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!

Pacing Oneself

I’ve been noticing lately that the pace of nature is very slow. I started to understand this in the past few years by watching one of our cats, Lemmon, hunt mice in our house. When she detects a mouse, say, behind the stove or refrigerator, she will sit in that part of the kitchen for hours and even days at a time, waiting for it to move. She knows the mouse will come out eventually, and she’s in no hurry.

A few days ago a toad moved into the rotting old stump near my flower garden. There’s enough erosion underneath to provide room for a toad to sit in the cool mud, a happy spot that benefits from water trickling down from the bird bath that sits on top of the stump. And there’s tall grass around the stump to make for good bug and slug-hunting territory. So the toad seemed happy to be there, and I was happy to watch it for hours at a time, fascinated. One morning I sat there reading for three hours, and the toad moved one inch in all that time. Like Lemmon, it was waiting patiently for bugs and slugs to come its way.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about reproduction and loss in nature, and that speaks to another kind of slow pace in terms of the endurance and rise and fall of population sizes. This year I’m fascinated in particular by the killdeer. Our resident killdeer pair have their second nest of the season in the garden right now. The first nest, as is typical, produced four chicks. One of the chicks survived the dangers of our neighborhood and is now as big as the parents, and we await the hatching of the next four eggs. A 25% yield is pretty darn good, but knowing that 90% of baby birds don’t survive their first year makes me realize that the little chick isn’t safe yet. It’s also likely that only one or none of this next brood will survive after hatching.

In other words, successful breeding is a slow business. Over the course of their lives, these two killdeer may produce anywhere between eight to eighty eggs, and for population maintenance we can really only hope that two will survive and reproduce. That means six to seventy-eight eggs and chicks may be lost. Similarly, I saw a mallard mama in our neighborhood start spring with nine little ducklings in tow. By the end of a two-week period, they were all gone, probably because of a combination of the red fox I’ve seen in the area, the barn cats at my neighbor’s horse farm, and the enormous snapping turtles in the creek where they swam. Now she’s on her second nest, on the edge of a neighbor’s house. Yesterday he came over to tell us that rat snakes had gotten into the nest and eaten all but three of the eggs. Such a sad loss of nine-plus lives so far, with little chance that one of the remaining three chicks, if hatched, will survive and grow to adulthood. But mallards are one of the most successful species in the world in terms of expanding their range and increasing their population, so obviously Mother Nature knows what she’s doing in the end.

So the lesson learned is that nature moves slowly, producing lots and lots of young over time so that a tiny minority will survive to reproduce. But, in the meantime, that “waste” goes to feed lots of other animals so that their young will survive to reproduce as well.

All of that is hard to grasp from my human perspective, especially given that I come from a society that values speed, efficiency, and immediate gratification. The hours I spend watching wildlife are painfully slow and bearable only if I’m reading or making to-do lists or something else so that I won’t be “wasting” my time. I don’t understand why Lemmon even bothers to hunt mice, knowing that there will be a bowl of food set down in front of her three times a day by busy, efficient me. But there are age-old lessons in the slowness of nature that we should heed.

First, slow, careful work yields a lot. One day I noticed a growing pile of teeny wood shavings at the bottom of that old stump. Finally I looked for the source and realized there are ants inside, digging out passageways; each ant works hard to dig out the wood and bring the shaving to a crack in the stump to dump it out. It’s amazing how the pile has grown in a few short days! Likewise, tons of research on writing shows that a little bit of writing every day produces many times more pages over the course of the year than a fast and furious spurt of occasional writing. The tortoise and the hare principal applies in nature and in our lives, otherwise Aesop wouldn’t have bothered writing a fable about it.

Another lesson is the importance of patience. Lemmon and the toad eventually get what they want (although we always take the mouse away from poor Lemmon and release it in the field across the street), and they do so by waiting patiently, saving themselves a great deal of exertion. Needless to say, developing that kind of patience is a tough one for all of us. But how many self-help books advocate patience and endurance, setting and working toward long-term, important goals, rather than chasing after short-term goals, urgent matters, and immediate gratification? We know that kind of patience is better for our emotional, mental, and physical health.

And there are other lessons, perhaps less satisfying, about the inevitability of death and loss and grief, but also about moving on, laying the next nest, hatching the next brood, trying again, optimistic that all of those efforts will produce much over the long haul.

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.

The Asphalt Cage

Every morning I have an hour-long commute from rural central Maryland to rural south-central Pennsylvania. This morning I began, as always, with a 10-minute stretch on I-70 East, blinded by the morning sun, battling seemingly angry and demoralized commuters heading to D.C. and Baltimore, before blessedly turning off on back roads, where the mountains and trees soften the sun and the few drivers on the road are a little slower and more relaxed. As I drove past all the familiar forests and pastures and streams and cows and goats and sheep and geese, my body and mind began to relax.

The great German social theorist Max Weber wrote of the “iron cage” of modernity. He was writing in the early 20^th century, trying to envision where Western, capitalist, industrial society was heading. In part, he argued, it was headed toward further and deeper bureaucratization, efficiency, rationalism, and so forth. Where we become social security numbers instead of people, census and poll takers rather than citizens, and people whose time and ability to navigate life are in the hands of low-level state bureaucrats rather than family and community members. Eventually the iron cage will imprison us, Weber argued, taking away our freedom, autonomy, and joy. I think we can all feel that iron cage at times.

But this morning I was thinking of a cage made of asphalt rather than iron. How much of our lives do we spend hurtling down an asphalt road to hell, in danger from the crazy drivers around us, our backs hurting from sitting too long, our only window on nature the little blur of trees and mountains we can see through our windows and windshield? And have you noticed how complex parking lots have become, with divisions and subdivisions and stop signs and arrows marking the direction of traffic? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been trapped in a shopping center parking lot, unable to figure out which of the exit-like turns is actually an exit that will finally allow me out of the shopping center!

But this morning I was concerned even more with how much of nature is now carved up by asphalt. Take a look at how wide some of our multi-lane roads are now: much too wide for most birds to traverse, too dangerous for deer and other mammals to cross, and effectively cutting an ecosystem into pieces. I just googled some best guesses as to how much of the U.S.’s land surface is paved, and it’s probably around 61,000 square miles: about as much land area as the state of Georgia. As for the portion of the planet’s land surface that is paved, probably around 0.2%. That is small in quantity but potentially huge in effect. And I cannot imagine that this percentage will do anything but grow rapidly as populations swell, development of infrastructure increases around the world, more goods need to be trucked to more places, and urban centers require greater connection to each other and their hinterlands.

A part of me loves to get out in my car and drive. It feels like such freedom! But I fear that the asphalt cage, in addition to its negative effects on us and our lives, is gradually imprisoning nature, taking away its freedom, autonomy, and joy.

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.

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.