Stoopid Birds!

I often hear people make comments along the lines of: “Today a bird flew right into my window. Stoopid bird!” or “Stoopid ducks - why are they crossing a busy highway?”

But what’s really stupid - or maybe “silly” or “surprising” or even “horrifying” is the better word - is that we as humans have the expectation that wild birds should figure out our unnatural human world and make accommodations for it. In the last few decades, we seem to reason, wild birds should have evolved an understanding of reflective windows in houses and how dangerous they are. And they certainly should have figured out what a highway is and how to avoid it, even if it is inconveniently located between a prime nesting spot and a desired body of water.

"Barn Swallow," by Linda Tanner CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

In fact, birds make surprising accommodations to our human world and its infringement on their own. In The Bluebird Effect (one of my favorite books!), naturalist and artist Julie Zickefoose writes that in multiple incidents recorded in the U.S. and Japan, barn swallows have figured out how to open the sliding glass doors in big-box stores and warehouses. They identify the motion-activated electric eye unit and hover in front of it until the doors slide open. Then the birds quickly fly in (or out) before the doors close. Successive generations learn the technique from their parents, such that a Home Depot in Maplewood, Minnesota, has had a barn swallow colony return every year to nest inside the store since 2000!

"Put Me Back! House Finch Greets the World,"
by John Flannery CC BY-SA 2.0

And this article and video summarize a recent experiment by Mexican scientists seeking to explain why urban house finches have the odd behavior of stuffing discarded cigarette butts into their nests. The scientists theorize that it’s a pest-control technique: the cigarette butts ward off blood-sucking ticks that otherwise infest their nests. It turns out that nicotine has some anti-parasite properties.

Despite these happy stories, overall our human world is changing the bird world much too fast for the birds to keep up. Bird numbers are declining - alarmingly fast for some species - because we’re clearing their habitat, poisoning the insects they eat and the water they drink, interfering with their migration by putting windmills in their path and lighting up the night sky, and so on. (For more information, see the 2016 State of North America's Birds report.)

Even the clever little house finches haven’t yet caught on that those discarded cigarette butts - one of the world’s greatest sources of environmental pollution, by the way - are causing genetic damage to their chicks by interfering with cell division. But doesn’t that make us humans, the ones who throw out the cigarette butts in the first place, the stoopid ones?

The Seven Bird Gifts of Christmas

On Christmas Eve, I can’t help but notice that most of the gifts given in “The Twelve Days of Christmas” are birds:

Seven swans a-swimming

Six geese a-laying

Five golden rings

Four calling birds

Three French hens

Two turtle doves

And a partridge in a pear tree. 

Wait, you say! Golden rings aren’t birds. Well, not a lot is known about the origins of the song, but many speculate that, in keeping with the other kinds of gifts mentioned, the five rings may refer to rings on a bird, such as the ring-necked pheasant, or perhaps to the “goldspinks," which shows up in an old Scottish version, a reference to the goldfinch. Another clarification: “calling” birds is a more recent term. Older versions refer to “collie birds,” which are blackbirds (think black like coal), or “canary birds.” French hens are basically chickens.

Xavier Romero-Frias, "Twelve Days of
Christmas Song Poster," CC BY-SA 3.0

This very old song probably originated as a children’s memory and forfeit game, where one child keeps advancing until making a mistake in trying to remember all the words, and then the next child gets a turn. Since the song is about Advent gift giving (probably from a lover to his love), this implies that at the time of its origin birds were considered among the very best gifts possible. One can imagine that birds represented all kinds of ideas that a lover would wish to convey to his beloved: beauty (swans), fertility (geese laying eggs), nourishment (pheasants and hens), cuddling (turtle doves), and romantic love (partridge, with its heart-shaped breast). It also shows the agricultural base of the context, calling up an image of maids a-milking (perhaps another nod to fertility), surrounded by farm animals such as geese and chickens.

In short, this silly song provides another example of how we invoke animals as symbols in our relationships to one another.

So Merry Christmas to you all. Thank you for the gift you give me of reading my blog! In return, I give you this old video of a wonderful parody of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” by the a cappella group Straight No Chaser.

