Chickadees: If You Have To Ask, You Can't Afford It

Female

Big news in Portland real estate, where rental vacancies are at an all-time low, and landlords can comfortably soak their tenants without compromising their ethics at all, assuming they're assholes. So it should have been no surprise that the nesting box, the one right outside my writing room window that has been occupied every spring by Marge and Studley Windowson, our chickadees, has fallen victim to the hot market. A pair of nuthatches sensed an opportunity and snapped it up before Marge and Studley ever got their tiny little identical butts in gear. There's nothing we can do about it. We're hoping the Windowsons have been able to locate something affordable on the edge of town.

Meanwhile the nuthatches seemed to be dinking around about actually moving in. I decided to hang up some nesting material right nearby. My cat Tater helpfully refused to shed a single strand of fur. I went next door and borrowed a cup of Golden Retriever. Birds loved it, except for the nuthatches.

Holding single strand of golden retriever

I read up. The box was the right size, but nuthatches "rarely" use them. Well, poo. Had they just been toying with us, and holding up the paperwork on the house just long enough that Marge and Studley had to give up? Would we have an empty box through the nesting season?

Finally they began to move in some fluff. It looks like a going concern now, plus we have the benefit of feeling special, since they so rarely go for nesting boxes. I'm looking forward to watching this, not least because I can tell these guys apart. I don't know if I'm looking at this one, or the other one, but I'm pretty sure they're not the same.

Which just goes to show how extremely bad I am at really noticing things. I spend a lot of time noticing, but not to the point where I could give you any particulars.

Male, primping

Example. This week Dave and I went on a hike. A few hours in, an old man came by us going the  other direction and we all said Hi. One minute later another old man came by and asked us if we'd seen a woman just ahead of him on the trail. I hesitated. I didn't want to say an old man had just passed by, in case that was the woman he was talking about. Seemed rude. He clarified that "she is wearing a pink jacket." Now. I should have remembered if the old man was wearing a pink jacket, shouldn't I? But at that point I couldn't swear that the person we just saw was a man or a woman or was wearing pink or not.

Birds, same way. I'm pretty sure our nuthatches are different, but if you asked me, I'd say one looked sort of diffident, and the other one sort of saucy. These are not field marks. Find three field marks, I can hear my friend Bill say, so let's see: one of them is diffident and pensive with a thousand-mile stare. The other one is saucy, restless, and prone to hyperbole.

I looked them up. According to the guides, the male has a black crown and tends to be somewhat darker in the breast, and the female has a dark gray crown. Well, sure. When you put it that way. I can see it now.

But if one of them had a pink jacket on, I can't recall.

Here's a bonus video of the nuthatches protecting their territory. Hold onto your heart; and yes, I promise the nuthatch is okay in the end!

Trying To Hit A Triple

Marge (or Studley)

Well, I've been watching, and it's a regular hormonathon out there. The birds are chasing tail all day long. I don't know if they're kissing up or beating up, but something's up.

Not a penis though. We don't have any ducks, geese, swans, or ostriches in the vicinity. Most everyone else of the nouveau-dinosaur persuasion around here has to make do with a cloaca--in fact, making doo is one of the things they do with it--and by all appearances, there are a lot of folks here wanting to get into a close cloacal position together and swap bird schmutz. It's only third base, but that's all the bases they got to work with. So tail is being chased. That's the only thing being chaste.

Some are being chased away. Juncos are herding robins right into the cherry tree. Robins are bigger than juncos but they don't seem too fierce. It's probably the worms. Sometimes a spare junco drops out of the cherry and gets chased by another junco. From a distance I can't tell if the spare is an object of desire or a rival. But they're all busy staking out their little kingdoms and interlopers must be routed.

Last Year's Windowson Baby

Not everyone is going to get lucky, I imagine. But everyone's thinking about it. Those unable to defend their kingdoms are congregating at Phi Crappa and bragging about all the cloaca they get.

The suet feeder demonstrates the pecking order in this yard. Chickadees give way to juncos. Juncos acquiesce to song sparrows. Starlings rout those, and scrub jays and woodpeckers can dine unmolested. (Scrub jays will perforate anybody, and everyone knows it.) And for some reason they all step aside when the bushtits arrive. That's because although bushtits are very small, they're very plural. Nobody knows what to do about them. A perfectly sturdy junco will perch sullenly on a branch and watch the suet feeder turn into a fluffy bustle of tits, looking like a grumpy old fart on a park bench when kindergarten lets out.

