Purple Prose

Distinct lack of finches around here or maybe I just don’t see them. Lots of woodpeckers, tho, and nuthatches and chickadees. My goal for the summer this year is to get the orioles to come to the feeders.

Well, thanks for that earworm! Although of all the ones lurking about ready to burrow in, that one’s fairly benign.

Laughing out loud about the brown streaks, rude or not.

Back now to being finchy here at home, including the glance askance.

Here’s the thing, though. I am rarely quite certain enough about the males to make a loud public declaration on the subject, but if the FEMALES are there, then I can be certain. Because I can tell the females apart easily, so I figure if a female purple finch is hanging around with some pinkish reddish purplish finch, he’s probably an honest to god purple finch. Unless she’s a finchy floozy.

My mum used to keep finches in a huge aviary in her backyard, canaries were in there too. I haven’t the foggiest memory of what they looked like but I remember some were called zebra finches and all the canaries were yellow.
Here in my own yard, according to my bird book, female blackbirds are actually brown and I saw one this morning, hopping up towards the water dish.

Like many more shallow birders, I’m less excited by the drab females. (Check out Wilson’s phalaropes – roles are switched there.) And I ignore juvenile gulls, too. Because I can’t hold details in my hard drive, I can’t immediately recognize many other birds that I’m “supposed” to know, at least not without a check with Cornell or Peterson’s. But, you go, girl. You’ll be a Sarah before you know it!

You’re almost an expert.

I point and scream, “Birds!” and expect applause.

Looking at an entire page of nearly-identical female sparrows in Sibley is almost enough to make me give up on even attempting to ID female birds. Also, the sexes of the American robin and the western scrub jay appear very similar. To me, anyway. And don’t even get me started on hawks and vultures.

Just recently one of our white-crowned sparrows figured out how to hang onto and eat from the sock full of Guizotia abyssinica seeds (which some call thistle, which they’re not, and which some marketing genius decided to call “nyjer”), but when the sparrows aren’t in the way the sock is covered with Lesser goldfinches. They can empty that thing in under a week. A few months ago our first spotted towhee showed up, and seems to have decided to stay. California towhees all the time. Anna’s hummingbird’s year-round, rufous hummingbirds seasonally, passing through. Some years ago Marsha spotted our first hooded oriole hanging upside-down, picking drips off a leaky hummingbird feeder. Now we hang a separate feeder just for them in the summer, which they sometimes share with Bullock’s orioles (which we can identify because they wear eyeliner). I try to keep a steady supply of suet in the yard, and daily tear up a slice of bread and leave that on the lawn with some almonds to make the jays happy. Sometimes crows show up to join the feast, sometimes they don’t, but they don’t seem to be using their size to scare off the little birds — in fact they look very wary. We had a feeder full of mixed seeds, but had no good place to hang it after the crumbling pergola was torn down, so I pitched it rather than keep it in the garage until the smell brought mice. Some birds picked their favorite seeds out carefully, others scooped the stuff they didn’t like gleefully onto the grass, where the mourning doves (and sometimes pigeons) were happy to find it. I wanted to put up an owl house, but I read that one shouldn’t host owls before persuading all of one’s neighbors to not use rodenticides, so, having no desire to go door-to-door persuading our neighbors of anything, I dropped that idea. But owls have moved into the neighborhood somewhere anyway, and I love to hear them calling in the evening.

In his book “Living Mammals of the World” naturalist Ivan Sanderson, in writing about the cane-rat (a.k.a. grasscutter or, in pidgin, cutting-grass) said it makes a noise like that of the Indonesian brain-fever bird. He described it as a sound like a pebble being dropped onto outdoor ice in winter, or “boing.” He wrote that the brain-fever bird is called that because the irregular frequency of the boings can drive a person nuts, and that people in Indonesia sometimes spend hours betting on the interval before the next boing. Yesterday I googled the brain-fever bird and found absolutely nothing in the description or the recorded calls that matched his description. Boing.

I shall end my treatise with “A Wonderful Bird Is The Pelican” by Dixon Lanier Merritt (which I thought was by Hilaire Belloc until I looked it up just now):

A wonderful bird is the pelican,
His bill will hold more than his belican,
He can take in his beak
Enough food for a week
But I’m damned if I see how the helican!