Hummingbirds of Winter

It’s a wonderful feeling when I find out fascinating new information about nature.

Calliope Hummingbird of Lafitte's Cove
by Dan Pancamo CC BY-SA 2.0

This week it has come to my attention that people see hummingbirds in winter here in central Maryland, where I live. Not the ruby-throated hummingbirds that we have in the summer, but calliope and rufous hummingbirds from the West. They should be in Mexico but instead end up in Maryland and other places on the East coast.

It turns out that lots of people around here leave their feeders out during the winter for the hummingbirds. There are all kinds of tricks online about how to keep your feeders from freezing, for example here.

And then there’s this interesting fact: when they can’t find nectar, hummingbirds eat insects. They can pick them off of leaves or grab them in midair, which is known as “hawking”. In fact, while hummingbirds fatten up on nectar to begin their migration South, they fuel up on insects to begin their migration North.

I spend hours each week obsessively watching birds, reading about birds, and thinking about birds. Hummingbirds are some of my favorites. So how could all of this knowledge have escaped my attention until now? I think the answer lies in the source of my information: other, more experienced birders, who have been feeding and watching birds for much longer than I have. What I actually get to see in the world of birds and nature depends on where I am and when. What I read about birds and nature is equally serendipitous. There’s so much to know about nature, and that’s what makes it so endlessly fascinating. It’s not surprising that foragers, human societies that rely for subsistence on hunting and gathering in their natural environment, require years of training and experience to become good hunters and gatherers. It’s also not surprising that they depend on more experienced elders to teach them. Why should I be any different?

In case you like to feed hummingbirds, or would like to try, consider winter feeding. And keep in mind these important “don’ts”:

• Don’t dye the water red! Hummingbirds are attracted to red flowers (like those on feeders), but they couldn’t care less what color the nectar is. Red dye is harmful to hummingbirds.

• Don’t use commercial nectar! It is full of preservatives and dyes, which are harmful to hummers just like they are to humans. It’s cheaper and safer to make your own nectar. Boil one part sugar in four parts water, cool, and serve. Use regular ole white sugar, not honey or any other sugar substitute.

Mexican Long-Tongued Bat at Hummingbird
Feeder by Ken Cosma CC BY 2.0

• Don’t worry that keeping your feeders out will make hummers stay around when they should be migrating! They know what to do and when to do it, and that decision has to do with their internal clock rather than the availability of food. You should keep your feeders out as long as you’re seeing hummingbirds.

• Don’t be surprised if other critters find their way to your feeder!

The Extinction of a Tool User

There are many reasons to prevent the extinction of species, and one of them is that we have a lot still to learn about plants and animals. My last blog covered three species that have been brought back from the brink of extinction thanks to concerted human effort. Cross your fingers with me that the same can be done for this fascinating one.

U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

The Hawaiian crow (Corvus hawaiiensis) - known in Hawaiian as the ʻalalā - is a tool user. It can clutch a stick in its bill and use it to dig food out of a crevice. That already puts it in a unique group of bird species that have been found to use tools in this way. But the Hawaiian crow is a bit exceptional even within this group: it not only uses tools, it manufactures them. The crow can pry off a twig and shape it into just the tool it needs. Watch the process in this video: the crow realizes it needs a tool, makes the tool, and then figures out the best place to use it!

Unfortunately, Hawaiian crows became extinct from the wild in 2002 as a result of disease, predation, habitat encroachment, and shooting by farmers who saw them as a threat to their crops. They have been bred in captivity since then in hopes of reintroducing them to the wild. The success of reintroduction is not assured, especially since rising temperatures have allowed mosquitoes that carry bird malaria to thrive in the higher altitudes of Hawaii where the crows once lived. Nevertheless, six fledglings will be released into the wild this November, and you can read about and follow the process here.

There are many reasons to care about the Hawaiian crow and its survival, and one of them is that the species can help us understand something very interesting about the relationship between humans and nature. One of the many early assumptions about the differences between humans and animals was that only humans use tools. Over the last few decades, scientists have discovered tool use among a diverse set of animals: from sea otters that use stones to open abalone shells to bonobos that use leaves as umbrellas to elephants that use branches to swat flies. There is much to learn about the parts of the brain that allow such complex abilities as tool use and when, where, and how tool use is taught rather than instinctive.

