One Bird Too Far

baby

So many things going on during nesting season if you're paying attention. The trill of victory, the agony of de tiny little feet! Everywhere one soap opera after another is playing out. Studley and Marge plumb disappeared shortly after the scrub jay incident and didn't show up for worms even though we extended our beer-thirty hours JUST for them, and we had no idea where they went or even if they still...were. The resident crows are just past the stage where their baby has plummeted from the treetops and been grounded for a few days, and we knew that because every so often we heard a great cawcophany from the neighbor's yard followed by two little kids screaming their heads off and dashing back into the house. It was very satisfying. Now the crow baby is aloft for good and pecking around the garden beds with its blue eyes and gape-remnant lips and it will soon be the best-looking one of the bunch, because the adults are all about to go gappy and drop their feathers.

Then Studley came back with three of his little guys in tow! They're not any littler than he is, of course, but they're beebling away in the trees waiting for Daddy to show up with snacks, and we couldn't be relieveder. They too can be recognized by their shiny new suits and I do believe they outweigh their father too, because as usual he has worked himself skinny. His molt will start any day now. Last year by this time he had a ragged cheek bib and a bald spot on his head. This year his head feathers look okay but he's had this one feather sticking up on his back for weeks. I tried to smooth it down once but Studley has stopped just short of allowing me to touch him in a personal fingery way. And I know this because it's everything I can do to keep from chucking the little dude under the chin.

wayward feather

And because it is not enough to have a private tit to show off to your friends, my niece was inspired to try to entice a pair of juncos that were nesting in her yard, and succeeded in getting them and their babies to take food from her hand, and start a new brood, and get those babies to do the same, and, what the hey, the local song sparrows seemed to show an interest too, and what with one thing and another, she is basically encrusted with birds every time she walks outside. Dave shakes his head. Brewster girls, he says, without elaborating.

It's not a competition, but I will point out she doesn't have a chickadee yet.

And so I'm happy that I've made my garden a destination resort for the feathered set, and contemplate what more I can provide, because birds are awesome in every way, but I would like to mention that I the hell did not mean I wanted freaking pigeons nesting under my solar panels with their stupid breathy cooing like they're fat little Olivia Newton-Johns in a world of opera stars and all walking around like they do with their tiny stupid heads poinking along behind them like they're trying to catch up to their own plumpety bodies. But there they are flapping down to the rental house's gutter and coming back up to our roof with big old sticks because not only do we have freaking pigeons committing lavish poopination under our solar panels but sure enough we didn't get around to clearing out the gutters last season and thanks for reminding us.

I know I'm supposed to be more even-handed about this as a bird lover but I really don't care for pigeons much at all or the whoop-whoop-whoop Three Stooges routine they do or their unmatched outfits, the best of which look like a motor oil slick in a puddle, walking around all dumb and eating white bread preferentially, and I know they have plenty of admirers and can do some amazing things such as find their way home even from a very great distance, which they can go ahead and do any time now as far as I'm concerned and I hope it's way the hell across the ocean.

Firstly, You Must Find Another Shrubbery

You act weird enough, people just leave you be.

I've already told you about the time Dave took me to the back porch to teach me how to blow a raspberry. (It was a sanitary issue. I was spraying a lot.) He was patient. I must've spent a good fifteen minutes spraying away before I got my first good fart sound out and then it was just a matter of refining the tone.

By then I was leaning over the railing so the spit wouldn't hit the porch so much, and Dave was helpfully lip-farting to demonstrate proper embouchure, and every time we looked up we could see Venetian blind slats closing, and curtains dropping.

Still, people didn't leave us alone for long. We're friendly, and we have beer and a pickup truck. But today I might have finally done it.

I was outside attending Mr. Studley Windowson with a nice tub of mealworms, and he took one and immediately started scolding, and loud. That's something, not only having a perfect bird on your finger but having him go off like that, and I looked up, and there was a scrub jay close by on a post. Mr. Windowson hates scrub jays and the boy can put out some decibels when he wants to. I admire jays, but I'm getting to where I'd prefer they go somewhere else, ever since the Nuthatch Fiasco of 2016.

So Studley flies off to a wire to scold some more, and Marge joins him, and they're both going off, and I think--recalling Julie Zickefoose and the time she won over a previously hostile family of barn swallows by getting on a ladder and scooping up an enormous black rat snake that was working its way toward their nest--I think, Watch this, Marge, because Marge still hasn't come to my hand, and I go over to the post the jay is perched on and thump it but good.

Studley visits friends too.

And the jay does not even pay me the honor of glancing down. Eventually it gets bored and goes to another post, and I follow it and thump it right up to Kingdom Come. And then I get out my hose and put it on Jet and try to knock it off, but it flies lazily upward, and by this time I'm spraying the hose straight up in the air and every which way. Any neighbor peeking out the window is now watching me spray myself, basically, and nothing else in particular, and running around in circles. And eventually the mildly annoyed jay flies off. Meanwhile, Marge and Studley are still going nuts.

