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.

A Natural Mind, Part 1

The other day I went on a short birding trip with a friend who is new to birding (not new to appreciating birds, just new to learning and documenting what type they are). She said she felt she would never be able to recognize and remember all the different types. I remember feeling the same way when I began birding a few years ago. But birding has taught me a lot about the human mind, mainly that it instinctively wants to recognize and remember the natural world.

There are so many cues for recognizing birds. Color is the easiest one. We can all recognize a cardinal or a blue jay, and it’s impossible to forget an American goldfinch once you’ve seen the male in his yellow summertime glory. We also easily know general types and their general niche in the ecosystem: ducks are found near water, vultures soar high in the air. Those are good starting points, and we already know them, even without thinking much about them. At some point our minds noticed those features and filed them away in our innate filing system.

It only takes a little bit of observation time to start filling in some of the other features. One is song. That seems like the hardest to memorize, especially given that most of us think we are visual rather than aural learners. But our minds are working on those, too. I was telling my friend that many people memorize bird songs by turning them into English phrases, such as “Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, please!” for the Carolina wren. “Wait, I know that one,” she immediately said. She had heard that unmistakable melody, at surprisingly loud volume, all around her house, all year long. Her mind had already recognized and memorized it; she just didn’t have a label to put on it yet.

Another is a more subtle sense of where to find birds. Robins are on the ground during the nesting season, looking for earthworms. But many other birds are never seen on the ground. If you hear a Baltimore oriole - another unmistakable sound once you learn it - you should always look up in the very top of the trees; you will likely never see one on the ground. If you see a bird in the evening flying across your yard, swooping and diving and rising up again, over and over and over, chances are it’s a swallow of some kind.

Similarly, flight is a big indicator. Finches have a cute little up and down swoopy flight. Doves can move at an incredible speed straight across the sky, while a blue jay has a slow, clumsy flight. Shape and flight together are helpful indicators. I’m still learning to differentiate raptors, and one of the best ways to do so is to look at the general shape as they fly, which will tell you whether it’s a soaring hawk hunting for mammals (buteo, such as a red-tailed hawk), an agile-flying hawk hunting for other birds (accipter, such as a sharp-shinned hawk), or a flying-super-fast-or-hovering falcon hunting for just about anything (falcon, such as an American kestrel).

Once you get the big categories under your belt, more subtle features help further. Birders look for the number of wingbars a bird has or whether there are colored rings around their eyes. There are spots, stripes, and other marks. Bill type and shape are big helps as well: seed eaters have a certain bill shape that is very different from insect eaters, and we can all recognize the unique shape and function of the hummingbird’s nectar-extracting bill.

And, finally, our minds classify through comparison and contrast. As the categories sharpen, we instinctively begin to use those categories to differentiate birds. I thought I saw a phoebe while birding one morning last week. But the bird was a little bigger than a phoebe and had a white bar at the end of its tail, so I knew immediately it was an Eastern kingbird. When it made its buzzy sound, that was additional confirmation.

I read William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury in college, during a wonderful class on Faulkner taught by Dr. Charles Chappell at Hendrix College. I read it easily, despite the fact that it’s such a difficult book. It is narrated through stream of consciousness by a character who is cognitively disabled, and it makes little sense. Somehow I knew that I should simply file the information presented in each narrative away in my mind and not worry too much whether I understood it or not. Suddenly, in a series of moments of clarity toward the end, I had enough information to get what Benjy was trying to say. I often think of that when birding or working to identify trees or figuring out any other aspect of nature. All I have to do is let the information flow into the incredible classification system that is my brain, and over time my brain will sort it all out and give me the ID.

In my next blog on this topic, we’ll take a look at some of the indigenous peoples who live close to nature and use their innate classification system to memorize hundreds of species and aspects of the flora and fauna on which they depend for survival.

Life After Downton Abbey

Something very sad happened to me recently. The great horned owl family that I have been watching obsessively since February on the Savannah Owls bird cam have now left the nest. First I watched the parents settle into the nest. Then I watched the mother sit patiently on her two eggs for endless days, as the wind and snow blew on her, and I watched the father bring in food or sit on the eggs so the mother could have a break. The eggs hatched, and I got to watch two of the most ugly-cute baby birds on earth grow up, with their ghostly white feathers and their even spookier wide, staring eyes. I shuddered as the dead animals piled up in the nest - mice, rats, squirrels, egrets, and other unidentified birds - and the babies slowly learned to pull chunks of dead flesh off the bone and feed themselves. I watched with dread as the parents spent less and less time on the nest and the owlets began to climb the branches of the tree around the nest, flexing and flapping their developing wings. And then, suddenly, the sad days came, as each of the owlets disappeared from sight. For a couple of days, the mother would come back to the nest with food, and sometimes be able to call the owlets back, but for the last two days there has been nothing.

