it takes a village” scenarios. There are numerous child-rearing styles. But no young bird prospers without substantial parenting in some form.

Black-headed Grosbeak Male Feeding Young

Black-headed Grosbeak Male Feeding Young

Billions of aspiring avian moms and dads are in this child-raising season right now. Most songbird pairs share their nesting duties. Typically, the female incubates and turns the eggs, and quietly chirps to the young, who learn her voice before they hatch. Males in some species spell their mates on the nest, but more often do guard duty, dive-bombing or distracting predators. Both parents feed the hatchlings, hunting down hundreds of insects and making scores of feeding visits to the nest every day. When the fledglings take wing, the male often shepherds them, while mom perhaps begins a second or even third nest.

Black-headed Grosbeak Female

Black-headed Grosbeak Female

Black-headed grosbeaks, colorful, big-billed birds, take the sharing of nest duties a notch or two farther than most species. When a dangerous jay or neighborhood cat approaches, the female readily joins her mate in harassing the predator, attempting to drive it from their vulnerable young. On his part, the male, with rare egalitarianism, undertakes an even share of egg incubation and nestling-warming. More noisily than his mate, he nests with what seems foolhardy flair; he sings loudly right from the nest, as if he can’t contain his proud papa-hood.

Black-headed Grosbeak Juvenile

Black-headed Grosbeak Juvenile

Unike the precocial ready-to-go chicks of turkeys, ducks and quail, hatchling grosbeaks are altricial—blind, naked, and helpless. Within two weeks, however, under their parents’ relentless feeding and guardianship, the babies are full grown and feathered, ready to try their wings.

Like so many of our nesting birds, grosbeaks are travelers, wintering in Mexico and nesting as far north as British Columbia. Like robins, they have adapted effectively to suburbs and parks. They prefer to nest near water where both trees and brush offer cover. The females weave loose nests, usually on outer branches no higher than a second story window. Both the male and female sing profusely, a tune and tone frequently likened to that of a tipsy robin. His song is especially loud and clear, waltzing through the woods any time of day.

These singers of the American West dine on seeds, insects, and fruit, happily foraging high above us mere walklings. They are, however, happy to descend to our level to empty our feeders of sunflower seeds. There we can enjoy their burnt orange plumage and oddly hefty bills.

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Black Phoebes Make Doughty Neighbors

By on February 24, 2018 in BirdWords
Black Phoebe

Black Phoebe photo courtesy of David Bogener

Winter is not traditionally mosquito-buzzing or cricket-singing season. The bugs lie low, not with summer music but tucked mutely into a puddle or under a log or leaf, usually as eggs or larvae or pupae. They wait for the revolving Earth to point us sunward, waking them up and rousing the crescendo of photosynthesis that prospers life seasonally all over the planet’s surface.

Songbirds, of course, know these seasons at an instinctual level. Our summer birds head south to sunnier latitudes not to keep warm but to keep in grub. Flycatchers, who snag six-legged prey right out of the air for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, are particularly reactive to insect dormancy. Customarily, they enjoy Acapulco or similar resort destinations this time of year.

But there’s always a nonconformist. Come drenching winter rains, pounding hail, hard frosts, and coats of snow, one little flycatcher finds a way to live through winter right here in Northern California. The black phoebe is one of our pluckiest neighbors.

Black Phoebe with Spider

They are no shrinking violets, nor much vegetative at all. Although scarcely the length of your handspan, and dressed in buttoned-down black-and-white, they engage life with redoubtable effervescence. They abundantly sing out their name, phoe-be, phoe-be! as if announcing nature’s vitality on even a frosty morning. They fly-catch when flies—or moths or mosquitoes—are few and far between, and expand their hunt to snatch prey from blades of grass or the surface of ponds. They flick their tails incessantly as if life simply requires dancing. They wear just a hint of a punk ‘do in their headfeathers, just enough to keep more sedate heads wondering.

And they not only survive, they flourish. When spring comes with readier food supplies, pairs reunite, and the male takes his mate on a tour of possible nest sites, fluttering enticingly under bridges or shady eves, or in the cleft of a tree-sized boulder. She chooses a spot and builds a nest, a half-bowl of mud plastered to the selected vertical surface—possibly refurbishing a site that the pair used in prior years.

Black Phoebe Nest

Phoebes defend their turf, chasing off other insectivores and reserving the local winged protein for themselves and their nestlings. But plucky is not foolhardy. They will generally flee a hunting hawk. Still, they are known to harass a fox or cat, and have been observed chasing jays thrice their size to protect their helpless young.

Black phoebes have done well with people. As long as water is nearby, with its provision of insects for eating and mud for nesting, human development has multiplied the vertical surfaces that make continuing life possible for this hardy neighbor of ours. Keep an eye and an ear out: there is likely a clear “phoe-be, phoe-be” near you!

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