And for those of us who aren’t scientists, there is the simple sense of awe that comes from learning what animals can do and how much like us they can be. I hope someday to watch a video of wild Hawaiian crows using tools and showing us their genius, adaptability, and determination.

Peace, Love, and Dinner

My husband and I are out walking. Mourning doves fly up into the air, startled. I exclaim with delight at their beauty and soft alarm calls. He lifts a pretend shotgun and starts shooting them. I envision them canoodling in love and peace, the perfect example of monogamous bird love. He imagines them stewing in a sauce of garlic and herbs.

Doves symbolize peace, love, dinner, and lots of other things, depending on the person or the society. Doves figure heavily in religious symbolism around the world. Goddesses in ancient societies, such as Aphrodite, were symbolized by the dove. The dove gained an important meaning in Judaic lore when Noah released a dove to guide the ark to land after the flood. Christianity applied the dove as symbol to both Jesus and the Holy Spirit, among other things. Perhaps because of its status in religion, the dove became a symbol of peace in European culture. It is symbolic of fidelity and fecundity in Chinese arts and holds spiritual meanings in Indian culture. And expressions such as “lovey-dovey” in English show that somewhere along the way doves became symbols of romantic love as well. How can doves mean so many different things to different people and cultures? Are there any aspects of the actual lives of doves that may have leant themselves to these meanings?

Perhaps it is their look. Most doves around the world are smooth and round, with muted colors: a wonderful gray-brown with shades of rose, or pure white, or light pink or orange. Maybe these colors make them seem peaceful and mild. However, tufted titmice, juncos, and house finches come in varying shades of gray and pinky-grey and white, yet I have never heard them mentioned as symbols of peace.

Perhaps it is their soft cooing, which seems gentle or even mournful. But a similar low hooting on the part of the great horned owl is cast as creepy or ominous or even wise, not sweet or gentle or mournful.

Perhaps it is the close companionship of mated pairs. Males and females are always together, and they mate in much of the world for the entire year (rather than in a limited breeding season, like most birds). Maybe we simply see them displaying mating behavior more often than other birds, which makes them seem more loving. Their young accompany them for a while after fledging, meaning that they are often in small groups. But of how many birds can we say the same?

Even their “prey” meaning to hunters doesn’t make a great deal of sense. They’re larger than many birds, but not as large as many others, so they don’t provide a significant amount of meat. They can fly fast, which I suppose makes them an interesting challenge for hunters, but can’t many other birds fly fast as well? In fact, one of the concerns of those opposed to dove hunting is that hunters may in fact be shooting other birds with much the same general size and shape, which suggests doves aren’t terribly unique as sport.

In thinking about all of this, I would like to suggest a simple explanation: it is their ubiquity, both in time and in space, that makes doves so meaningful. Doves are one of the oldest bird species, older than the songbirds. They are a family of birds (Columbidae) that is spread over almost every part of the world, thrives in just about every type of ecosystem, and includes over 300 species. In other words, there are lots of them around, and there always have been. Human societies have had plenty of time and opportunity to attach meanings to doves. And since doves are familiar to humans all over the globe (unlike most bird families), it makes sense that some of those meanings would come to be shared. Perhaps one religious group had the idea to represent a deity through the symbol of a dove, and that same representation spread to another through syncretism. Migration and shared cuisines could have brought the idea that doves are good to eat from one continent to another.

At the end of the day, doves are birds, doing bird things: breeding, searching for food, calling to each other, flying through the air. That they are the carriers of symbolic meaning says much more about us humans than it does about them.

In Praise of (Bird) Fathers

As Father’s Day approaches, obviously I can’t help but think about dads. There are all kinds of dads out there: wonderful dads, active dads, cold and distant dads, up close and personal dads, mean dads, deadbeat dads, disciplinarian dads, laidback dads - you name it!