I know they’re out there in the world together, and that the parents will continue to guide and protect the owlets for months until they can hunt successfully on their own and stake out their own territories. But I won’t see all of that happen from here on out, and it feels like the same kind of loss I experienced when six seasons of Downton Abbey came to an end and I no longer had those “friends” in my life.

Bird cams are a revolutionary technology growing in popularity. They bring us into the most intimate sphere of the bird world. We admire the birds for their hard work, tenacity, and long hours of caring for offspring. We see how helpless the babies are and how quickly they develop. We even give them names. The eagle family featured on the Washington, D.C., eagle cam are “Mr. President” and “The First Lady”. (Next year will they be the Clintons? The Trumps? The Cruzes? The Sanderses? Only time will tell!)

Bird cams also make us face the horrible realities of nature: that somebody has to die in order for somebody else to live, or that sometimes somebody dies for no good reason at all. Whole families and offices full of people cheered as the bald eaglets hatched in Hanover, Pennsylvania, and then expressed horror as one died in the nest, for no clear reason. The Washington, D.C., eagle cam website even posts the following warning:

“This is a wild eagle nest and anything can happen. While we hope that these two healthy juvenile eagles will end up fledging from the nest this summer, things like sibling rivalry, predators, and natural disaster can affect this eagle family and may be difficult to watch.”

Like reality television, the bird cam industry is expanding. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology alone hosts 15 cameras on a variety of species, from hummingbirds in West Texas to an albatross nest in Hawaii. Daily moments on the cams are tweeted, shared on Facebook, and captured in videos for Youtube. As with all other internet and social media phenomena, they are changing us and our experiences of life. For example, the intimacy of the camera now makes the nests in my yard seem a little dull. I can’t stand next to the Leyland cypress and peer into the chipping sparrow nest several hours a day without running the poor, scared little things off and without developing leg cramps from standing on a ladder. A couple of weeks ago I was at the National Conservation Training Center in Shepherdstown, WV, looking through binoculars at a bald eagle nest that I watch online here, and it was a real letdown to see it in person, from far away, with an obstructed view because of the tree branches. Sitting in my office, staring at my computer suddenly seemed the more “real” way to interact with nature. Funny, huh? The internet as the best and most real way to celebrate nature.

Today I went to the Savannah Owls cam website, desperately hoping that maybe the camera would catch one of the owlets back in the nest for a daytime sleep and I could smile at how much he has grown in the last couple of days. To my surprise, there was a pair of ospreys on the nest instead. I am watching them now as they check out the nest and call to each other. Will they nest there? Will they successfully raise a family? Will the owls return? Will the owls kill and eat the osprey chicks after I have fallen in love with them? As with any soap opera cliffhanger, I will definitely have to tune in tomorrow and find out more.

Cute - or Deadly?

It’s a beautiful week in central Maryland, and I’m on spring break, which means I’ve been out a lot, looking at birds. As I walked along the Potomac River yesterday morning, there were Eastern bluebirds everywhere, one of my favorites. I love that flash of blue in the sunshine, that bit of chestnut brown on the breast, their big, round cartoon eyes, and their perky little song.

But these particular birds were not being cartoonish and perky; they were fighting. There were eight total, four males and four females. They seemed to be fighting over territory, with each pair trying to run off the other pairs. However, it may be that they were fighting over each other. It’s early in the mating season, and pairs may not yet be securely established. Plus, although most songbirds are generally monogamous, both male and female Eastern bluebirds always look to get a little action on the side. (This article provides a concise summary of bluebird mating habits with more such fascinating information.)

Whatever the reason, the fighting continued for the entire twenty minutes that I stood there watching. The birds chased, dove, flapped, and pecked - and they were so caught up in their actions that they were oblivious to my presence there, flying past me several times and letting me get pretty close to them. It struck me that they were wasting an enormous amount of precious energy on this process. Cold winters are hard on bluebirds, which generally stay put in our region for the year, and many of them die in the early spring because they are starving and weak and food resources have not yet picked back up. But here they were, willing to spend such long periods of time in the energy-sapping process of fighting.