Then I see the jay is poking around the neighbor's arborvitae. Marge even takes a dive at the jay, and then the arborvitae explodes with birds, all of them screaming their tiny chickadee heads off, and I see the jay is actually chasing a flying bird, and I think No, no, not Studley, and I haul ass over there--I am now in my neighbor's yard--and I see the jay actually bearing down on two flying chickadees, not two feet behind them, and I don't know if they're Studley and Marge or the junior Windowsons, and I'm chasing the jay and flapping my arms and yelling NO NO NO at the top of my lungs, and they're making tight circles so I am too and--well, basically, from the standpoint of anyone looking out his window, nobody does any of this stuff unless they're on hallucinogens.

Finally the jay decides to bother someone else and goes away. I think the two birds the jay was almost catching were Studley and Marge drawing attention away from their babies in the arborvitae, but god almighty, how long do they have to keep this up? Their kids are flying, but apparently not well enough, and the sight of a jay almost catching them in flight fills me with dread. They've already made a nest out of pretty much nothing and found food for their brood for weeks and weeks and worked themselves skinny, but the danger never ceases. When do they get to stop worrying?

I've heard it's the same with humans though.

The Three Essentials

Surviving self-quarantine requires a flexibility of spirit. One quickly learns what is essential to living and what can be done without. Dave and I? We're set. We've got beer, toilet paper, and mealworms.

Hell, I'll eat anything. But I won't be caught during nesting season without Studley Windowson's favorite food. Chickadees gotta eat.

In early March, when we were just getting an idea what was coming, a friend did me a favor. "You have enough mealworms? Because you might not be able to go to the store whenever you want." Oh shit! We stocked up. Turns out you can buy mealworms online, of course, just like everything else. "I'll take 500," I typed, and a week later a small box marked LIVE ANIMALS landed on my porch.

I should have remembered you can buy grubs by mail. I delivered plenty such packages. It can be ominous. You get a parcel stamped LIVE ANIMALS and it makes a dry, rattling sound when shaken, you're best off leaving it on the porch, ringing the bell, and running like hell. If they don't see you, you can blame it on your replacement carrier.

This box was fine. I'm not sure what I expected. When I buy them in the store, they come in a ventilated plastic tub with wheat meal. Inside this box was a simple cloth bag with a drawstring, and inside that were my five hundred mealworms, naked and in zippy condition, congregated around a piece of crumpled-up newspaper. I decided to decant them into a cottage cheese container so I could keep them in the fridge. Next to the beer. Refrigerated mealworms are less motivated to beetle up.

They didn't exactly pour out. Lots of them were pretty attached to the newspaper. I got the bright idea of upending the bag over a colander and batting at it until they dropped, and then transferring them to the tub. It was going pretty well. Except the bottom layer of mealworms wouldn't slide out.

Because they were poking themselves through the holes in the colander. From underneath, it looked like the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Why, my friend asked, with that look that people often give me, didn't you use a bowl?

Shit, I don't know. Might as well ask me why, when I'm hopping around trying to get my sock on and I crash to the floor, I don't let go of my sock. People have asked me that. It's the same answer. Shit, I don't know.

I think somewhere in the back of my mind I made a connection between the little ventilation holes you have to have in the worm tub and the colander holes. I don't always think things all the way through. Anyway, after an entertaining five minutes or so of playing Teeny Tiny Adorable One-Finger Whack-A-Mole with my colander, I got them all into the tub. You know, probably.

And Studley is all over it. He and Marge have eggs cooking right now and within a few days it will be Peep City, Start Up The Gravy Train. Meantime, he's hauling worms off to Marge about as fast as we can pinch them out. He's got skills. If we're twirling our fingers in the wheat meal trying to scare up a worm--they hide--he gets impatient, lands on the side of the tub, and spears three invisible worms at once. He's learned to hover like a hummingbird in front of a window if he sees us indoors. He's the best damn bird in three counties and I'll fight anyone who says otherwise.

Chip And Mitzi Put In An Offer

Mitzi

Well, we certainly did not want to discourage Chip and Mitzi Vinebustle, the bushtits, from building a nest right spang in front of our noses. And we'd only get the one shot. In spite of the fact that it takes a month or more to knit a bushtit nest, they don't reuse them the next year, but choose a different location. The amazing thing is they totally could reuse them. The suckers are sturdy. I'm always seeing bushtit nests from previous years. They look like fluff with intention, but they make it right through the winter, and as you may recall, this is tornado country.

Not really. But it's tornado neighborhood. We had a genuine petite tornado a couple blocks away last year and it took some trees down but I'm betting the bushtit nests made it through. What makes them so durable?

The main ingredient is spider web, a.k.a. God's Own Spandex. Chip and Mitzi are in there tugging on the webbing and pulling it every which direction. Usually these nests dangle from tree branches, which means the construction crew has to hang onto the nest with their feets while they're working on it, but Chip is totally using scaffolding. We have the smartest birds! The wisteria is jangling with old beans on strings and they're hanging their nest right in amongst them.