There are also all kinds of bird dads. But, through our cultural lens, we often project our expectations of human dad behavior onto the bird world. For example, when describing birds in the process of nesting behaviors - building the nest, sitting on the nest, feeding the young’uns after they hatch - I always hear people use the pronoun “she.” In many of our minds, the human parent doing the most to manage the household and take care of babies is the mom. Sometimes our projections lead us to get quite heated about perceived fatherly neglect in the bird world. The other day I was reading in online forums about people’s experiences with killdeer nests in their yard, and one irate woman noted that the female killdeer sat on the nest 24 hours a day while her “no good husband” didn’t bother to stick around.

Fascinating, huh? Not only are we characterizing bird mating behaviors as marriage, but we’re also judging bird morality based on whether or not their actions conform to our human expectations of gender and marriage!

Once you start looking at bird behavior, you might be surprised to find that dads are integral to the nesting and caregiving processes of most bird species. They don’t just love ‘em and leave ‘em, as we may be tempted to think. Let’s take the example of the killdeer, assumed by this one woman to be a deadbeat dad. Killdeer pairs mate for life, they go around marking out potential nesting sites together, and they take pretty equal turns sitting on the nest. I know from experience with a killdeer nest in our garden that the male is much more aggressive about chasing potential threats away from the nest than the female. After the first nest hatches, the parents take the chicks away to a safer place and share the responsibility of caring for them until they can fly within about 30 days.

The northern cardinal dad is a devoted caregiver after the female incubates the eggs, feeding her and the chicks in the nest until they fledge. While the female sits on a second nest, the male continues to feed and look after the older, fledged young, while also feeding the female and guarding their territory. By the time the second set of eggs hatch, the older siblings are ready to live on their own, and the dad can turn his attention to the next brood of nestlings. It’s hard to find a male cardinal at the end of the breeding season who isn’t exhausted, with bare patches and bedraggled feathers, badly in need of a molt.

Songbird males can also serve as mentors to younger males. I’ve just recently learned how a chipping sparrow male learns to sing. He doesn’t learn from his dad. Instead, when chipping sparrows return to their breeding grounds a years after a young male hatches, he seeks out an older male in the territory he wishes to inhabit and learns that male’s song. An older male will not tolerate another adult male in his territory, but he allows this new young fellow to move in and learn his song, even knowing that that younger male may eventually seek to take over his territory.

Of course, a few birds are, in fact, deadbeat dads. Since they are so cute and beloved, you may be disappointed to know that the ruby-throated hummingbird male is one of the most neglectful. He flies around in all his ruby-throated glory and mates with one, two, three, or however many females he can find around his territory. After that, a female builds a nest, lays (typically) two eggs, and raises the chicks, all on her own. There is some probability that the male does allow her to feed in his territory without fighting her off, as he would another male, but that’s the extent of his care for her or the young. By the time the young hatch, the male has often left the territory. And then guess what happens: as soon as they’re old enough, her young will start fighting with the poor female over food sources in the territory. I’m sure the complaining woman mentioned above would have plenty to say about these ungrateful children!

So there are all kinds of bird dads, and they may or may not live up to our human standards (just like human dads). Just as it’s interesting to think about the social, cultural, economic, and other pressures that lead to certain kinds of human dad behaviors, it’s interesting to think about the territorial, food, climatic, and other kinds of factors that lead bird dads toward behaviors that will (hopefully) ensure the survival of their offspring and species. Happy Father’s Day to all dads, bird or human, with appreciation for all that you do!

Birds on the Move

March 1: a big day for me because March is the month when many songbirds start their migration north to their breeding grounds. I am so ready for them! I am ready for their dawn song, their frantic nest building, the hatching of the eggs, the fledglings making their way around my yard, the parents flitting back and forth between food sources and home.

There are amazing technologies out there for tracking the migration of birds - and a lot of information about migrants gathered carefully by everyday citizen scientists who go out birdwatching and record their data online in various forums.

Birdcast.org will soon begin weekly forecasts of bird migrations. It is so much fun to read their forecasts and then watch them come true in your yard that week. If Birdcast says you will see a grey catbird in your region by early Tuesday, you can bet you’ll hear its iconic mewing sound on that day. But these forecasts are not only for our delight as birdwatchers. They are essential to persuading wind farms to shut off their turbines during certain days or times of day to avoid grinding up millions of migrating songbirds. Big building lights can also be dimmed strategically so that the birds are not confused by the lights, which can get them off course or lead them to crash into the buildings as they fly.