This morning I had the thrilling opportunity to see two Northern flickers do their mating dance. (You can watch a quick video of this neat little dance here.) Another energy-intensive process, it went on for minutes and was followed by quite a bit of flying and chasing and chirping. Northern flickers are another year-round bird that can be exhausted and weak by this time of year, yet every year they summon up the energy for this elaborate mating process.

I often hear people talk about how “sweet” the sound of the birds is, how “happy” they sound when they sing or “cute” they look when they zip around our yards. I have used this language myself! When we hear birdsong, it makes us feel sweet and happy, and so we assume that those nice emotions must be shared by the pretty, energetic, brightly-colored birds around us.

But there is nothing sweet or happy about these springtime behaviors. These birds are in a fight for their lives and the right to claim the best territory, find the best mate(s), and raise the best brood. Those beautiful songs contain threats to competitors and lures to potential mates. Many of the males will lose out and be resigned to a life on the margins, trying to mate surreptitiously with an unattended female or move in on another male’s territory when he dies or is injured. The females will wear themselves out with raising brood after brood and helping to defend their territory against predators, other birds, and those marginal males. By the end of the nesting season, toward the middle to end of summer, all of the adults will be looking ragged and worn.

As I finished my walk this morning, I saw a male song sparrow, singing his heart out in an evergreen by a creek - the ideal spot for a song sparrow to claim as his territory. So tiny, singing his beautiful little melody - the words “cute” and “happy” definitely came to mind. Funny to think that, in his own mind, he was being “fierce” and “threatening” and asserting his “masculinity” - perhaps not too different from the young man who then drove by in his huge dually truck with double exhaust stacks.

20 Minutes of Wildlife

A sense of disappointment always sets in for me in August, as the songbird mating season comes to an end and the birds fall silent, and then they start to leave the area, and then the summer insect sounds die away, and then the butterflies fade, and then the first hard frost comes and most of the plants still managing to produce in my garden freeze and die. Although frenetic animal activity begins - such as the white-tailed deer rut and the pre-hibernation feeding frenzy of groundhogs and other burrowing rodents - it doesn’t seem to provide the same pleasure as springtime viewings of fawns and muskrats and bunnies. By November, I feel hopelessly distanced from the natural world.

But it’s really not true that the world of wildlife disappears or even slows down. I was just reviewing my notes from a 20-minute walk I took in mid November. In just 20 short minutes, I saw a female turkey, a young white-tailed buck, and a mink. The birds were crazy with activity, and in a short stroll along a creek I saw a pair of mallards, a mockingbird, several robins, several cardinals, a bunch of male bluebirds fussing at each other and chasing each other through the trees, juncos, goldfinches, and 20 or so yellow-rumped warblers flying down to drink and then back up into the trees. I heard a song sparrow, a Northern flicker, and crows. And I’m sure there were many other animals in my vicinity who saw me but remained beyond my notice.

One of my very favorite books is Jon Young’s What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). An experienced tracker, Young explains how understanding bird behavior and sounds can clue one in to many aspects of the natural world. Birds have different songs to indicate different kinds of predators: those on the ground, those coming through the trees, those high up in the air. Their flight patterns also indicate where a predator or food source might be. Young recommends that you sit in the same spot everyday, remain quiet until the birds forget you are there, and then observe. You will quickly begin to distinguish different kinds of calls and activities, particularly if you focus on one species. Fall and winter are ideal times to do this because you remove certain activities and calls related to mating and nesting from the equation, leaving fewer factors to consider in your study. And without leaves on the trees, the birds are much easier to find and keep track of.

Winter can be ideal for learning about other wildlife, too, particularly when there is snow on the ground and you can see tracks. A basic book of mammal and bird tracks is a helpful guide to identifying tracks, and following them can give you clues to an animal’s route, particular behavior, and even the location of a winter den.

Nature organizations and national parks host lots of activities in the winter to help people experience the natural world. My local Audubon society is offering free bird-watching trips, a tree identification workshop, a tracks identification workshop, and several lectures over the next couple of weeks to help people fend off the indoor ennui of winter. I hope you’ll join me in finding opportunities to take advantage of winter and take yourself back out into the natural world to see just how alive it is - at all times of the year.