Mitzi up top with construction-grade fluff

That was job one, for us. The beans are left over from last year's pendulous flowers and some warm evening in March they all detonate. They can take your eye out. You can hear them blow up from a block away. Unfortunately not every one has gone off yet this year. There were still three unpopped beans hanging within a foot of the Vinebustles' nest, so we clipped them off. The explosion would be sure to discourage any prospective fuzzy homeowner and that's if it doesn't blast them into the street.

It's possible that bushtits have enough equanimity to shrug off exploding wisteria beans, though. They don't mind us too much. And they're not real fussy. The Literature states that the location of the nest in a given tree "tends to be from 3 feet to 100 feet" off the ground. Tends? That's like saying your average American tends to live somewhere between sea and shining sea.

The Literature also says that the tits incorporate feathers, fur, and downy plant matter to camouflage the outside of the nest. That way nobody will notice a foot-long fuzzy sock with a bustle of bushtits flying in and out of it all day long. Because once Chip and Mitzi invite the whole family back in, there are going to be lots of bushtits, and they never stop talking, either. It'll be as quiet as a preteen slumber party. Everyone wants a turn. Let ME sit the eggs! No, let ME! MOM! It's MY turn! Pip pip pip! No fair! SCOOT OVER!

Chip on his scaffolding

Camouflage? Please. They might as well go for a snappy argyle.

The extra helper tits are referred to (in The Literature) as "supernumeraries," and yes, that is the same term used for extra nipples on people. It's a little dismissive. The implication is that you really don't need all those bushtits. They're superfluous. But bushtits never find each other superfluous. They all find each other equally swell and they're all super excited about making new ones.

So among the things I'm looking forward to here is the arrival of the Louis Tiffany drapes Mitzi has on order, and the day the sock will bulge and bop with essential birds, cozying up in the feather lining. There won't be a kid jiggling his bag of marbles who will be any happier than me.

Meet My Tweetheart: Studley D. D. D. Windowson

I have mealworms. Let the seduction begin.

I have mealworms, two industrious chickadees, and a box of beebling baby birds at the goober stage, all ready to assemble. Marge and Studley Windowson did find the mealworm stash near the suet feeder on the other side of the house, or someone else did, but still I yearned for intimacy. I did not want to attract scrub jays. I gave it some thought. The mealworm store lady probably couldn't guess how much time and care I was willing to devote to this project. I cracked open the window close to the birdhouse. When I was certain only my chickadees were around, I eased a worm out onto the windowsill. Nothing happened. But when I turned my head for a moment--okay, I went to the toity--it was gone.

The next day I edged my palm out onto the sill with a mealworm in it. Studley definitely saw it. Studley definitely wanted it. He made feints at my hand, hovering. Then he landed on the sill, weighed his responsibilities against his fear, stabbed at the worm and rocketed off like he'd swatted a tiger's nose on a dare. A half hour later he was landing on my finger. Then on Dave's finger. On two hearts at once.

They say there are wormholes in space-time. Portals to other universes. I was already smitten, but it wasn't until the next day that my entire soul tipped into that gravity well. I was outside weeding and stood up to stretch, and there came a flibbet of wingbeats, and there was Studley, on a twig eight inches from my face. He tilted his head, back and forth, sent me one bright black eye, then the other. And I fell through the mealwormhole into Studley's world.

I wasn't anywhere near his window. And I was wearing a hat. But he knew me. Had he been looking at me for years, even as I was looking at him? He's paying attention, that's for sure. Dave stands in the garden with his hands relaxed at his sides and a small grown bird tucks into the cup of his fingers. I get out of my car and a bird lights up the closest branch, and dips over to my hand, his feet as important and small as punctuation. He doesn't weigh any more than a held breath.

Marge hasn't taken the plunge. That's okay. I worry about habituating Studs to people, although he's only stalking Dave and me, but he did land on neighbor Anna's teacup. It's white, just like the ramekin I carry mealworms around in. Maybe it's because I've zoomed in on so many photos of Studley, but even now, when I see him through the window, he seems larger than he really is. Substantial, even. He's not. He wouldn't tip a scale with a peanut in the other pan. He is a tiny, tiny bird. But he's smart.

He's damn smart. He's probably known me for years before discovering I'm useful. When I'm too slow to get him a worm, he knocks the hat off my ramekin and helps himself. He goes off to a branch to subdue it for a baby's gullet, whap whap whap. When we call it a day and go inside, he figures out where we are in the house and hovers at that window.

He knows when beer-thirty is.

I know what he likes me for. But is it love?

I want to get this right.

The sober voices say all love is self-interest. The sober voices are measured in their assessment. They manage risk. Keep their own hearts on a short lead, safe from disappointment.

I choose headlong.

Because I don't know just where a love story begins. But maybe love is the name of the charged ether that joins our worlds. I do know I've got the trust of the smartest, bravest, most valiant chickadee in the whole world, a world that can be frantic, and grabby, and barren. Does he feel a lift in his little gray chest when he sees me? Does he love me too? It might not matter. I've got enough love for both of us.