Ebird.org is also a useful resource. Individual birders record the species they observe in particular areas - and the data is coming in from all over the world - so that you can figure out where to go to see a migrating species arrive to stay or to fly through quickly on their way further north. This tool helps a lot during warbler season especially. A lot of warblers remain in our area only for a few weeks, and this tool helps me know where I am likely to find them. Over time, these recorded observations (coupled with radar, which picks up flocks of migrating birds) can also help scientists track how arrival and departure dates for certain species change from year to year, which could be useful in determining the effects of weather, climate change, food source availability, and other phenomena on bird migration. Apparently scientists are still using Henry David Thoreau’s carefully recorded observations of weather, nature, and wildlife as a baseline for comparison with later years in the area around Walden Pond!

Such tools can help us learn about and enjoy nature, and they are also an excellent way to participate in science as a non-scientist. Please write in the comments if you have another tool that helps you enjoy the migration season.

Valentine's Day Animals

Google “Valentine’s Day and animals” and you will find a wealth of links to sweet photos and stories about how animals love each other; kiss, hug, and otherwise embrace; and form lifelong bonds. It’s true: there is a lot of love out there in the animal world. A friend was just telling us of his dog’s despondency and death after her elderly dog companion was put down. The same behavior has been documented among songbirds, who mostly mate for life, and may sit by the body of a dead mate for hours or days. Mammals love to snuggle against other warm mammal bodies, as seen in the above photo of two very cuddly pet rabbits I used to have.

Really, the animal world is a mixed bag, and we get into dangerous territory when we start anthropomorphizing, or giving human characteristics to, animals. Songbirds may mate for life and mourn the death of a mate, but male mallards gang rape lone females in a terribly violent way during the mating and nesting season. Guinea pigs, horses, and parrots should never be kept alone as pets because they need the companionship of others of their kind to remain healthy psychologically, but golden hamsters will fight and kill each other if kept in the same cage as adults. Even those sweet bunnies in the photo above only reached that bonded state after several weeks apart as I slowly and carefully introduced them to each other amid a great deal of aggression. Plenty of animals spend their lives in solitude and some are aggressive toward each other when together. You won’t see those photos in an online article on Valentine’s Day!

So why do we need to show animals in love? What are we trying to say about ourselves and them? Perhaps we are acknowledging our own animal nature and hoping that, if bunnies and kitties and squirrels and piglets can love each other, then we can love each other, too. This is why animal examples are so risky; some evolutionary psychologists and biological anthropologists have used the mallard and other examples to suggest that rape is a “natural” behavior among human men. Another possibility: perhaps we want to believe that the animals around us are able to enjoy love and other emotions at the levels we do, that they lead highly satisfying emotional lives, especially as our pets. This is risky as well and leads to a lot of hand wringing when we feel we are causing animals harm or not doing our utmost to care for them. I really don’t have answers to this question, but what I do know is that this view of animals and love is a construction that is highly specific to certain societies in certain places.

Take as a contrasting example what anthropologist James Suzman writes in this New York Times article about his experience with the Ju/’hoansi, hunter-gatherers who live in southern Africa and are more commonly known in the U.S. by the old-fashioned and inapt term “the Bushmen of the Kalahari”. These are people who live very close to animals and know them well because they must know them well to hunt them successfully and survive in their world. Suzman argues that they empathize, rather than sympathize, with animals:

For them animal empathy was not a question of focusing on an animal’s human-like characteristics, but of assuming the whole perspective of the animal. Their animal empathy defied verbalization. To empathize with an animal you couldn’t think like a human and project your mind-set into it; you had to “be” the animal.

But this kind of empathy did not persuade Ju/’hoansi and other hunter-gatherers to feel sympathy for animals or assume a duty of care for them. Rather it made people focus more on the non-human behaviors of animals rather than what they had in common. Among people who considered themselves to be just one of many different kinds of animal-people in a wild environment, hunting, death and pain were parts of everyday life. Human compassion did not extend to other species.