Well, clearly it was time to put out the cleaned-up birdhouse for our resident chickadees, Marge and Studley Windowson. Marge and Studley have been rearing chilluns in that house for six years now. And as usual they did come to check it out.

But so did a pair of nuthatches.

Oh dear.

We do not know how that will go. The nuthatches seem a little more serious at this point. They're pecking at the hole. Everyone wants to put their own stamp on a place. Person buys a mid-century ranch, and the first thing he does is swap out the garden gnomes for pink flamingos. Marge (or possibly Studley) is over in the crape myrtle scolding Studley (or possibly Marge). I told you we needed to put in an offer. We're going to get aced out by Californians with cash.

It could go either way. The specs for a nuthatch house are the same as for a chickadee house. The birds are all of a size, and frequently associate together. In fact, nuthatches are said to be able to understand spoken Chickadee, if not speak it themselves. So for all we know the nuthatches found out about the place when the chickadees started talking about the old homestead. Loose beaks boost sneaks.

I'll take what comes. Dave is very fond of the Windowsons and is wondering if he should nail up a new house in the same tree. We don't know what kind of zoning applies. Could be too much density puts off both species. I'd be cool with the nuthatches. I can tell them apart.

My Friends Are Questionable

It's probably spring by now. Birds are picking fights with each other, and some of them are--why, I believe they are wrestling. Dave built a chickadee house and situated it a foot away from my window where I do all my writing in order to facilitate the procrastination process. I was just up there today and no sooner had despaired of seeing our chickadee pair this year than they showed up. Same couple, too. One of them has that high, squeaky voice, and the other has that higher, squeakier voice. Each one took turns checking out the house, and then they sat on a nearby branch and got into a heated exchange, and I didn't see anyone hauling in any furniture. I think one of them thinks it's just fine and the other one is saying it's too ratty-tatty and couldn't they ever get anything nice for a change. The first one sharpened his or her beak on a branch and the seeds in the suet-cake trembled.

"I wonder if we should have cleaned out that nest box again," I said to Dave. Oh jeez, there's that look.

Julie

"I asked you if I should clean out the nest box three weeks ago and you said [higher, squeakier voice] 'oh no, not now, it's too close to nesting season, and maybe they'll be put off by your scent or something.'"

I would very much like to refute this, without doing damage to the truth, but I can't. I did just say that.

"And you always tell me I don't even have a scent."

Also true. The man can spend the day shoveling rocks in the sun and not emit a molecule of odor. It's peculiar. I think he's perfected flatulence just so people know he's been around.

"Besides, there's no reason you should ever have to wonder about such things. Don't you know, like, a million birders?"

Bill

I do. Literally scores of them. They're good people. I got to know their queen, Julie Zickefoose, through this here blog, and she alerted the whole flock. And then I also know Bill Thompson III, who is so accomplished he can spot invisible birds that don't even exist--I've seen him do it. And I know Susan Kailholz-Williams, who wears hawks and owls like wrist corsages. For a living. I know Jeff Gordon, the  president of the American Excuse-Me Birding Association, and can tell you his winter range and what his legs look like. All of them have blogs. The birder blogs differ from mine mainly in the density of facts.

Susan

But that doesn't mean I want to pester them every time I need to know something bird-related. No one wants to get the same questions over and over again. When I was a letter carrier, that happened all the time. "Hey, we can't really call you the mail-MAN, can we?" "Hey, Uncle Sam, working hard or hardly working?" "Hey, dipshit, where the hell is my check?"

It gets old.

Update: Furniture going in.

Teachers always like to say "there is no such thing as a stupid question," but they don't really mean it. And if I got started asking my friends questions, it would never stop. Chickadees can't really tell each other apart, can they? They only figure out which one is the boy and which one is the girl when the egg falls out, right? Is there any reason I can't put up about twelve birdhouses here outside my window a yard apart, or will the birds start writing nasty letters to the editor about infill? Why do scrub jays go SKREE SKREE SKREE SKREE all the ding-dang day long when everybody heard them just fine the first time? That is wrestling they're doing, isn't it? What wine goes good with scrub jay? What has yellow legs, purple wing bars, an orange eyebrow, an argyle vest, a slant-six and tailfins? What do you mean I must be mistaken?


What good are you?