Pin lovingly fashioned by Amy Weisbrot, amyweisbrot@gmail.com

A Love Story: Tweet One

Who knows where a love story begins?

The best ones don't always start with the precision of Cupid's arrow. Some take time. And sometimes you can fall in love without even knowing someone's name. In this case, I had a name. But I wasn't sure who to attach it to.

Marge and Studley Windowson were more of a concept at first. True, I did have a pair of authentic chickadees and a house to put them in. But I didn't know if it was the same pair every spring. I didn't know which one was Marge and which one was Studley. I didn't even know how they knew. I think they just did what felt natural and then waited to see who the egg dropped out of. Strictly speaking, this is not the case. I read up: the female scouts the nest site and puts the mattress together while the male brings around snacks. So I knew who was who while Marge was hammering away in the nest box, but then as soon as they were both on a branch I was all befuddled again.

Fortunes change. Some years they blasted in with 5,000 bugs a day and baby birds came out. Some years they took off and left their eggs unloved. One year they were aced out by nuthatches. It's always something.

But then last year one of them showed up with a bum foot, and it turned out to be Studley. Brave Studley curled his swollen toes up in his belly feathers and devoted his days to supporting Marge any way he could think of. He parked on a nearby twig with his head swiveling for danger. He chased away smaller birds and hollered at the rest. When he came back this spring, with his missus, and minus two toes, I about lost my mind with joy. I wanted to take up trumpet. The cups are still rattling in the cupboards.

The trouble is, there's always trouble. It's harder to go from an egg to a journeyman bird than you might think. There are wasps. Mites. Other birds can't be trusted. Several of my neighbors are devoted to seeing that their cats can express their wild nature, and my yard is where they like to do it. And the tree that used to shade the Windowson residence has only a cowlick of leaves remaining. If the eggs don't get poached by a critter they could get poached, period. I learned how to reconstruct the nest box to keep it cool, but too late to avoid disturbing sweet Marge. Fortunately, it hasn't gotten hot yet.

But once the bug and grub train gets rolling, it'll be Grand Central around here. By the time the nestlings are about ready to fly away, Marge and Studley will be hauling in groceries about once a minute, dawn to dusk. You'll never see a stronger work ethic. Last year their brood failed. I wanted dearly to help.

"Mealworms," I told Dave, who reminds me of Studley.

We took off for the mealworm store.

What I wanted to do, I explained to the mealworm store lady, was crack the window open and dispense mealworms from my windowsill. I'm right there a couple feet away from the bird house. Maybe they'd even take them from my hand, I said, all fizzy with the possibility.  I once spent a half hour still as a statue with sunflower seeds in my hand and snagged two indelible seconds with a pine siskin. And of course I've had gray jays land on me. If you wear a suit made out of cereal, a gang of gray jays will strip you naked in nothing flat.

The mealworm store lady frowned. You don't want to attract scrub jays, she said. If you have a suet feeder on the other side of your house, you could hang a mealworm feeder underneath it and your chickadees will find it right away.

That felt less personal. But the image of a scrub jay slicing through the air with a fuzzy new nuthatch reopened a gash in my memory. I did not want to attract jays.

But I did buy the mealworms.

To be continued. This post and the next are dedicated to Julie Zickefoose and her wide-open heart.

The CHIRP! Of Love Is In His Face

This is a fact. Dave has a history of being dive-bombed by birds. There are many reasons this could happen, but the primary one is that birds are shitty judges of character. Dave is not a threat to birds. Any bird should be able to read it in his face, but apparently his face is too far off the ground for their comfort. I can walk right next to him and they'll go for his head every time.

But until this week, we'd never seen him get threatened by a hummingbird.

Our local Anna's hummingbirds do an awesome courtship display that involves flying up to the stratosphere and then arrowing down at warp speed, pulling up a the last second before *splat*, and then zooming back up again. Moreover, there is a tremendous CHIRP! sound right there at the bottom end of the flight, coming in fact from the bottom end of the bird. Quite recognizable. Whenever we hear it, we look straight up to locate the aerobat and watch him do it again. He pulls out of his dive right at about eye level from a prospective mate, who is observing from a twig. It's attention-getting.

This time we heard the CHIRP! just off Dave's shoulder. And--we checked--there was no female hummingbird in sight. We stood still. We waited. And sure enough, a half minute later, that hummingbird swooped down within a foot of Dave's left ear.

He was impressed, but not enough to have sex with a hummer.

So we don't know what was going on. It felt threatening.  It felt like the bird was trying to chase Dave off, not get Dave off. But who knows? Either Dave looks like another male threatening his territory, in which case we would assume it would fly straight at his hat, and not do a courtship display. Or, he finds Dave very attractive, and he would like to have three seconds of sweet hummingbird bliss on some suitable orifice, several of which come to mind.