Suzman goes on to suggest that people like those of us reading this blog post or his article are different because we live in a world in which animals have evolved and been bred to please us. Our animal world consists of pets, animals trained to delight us at zoos and aquariums, round-eyed cartoon animals who make us cry and laugh, and even wildlife displayed as entertainment in nature documentaries. We think of animals in terms of what they do for us and then conclude that, doing so much for us, they must love us, and that, loving us, they deserve our love. And there we have a whole bunch of human emotions all wrapped up in our relationships with animals.

Suzman is not saying that the Ju/’hoansi way is better, and neither am I. He describes their behaviors towards the dogs who live among them in ways that, from our perspective, seem abusive or neglectful. At the same time, I’m not sure it’s entirely healthy - or good for animals - that we anthropomorphize them to the extent that we do. What I want to consider is that we interface with animals through a construction that we have formed of them and our relationship to them, a construction that has not been and is not the same in all times and places. We also construct ourselves and our view of our humanity through them, which makes me think that all of those Valentine’s Day articles on the internet may tell us a lot more about ourselves than they tell us about the animals they feature.

The Hunt for the Dusky Flycatcher

The first week of November, the word got out: a Gettysburg College Wildlife Ecology class out birding on campus one morning identified what seemed to be a Dusky Flycatcher (Empidonax oberholseri). This is a small, rather nondescript little bird that lives in Western North America and migrates to Mexico for the winter. The poor little guy (maybe an inexperienced juvenile?) got blown off course and ended up all the way over in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

And with the news came the birders. According to one count, some 100 birders came to Gettysburg to see the bird over the course of the weekend. The identification still has to be confirmed and has proven controversial, with some saying that it may actually have been a Least Flycatcher (Empidonax minimus). If the Dusky Flycatcher identification stands, it will be the first one identified in the state of Pennsylvania.

I’ve been a bird lover for most of my life, so naturally attracted to birds from an early age that I apparently came in from kindergarten one day and tearfully begged my parents to let me have a pet budgie. I grew up watching birds in the yard, reading about birds, watching bird documentaries - and having a succession of budgies that were the center of my world. But I only recently became a birder, in part because I somehow felt that documenting birds, checking them off on a list, quantifying them, would take away from their beauty and mystery and all around wonderfulness.

Why are humans so drawn to birding? Now I’m beginning to understand. For one thing, to recognize them is to begin to know them. You don’t just check birds off your list and forget about them. The process of identifying them is the process of understanding them. The process of understanding them involves falling in love with them again and again as you read about their habitat, their migration paths, their parenting skills, as you listen to the variations on their song, as you begin to recognize how their plumage changes over the seasons. After that, seeing a bird you know well is like seeing an old friend.

For another thing, humans love to be on a hunt for something, and birding feels like such an accomplishment. I tried to see that Dusky Flycatcher for several days, without success. If I had, it would have marked a special day in my life and I would have always remembered the story. With birding - or appreciating nature more generally - you always have the sense that there is a world around you that you’re not seeing or hearing or smelling at that particular moment. To identify a bird or an animal is to extract it momentarily from that unacknowledged and mysterious world always surrounding us.

And then, as with anything else, you can tell all your other birding friends what you saw. Numbers and types of birds you’ve sighted become a form of prestige. I’m a novice, with a less than 100 life list (list of how many birds I’ve seen over my lifetime). The stars of the local Audubon Association loom large in my eyes, and I hope someday to have the kind of respect and knowledge that they garner, quantified in part in the number of birds on their life list, their ease of recognition, their ability to tell you exactly where in the surrounding area you can find which kinds of birds at what time of the year.

Might birding also be a form of control or ownership? I’ve thought about that, too. When you make a list, check birds off, talk numbers and species and places, you’re coming to know the world around you. Classification is a human instinct. Knowledge can provide a feeling of comfort, safety, even power over the natural world. But, hey, we’re humans. Control is what we do with nature. And, if we’re going to control nature, it’s best that we know it well and appreciate its details. And birding is a great way to get there.