Yes. I admit it. I want bird friends. Personal ones. I run the cafeteria but I still want to sit at the popular table. I plant for them, I leave the plants alone for them. I maintain clean feeders and I put out suet. It probably helps them at least some of the year, and it’s pretty much a mainstay for our winter hummingbirds, but the real reason anyone keeps a bird feeder going is to get closer to the birds. It’s for us, in other words. But we have to be alert that we aren’t endangering them too, spreading diseases, that sort of thing. Nothing is ever simple.
I miss Studley something fierce. Studley Windowson was one hell of a bird. Everyone goes on and on about the crows. We’re all crow experts now. They’re so smart! They know faces! They pass on knowledge! Sure, they’re a solid pound of brainpower. Well, not to take anything away from the crows, but chickadees have all of that packed into a half an ounce. Studley did, for sure. I think people underestimate animals all the time. As a general rule, now, I assume all the birds around here know me better than I know them, and they pay attention, and pass judgment.
So yes, right now I’m trying to suck up to a crow, but he’ll never replace Studley. I hoped with enough mealworms I could get intimate with one of Studley’s kids—she’s hanging out in the hibiscus—but although I’m pretty sure she knows who I am and what I’ve got, she can’t quite close the deal on landing on my hand. So be it. There’s always next year.
Anyway, after a lot of fruitless standing around with a palmful of worms like a big dummy, I gracefully relinquished this year’s chickadee seduction project. I’d stuck a small birdhouse up on our raspberry structure just in case and some chickadees started hauling in furniture right away. Then a crow landed just above the house and the chickadees deedled bloody murder. They were Up. Set. I realized the flaw in my nest box placement right away. Corvids are murder on eggs and nestlings. I think the nest was abandoned but I’m not sure.
Booboo the crow had buddy potential, though, so I turned my attention to him. He’s astonishingly beautiful, close up. Not a feather out of place, and if there’s a combover hiding the spot where his mom keeps spindling him on the head, it’s a good job. I’d hate to think I am drawn only to the beautiful among us, but the truth is, if you love someone, they acquire beauty no matter what. I mean, some people admire those freaky hairless cats even though they look like they should be on a charcuterie tray.
It bugged me, though, that my chickadees—my possible future Studleys—were watching me being intimate with a crow. I felt like I’d been caught out. Because I had. So: should people be feeding crows? Should I google it?
Shit.
Here’s the thing about crows. All over the world, the crow population follows people. People are where it’s at, for crows. You’re not going to find them in the woods. You’re going to find them at the Burger Barn. Ever and always, people are either dropping garbage or dropping dead, and it’s all the same to the crows. They score either way. Wherever there are people, there are crows scouting the property for a new subdivision.
And encouraging crows leads to more crows and less of everyone else. According to one source, the urban crow explosion has led to a paucity of warblers and vireos and other cup-nesters because crows and jays are the main predators of their nestlings. Sure enough, in my yard, the main birds are chickadees, nuthatches, and wrens—all cavity-nesters and a bit more protected from the corvids. And song sparrows and juncoes, that nest in dense shrubbery. Haven’t seen a robin’s nest in years. The house finches are doing okay, but they’ll plunk a nest down in a shoe. We have lots of hummingbirds too and they’re cup-nesters, but anyone bothering a hummer is going to get his eyeball poked out, and that’s a fact.
Marbled murrelets are adorable little birds. And they’re so reclusive no one knew where the hell they nested until recently. Turns out they refurbish a shallow mossy spot on a branch a bazillion feet off the ground, and they’re endangered. Lots of reasons. Mostly it’s because people keep mowing down their big trees. But on top of that, people leave garbage in woodsy campgrounds and that draws in the jay population, and the jays proliferate and predate the little murrelets. I hate people.
But other people are hand-painting little chicken eggs so they look like marbled murrelet eggs, and injecting them with a chemical that makes jays want to throw up, and the jays are starting to steer away.
I love people.
Yeah… I wish that a greater variety of birds would use our nest boxes ( we have 12 around the periphery of our property.) But mostly, it’s house sparrows, and a few wrens in the smaller boxes. There are those who would say, take down the sparrow nests, so someone else could use it. For one thing, ain’t nobody got time for that. These people obviously have nothing else to do, and still have the agility to take down a bunch of nest boxes repeatedly. Still despite all the “junk birds” in my yard (their words, not mine. Some people apparently think of immigrants as “junk people.” There are NO junk people… or birds.) Despite all the “invasives”, we still get all manner of birds in our yard with their young: chickadees, titmice, catbirds, blue jays, cardinals. And crows are a great example of Darwinism. They became more numerous as people became more numerous and slovenly. Also, they are omnivorous. That’s a big thing in survival of the fittest. Picky eaters are just NOT gonna make it. I can only imagine, when we run out of food for humans, how all these vegans and people with special diets are going to make out. Me, I would somehow LEARN to get food on the table, besides cooking something I bought at a store. My husband is a carnivore; if I skip a day serving meat or fish, he’s like “What… are you trying to make a vegetarian out of me?” But. If some sort of Food Apocalypse happened… he couldn’t bring himself to kill an animal for food. He won’t even kill a waterbug on our kitchen floor. He escorts them out of the house. Me? I stomp on them! So, would I kill an animal to get food? I wouldn’t like it, but I suspect I would get used to it.