Because as far as I know, male hummingbirds do not defend the nest. They have nothing to do with the nest. They defend their own territory of flowers and hope to entice a girl into their territory and chase off rivals and go to considerable trouble for that three-second wham-bam and then it's Sayonara, Sis, and good luck with the kids. So although other kinds of birds might try to discourage Dave from getting near their nests, the male hummer has gotten all he wants out of the relationship and is back to looking out for Number One.

That leaves attraction as the only other possibility. Something about Dave appeals to a male Anna's hummingbird. The male makes that tremendous noise during his courtship display with just his tail feathers and maybe he senses a kindred spirit in Dave.

All alone and feeling blue, and green, and yellow, and...

But the ability to make remarkable noises from your tail end isn't much to go on in a relationship. Sure, it worked for us, but we're a special case.

We should ask Anna. It's her hummingbird. Anna Masséna, the Duchess of Rivoli, was probably pretty hot. At least she was all the rage in the ornithological community. Her husband, the Duke of Rivoli, was an amateur ornithologist, which is to say he had an enormous dead bird collection. John James Audubon took a fancy to her too, but it was another ornithologist who thought to name the hummingbird after her. Audubon was probably doing this long involved courtship thing and making a gigantic bird painting for her, and then René-Primivère Lesson swoops in all CHIRP! and says "Ma chérie, I give you zees hummingbaird." No one knows what the Duke of Rivoli was doing all this time, but apparently not defending his territory.

Marge and Studley In Da House!

Studley April 2019

Marge and Studley Windowson are back again and I am so relieved.

It was no sure thing my chickadees would be back in the nesting business. At least not in the box Dave set up for them outside my window. Last year and the year before they made a go of it but didn't produce any working chickadees. And that's a heap of trouble to go through for nothing.

Last year she had a good start on the nest inside the box and then disappeared when the wasps showed up. Without much hope of success, I took down the box and removed the wasp nest that was hanging down like a chandelier from the ceiling. It was off-putting to me, and I'm certain Marge felt the same way, although she and Studley are made of stouter stuff than I am. A wasp or two came by after I absconded with their sculpture and decided the neighborhood was a little too iffy for them, and they moved on. Amazingly, Marge came back to check on things, found the chandelier gone, and resumed work on the nest. But some time before the eggs hatched, they abandoned it. I don't know why.

Studley April 2018

And yes, it is truly Marge and Studley. I will hereby admit I called them Marge and Studley for years without being utterly certain it was the same pair. Chickadees don't veer off the template much. You see one chickadee, you can kind of write the book on all the others. But last year Studley showed up with a bum foot. It was pink and swollen, and over the course of a couple months it looked like pieces of it fell off. The only thing I can think of is he narrowly escaped a cat. And I think I know which cat.

2018

This year his foot is nice and gray like it's supposed to be, but the toes aren't the right length and two of them are missing claws. When he lands on the nest box hole with his right foot, his left foot sort of slides down the side, for a lack of grabbiness. But he perches just fine, and that's mostly what he's doing now. He's keeping watch on a stubby branch while Marge works on putting the mattress together. And he's taking it seriously. His head turns every which direction and when he spots an intruder he gives it what-for. Mostly he scolds, but if there's a smaller bird, he'll chase it off. That means the Lesser Goldfinches are on the run for sure, and so are the bushtits. The bushtits don't really act scared, to be honest. He might aim at one and dislodge it and then they all fly off in a bunch, but they're all "Oh, are we going this way now? Fun! Whee whee whee!" Still, it has to puff out Studley a bit to rout fifteen birds at once.

2019

Scrub jays, whole other thing. If you could scare off a scrub jay by going dee dee dee at it, there'd be a lot of terrorized jays around here, but you can't. I don't frankly know what would scare a scrub jay. I used to like them before one made off with my nuthatch baby on its maiden flight, and now I'm a little peeved. I thought I'd help out Studley when a jay landed outside the window and I opened up the window and went all boogah boogah on its ass, and all it did was size up my eyeballs for spearing.

I worry about Marge and Studley though. I'm going to help out as much as I can this year. I'm going to buy some mealworms, which I've never done, and I'm going to put them on my windowsill for them. I'll try to rig up a parasol because the cascara tree has lost most of its leaves and I don't want the eggs to cook. I'm going to be very stern with the scrub jays. I'm going to aim a fire hose at the neighbor's cat at every opportunity. The neighbor said that was okay with her, not that I asked first. Sadly, it's considered a social blunder to fire-hose your neighbor.

Studley and Marge and the rest of us, we're all in the same boat. I despair of living with a ringside seat to the next great extinction event. I despair for the beautiful babies my friends and family are still cooking up, and I know they're due for troubles our ancestors could never have foreseen. I can scream and shout and fight with people on the internet and write post cards to my congressmen and most of the time--maybe all of the time--it's not much better than standing on my branch and going dee dee dee. But if Studley is still willing to fight the good fight with his bum foot, I can do it too.

The Marge And Studley Show: What Now Edition

Well, you just never know, and this whole eight-year enterprise in chickadee rentals has been one long exercise in just never knowing. Through it all, our admiration of chickadees has only increased, along with our own humility and frailty in the face of adversity. This is life, and life has its ups and downs and sudden screeching halts to it.

It started with the bird box Dave built according to Google directions, with its dimensions exactly yea-by-yo, and its freakishly specific drop-depth, and its entry hole precisely one and a quarter inches, per spec. And when we scored authentic chickadees with it, we were pretty chuffed. After all, how many rotten tree cavities are there around here with those exact requirements? Could Nature even pretend to compete with the mad skills of Dave? Clearly we had elevated the housing stock in the area and we were prepared to be the very best chickadee landlords we could be.

Nuthatch Fiasco...

But it's been one thing after another. The first few years we achieved invisible chicks, judging by the activity and the cheeping and whatnot, but we had to take it on faith. Then one year everything got started on schedule and the nest was abandoned. That was followed by the Year of Dead Chicks and Punctured Eggs. Then there was the dreadful Nuthatch Fiasco of '16, the likes of which I hope never to see again. Those nuthatches were as earnest as they could be but nothing went right for them at all.

Which brings us to this year, when I have been terribly excited by the prospect of monitoring Marge and Studley whilst actually knowing which was Marge and which was Studley, because Studley has a bum left foot. And no sooner does Marge start putting her mattress together than they both go away. Instead there are wasps.

...of 2016

So I haul the box inside for a look and unscrew the top and there's a small active wasp nest hanging from the ceiling like a chandelier. Marge's mattress looks to be nearly done, but there's no Marge. The Windowsons like to eat bugs but wasps are too spicy. I scraped off the wasp nest and re-hung the box after waiting a day to befuddle the wasps. I also took down the hummingbird feeder in case that was attracting them. Ten seconds after I shut the window a wasp came back to the house.

And maybe he was just trying to figure out what happened to his nice sculpture and he'd go away and pout. But how to get Marge back? Staging? Hanging a little picture of Marge's grandma? Laying in some potpourri that smells like chocolate chip cookies?

Besides, what's next? A plague of parasites? Hordes of Huns in hawk suits? Interference from the neighbor's Wi-Fi? Will it turn out that the Mercury in Retrograde crap affects only gullible humans and chickadees?

Odds are Marge and Studley are already off looking for new digs. I wouldn't blame them. We had a working cascara tree when we first put up the house. Now it's ninety percent dead and the birds like that too, but there aren't many leaves left and the birdhouse gets a lot more sun. I'd already thought about hanging an umbrella above it. No one wants to try to hatch a poached egg. How much intervention do our little friends need?

When you make the perfect bird house you like to think you're providing something for the community, but that's just what you tell yourself. The chickadees will figure something out. We have the box one foot away from our window because we want to watch. We put out a seed feeder and hang suet because we want to watch. But birds can share diseases at a feeder. Beyond hosing cats and planting natives and leaving seed pods to ripen, maybe we shouldn't be doing anything at all.

But. We want to watch.

One Foot Away

My pal Julie Zickefoose is a world-class noticer. One of the cool things you can do if you're a world-class noticer like Julie is you can learn things that nobody else knows yet. It's not like everything knowable is out there on the web somewhere already, ready to be rolled out on casters.

Ornithologists like to follow individual birds to see what they're up to, where they've been, and where they think they're going this time of night, Missy. They do this by nabbing them in nets and sewing little tags in their underwear. Sometimes they nab the same bird in subsequent years and eventually they know how old they are without having to saw into their tiny legs and count the rings. Or maybe someone else nabs them 10,000 miles away and we know how far they flapped for fruit, and then later know they came right back to the same original dang tree to nest. Cool stuff, although it's a long shot you're going to learn anything about any particular bird. It takes a lot of luck with your nabbing.

But Julie pays fierce attention to her own homies. Sometimes it's easy for her to recognize them--a doe whose eyes are hooked up crooked, for instance, or a blue jay with missing feathers or a mustache. But she's so good at paying attention that she doesn't need anything that obvious. She can tell critters apart because of how they ack. One bluebird will distinguish himself from the flock by his tendency toward solipsism, for instance, which gives him--to Julie's observant eye--an air of skepticism that sets him apart. She'll not only know which cardinal winks, but whether it's an affectionate or conspiratorial wink. Probably affectionate. She goes out on a limb for them, as it were.

Even I can do it if it's easy enough. We have a crow a couple miles away with two white tail feathers and we've gone back for three years to check on him, and he's always in the same tree. We think it's right handy of him to be so recognizable. And I have also learned some things, by noticing, that are not in the books. For instance: robins fart. The literature says they don't, but they do, and I've seen 'em do it. But mainly I can't pick out individuals in a flock. Marge and Studley Windowson, my chickadees, to take an example, are i-stinkin'-dentical. They don't even know who they are until an egg drops out of one of them.

UNTIL THIS YEAR! GREAT NEWS! I can tell Marge and Studley apart!

SHITTY NEWS! It's because Studley's got a bum foot!