Too much to respond to here! But I’ll throw this out: an awful big part of what’s destroying our atmosphere and our biodiversity is about raising meat. Just want to remind you that there are many good reasons to be a vegan that don’t involve some kind of preciousness or a sensibility you don’t quite share. (I’m not a vegan. Respect them immensely though and I’d say at this point at least half of my meals are vegetarian at least. Fun fact: my tastes and appetites changed drastically after I started avoiding wheat, and loving all those vegetables was one of the things that happened!)
I’ve had fledglings in the yard before, usually lots of brown fuzz balls that eventually turn into cardinals. Nests, sure there have been two robin nests that got abandoned quickly because it turns out even if the nest is twenty feet off the ground, robins don’t like that you know where their nests are.
This year I noticed a robin flying into my catalpa tree regularly and figured I’d find a nest there. Yes. I immediately avoided any semblance of being interested in the nest.
For some reason there were a ton of catbirds in my back yard. I figured they were there for the bird baths and the blueberries. Probably, but the neighbor advised me there was a nest in the burning bush I was planning to prune.
Yesterday I replenished the water in the baths, went back in the house and two robin fledglings turned up. One needed more bathing than the other and was a bit more stupid, continuing to fluff his wings while I slowly inched the sliding door open and tossed out a mealworm.
He spotted it eventually and circled it a few times before he gave it a few experimental pecks. He kept pecking it and flipping it until it stopped twisting. He tried it out in his mouth a few times and finally swallowed.
I would like a catbird, please. Or a cardinal. Or…well there are a lot of birds I would like to have around. Not willing, however, to move.
Catbirds, it turns out are easy to attract and very tolerant of quiet people. The ones in my yard seem to spend the day bathing (and I mean they get right in there, duck underwater and spray water everywhere) and singing. Obviously they fly off and eat elsewhere as evidenced by the wild cherry pits they poop out in the bath. But now I have blueberries to keep them in the yard.
I sit on the stoop sanding faux eggs or sculpting dinosaurs and they continue coming in to use the baths and sit in the burning bushes.
Chickadees are as bold and will come quite close while I refill feeders, but aren’t ablutionists like the catbirds.
I haven’t put out hummingbird feeders this year because I’m poor and the cheap ones I had finally died. But I had a few experiences of them getting uncomfortably close while I refilled the feeders. I had one hovering an inch from my eye. Their beautiful, but I don’t relish having one try to nectar from my tear duct.
I’m presently having an affair of the heart with a ‘porch lizard’. I swear it’s the same one from last year, that would lounge on a little cement square that I inadvertently left near the ‘porch pond’. This little Spiny Lizard eats ants like candy, and for that I am very grateful. Yes, the little dickens looks at me when I talk to it, and when I told it to get on the cement stone, it did, just like I pretend I trained it 😉
Speaking as a trained-cat owner, a lot of training is more anticipating.
Lizards can be great fun. I tried to import them into my yard, but they found something missing and left.
I was doing field surveys for the state at an abandoned WWI munitions factory, just remains of concrete floors and crawl spaces, now overgrown with scrub oaks, pitch pines and thorns when I found two fence swifts, a male and female sitting on a wall about a foot apart. I grabbed them, showed them to a grad student so that they could identify and sex them from a distance in the future and then returned them to where I thought they’d been just a few minutes before.
The female (as if she hadn’t just been grabbed) woke up out of her capture paralysis and attacked the male! She chased him six inches, stopped and marched back to what was obviously her place and resumed her contemplation of the infinite.
“I hate people.”
“I love people.”
I understand that. I hope the murrelets survive. And I hope the chickadee learns to trust you.
Me too, river, me too!
I always thoroughly enjoy your sojourns.
And, I learned, thanks to you again, a whole lot of new things at my age of 87 that I never knew anything about (dangling preposition) before, namely everything about crows (and it’s so much fun to learn new things at my age!!!). In fact, I went to Google (what did we ever do before Google) and read all about crows. Now I am “crowing” about my new-found knowledge!!
We were told in New Jersey (I live in the state of South Jersey where we speak and prononce correct English) that we should take down our bird feeders because of the bird flu. I looked that up (again using Google) and found contradictory information about bird feeders, song birds and the avian flu. What’s the ture story on that??
Our backyard is a true habitat. We even have box turtles and a self-built fish pond that is ecologically balanced with fish, frogs and pond plants surviving year-round because of a fountain that runs all year long so that it keeps a hole open in the ice during the winter months to supply oxygen. And, there are still forests accessible in our neighborhood. And few people in our proximity use chemicals in their yards. Yet, there has been an alarming decrease in song birds and butterfies. It grieves us!!
I do challenge you on the notion that hummingbirds may attack eyes. My understanding is that they will investigate forward-looking eyes, but will not attack eyes. Again, I searched that out in “Mr Google.” Can you point me to any relatively authoritative reference that bears out that hummingbirds will attack eyes?
Fondly signing out, Pete Speth, MD
No sir I cannot, but I can point you to fifteen years of Murrmurrs posts that authoritatively assert the powers of hyperbole, and also it is true that hummingbirds occasionally impale each other and it rarely works out for either combatant! You are welcome to dangle your preposition here anytime.
PS I do not know about bird flu and feeders, but in many areas it’s recommended to take down the feeders because the birds are infecting each other with various bird ailments that result in blindness or worse (for the birds). I try to keep an eye out for signs of infected eyes in my finches and our local Audubon is a good source for local information. Sometimes they recommend we take down feeders temporarily.
I loved the saga of Studley, and shed a few tears when he disappeared from your life. My close encounters with birds are not of the friendly sort; they usually involve run-ins with the f*king Canada Geese that gather in our yard. Even the parakeet I had as a child was a bastard. Guess I’m not cut out to be a bird whisperer.
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