I saw him a few weeks ago and thought he was feeling po'ly. He was all flopped over and fluffed out on a twig the way birds get when they're sick. But he flew off for sunflower seeds like anything, and ate, and flew up into tall trees, and generally acted fine. Later I saw him checking out our bird house and could see that one foot was all balled up in a little knob and he had to hang from the other one.  Marge was inside hammering away on her nest. We'll trust The Literature that the female builds the nest, and that's how I know Studley's the one with the crumpled gam. And now I can really observe who does what for the next month and a half. I'm very excited.

Last year I thought the neighbor cat Sid had gotten Marge or Studley because the nest had been abandoned, and Sid had been stalking them for a while. But maybe Sid only got hold of Studley's foot. And that put him down for the count for last year's brood, but he's back in the pink now. Anyway, Sid is dead. He got run over by a car, which is really sad news for his personal human, but really good news for everyone else around here.

Dearly Beloved

I was minding my own business until the crows started up, and then I decided to mind theirs. You get a little group of crows all going off at once this time of year, and odds are pretty good that somebody's cat needs skedaddling. By the time I walked outside, the racket was tremendous. And there, in the sky, was a gyre of at least a hundred opinionated crows. It was something.

"What is that?" my neighbor said.

"I'm not sure. But it's something."

"It sure is," he said.

A dogwalker came down the alley and looked up. "Wow, that is really something," she said, confirming our guess. The crows went round and round and round. They were circling above Sumner Street, just to the north. My neighbor Gayle poked her head out of her door with a look of abject horror.

"What are they doing, Murr?" Gayle is terrified of birds. Even the tweety variety. It might have been an early Hitchcock exposure. This was more than she could tolerate. She knows I like birds and, like other people who know even less about them than I do, she considers me an expert.

"I don't know, Gayle. But isn't it something?" Everyone agreed that that was exactly what it was.

An August Crow

Thing is, I have acquired a bit of bird knowledge. I've done some readin', and some writin', and I've also done some simple observin', resulting in what I consider reliable enough lore, even if I've never read it anywhere. And what I know about our crows is they go downtown to roost in the evening most days of the year, and they get together in nice raucous packs to do it, but they don't do it during nesting season. They stick around and jam stuff in their kids' front ends to get them to shut up for a second. That's what's happening now. A little later, in August, the adults will molt and look like shit for a few weeks. Then when they're all snappy again they gather the kids and hit the roosting scene downtown. This is too early for that. I briefly considered the possibility that there was a dead cow on Sumner Street, but rejected it. Even though that would have been a Life Cow for my yard list.

I settled on the possibility that one of the crows got into a can of malt liquor and started feeling a lot better about her lot in life, and then someone else showed up. "Go ahead, Harriet," Millie would say, "one little sip isn't going to kill you. Let the men feed the kids for a minute." Millie always thought Harriet had kind of a stick up her ass, to tell you the truth.

Harriet beaks away at the can and starts to feel kind of good too. "I mean, it's brawwk brawwk brawwk all day long, am I right? And I told the little shit, pick up your own damn walnut. It's right there in front of you. Put it in your face." And Millie is all "You know it, girl," and then the whole block shows up, and everyone's going on and on about the entitlement kids seem to feel these days, and would the world come to an end if the girls just checked out for a little while? Fine and dandy to get all that help with building the nest but it wouldn't kill those eggless wonders to take over all the feeding for a lousy half hour.

And so on.

I mentioned my theory later to my friend Margie. "Crow funeral," she said briefly.

Oh. Well, crumb. Maybe so. Margie's husband had once plunked a crow with a BB gun and then their dog pulled the stuffing out of it in the street, and, she said, the crows showed up from miles around to circle and complain. And they didn't forget, either. They harassed him and the dog every time they came outside for years. Windshield wipers fell off their truck, roof shingles began appearing in their yard, their home insurance lapsed when the annual bill failed to appear, and their credit rating mysteriously tanked. Don't mess with crows.

I looked up "crow funeral" and it's a thing. Scientists decline to characterize the crows' behavior as "grieving," preferring to assume instead that the crows are merely assessing what could possibly have gone wrong with the deceased crow, so as to avoid a similar fate themselves.

Horse poop. Scientists are so afraid of anthropomorphizing that they refuse to entertain the most obvious hypothesis. And these suckers were not investigating an unexplained death. They're crows. If they were doing that, there'd have been a chalk line around the body, somebody would have a pipette and test tube, someone else would have conducted a test for lead, and the one that looks most like Peter Falk would say, "Excuse me, ma'am, I don't want to be a bother. Just one more thing..."

That's just a fact. Could have been any one of them. They all look like Peter Falk, in August.

Cats Just Want To Have Fun

When I was a kid, I found a baby robin on the ground. I got the standard rescue equipment: a shoebox, some Kleenex, and a worm to be named later. Then I went to look for the worm in our compost pile. We had a compost pile because Dad was a liberal.

But I was squeamish about worms. I gripped it best I could and dangled it over the gaping chick, but the worm veered away at the last moment and I freaked out and dropped it and it went squirming around the little bird's feathers and I ran off with the willies. I don't remember if anyone intervened but I suspect the rehab effort resulted in a backyard burial.

What did I know? I know I thought one big worm would be quite enough for a little bird, but that's not actually true. I know this because of our chickadees Marge and Studley Windowson, and because of my friend Julie Zickefoose, who keeps getting wheedled into taking care of baby birds because she knows how. If you're going to make an entire bird out of the little goober that emerges from the shell, and fast, you need to really shovel in the groceries. Julie reports that your basic baby bird needs to be fed every half hour all day long for weeks, which is quite the imposition on an adult human with other stuff to do. Marge and Studley, who are likely to have four babies going at once, are bombing into the nest box every other minute with bugs, all of which they had to find themselves. It's exhausting. The year the weather went all wonky and the bugs were scarce, both of the Windowsons looked like shit. They ran themselves skinny.

The skinny year

It's a really big production. Months. Even before you get the eggs going, there's this elaborate nest to make out of grasses and stuff all woven together perfectly without using any fingers. That takes weeks. There's a little cup in the middle of it that has fluffy material like fur worked in special, so as to be cozy. Then come the eggs and the incubation period, during which Studley has to find double the usual amount of food to feed himself and Marge, and then the truly heroic business of cramming bugs into the chilluns all day long. Every year, I am immensely proud of them.

Marge and Studley are Dave's particular favorite little buddies. Well, and everyone who looks like Marge and Studley, which is basically all of the chickadees. He it was who built the nest box for them. We have had our pets--three, including two happy cats who have been advised they are invasive species, and are not allowed to stalk birds. The chickadees are the closest wild items that might qualify as Dave's pets. He loves them.

This year everything was right on schedule. The nest was started in early April, incubation a few weeks after that, and then, in mid-May, both Marge and Studley were flying in and out of the box. I opened my window in case I could hear peeping, but I couldn't. It takes a few days for it to become audible from my window. And then, that soon, activity ceased. I never saw both Marge and Studley at the same time. Finally Marge, or possibly Studley, flew to the nest box with a caterpillar, looked inside, hopped in, and hopped out again a minute later, still with the caterpillar. And flew away, and never came back.

When the flies showed up, I had Dave take the box down and we looked inside. The nest was perfect. You could still see the cup with the fuzz around it, almost in pristine condition, because nobody got big enough to stomp it down. There were four tiny desiccated bodies.

My birder friend Max said this is what happens when one of the parents dies.

CatBib

I have two neighbors whose cats roam my yard. The cats' names are Anjali and Sid. Like Marge and Studley, they get to have names because someone cares about them. Personally. Both neighbors know how I feel about outdoor cats. They're both apologetic. I'd even gotten an email from one of them when she decided to start letting her cat out. "I can't keep Anjali in anymore," she said. "She wants to be outside so badly. But let me know if there's anything I can do to keep her from hurting your birds. Anything."

"You could put a CatBib on her," I said. I'd even bought a dozen to give away. "It's highly effective. It doesn't keep them from moving or climbing, or shitting in my tomato patch, but it interferes with that last pounce when they're hunting."

"Oh, that thing looks weird. I would never hang that on her collar," she said.

"Or you could give her one of these wide, bright collars to wear. It's not quite as effective, but it makes it a lot easier for the birds to spot them," I said.

"Oh, no, I couldn't make her wear that. It's so undignified."

Not long after, I found the tag and collar of the other woman's cat. Sid. It was directly underneath my bird feeder. The chickadees in particular like to take their seeds to the low branches of the nearby azalea. I returned the collar to the owner. She looked remorseful, and yet, somehow, helpless.

I don't have four new chickadees. Sid doesn't have his collar. But he and Anjali have their entertainment. And their dignity. And maybe they have Marge, too.

This is personal, now.

Jammin' In The Hood

I'm walking outside, and there, on top of my topiary salamander, is a tiny plant that looks an awful lot like one I'd put in my flower boxes, only sadder and upside-down. And on the sidewalk, there was yet another, roots-up. Huh. Two of my five flower boxes have been raided and their contents strewn about. It looked like the work of adolescents in need of some impulse control applied to their pimply butts.

I suspect this even though I know there are miscreant corvids in the 'hood who make a point of pulling up shallow-rooted little plants. They are looking for nesting material and they don't really care all that much if it cost $3.99 for a 4-inch pot, especially the scrub jays, who can be downright disrespectful that way. But usually they'll just take one or two plants out of the boxes. They won't strip them clean.

Still, it is nesting season. Crows make a big ol' stick nest and line the center portion with nice soft material, and the nursery doesn't call them "bedding plants" for nothing. And of the eight plants that had been uprooted, I only found four plants. So maybe a crow did pull them out and brought them back home. And half of them didn't make the cut. "Too matchy-matchy," says the female, back at the nest. Or, "Again with the purple?"

We've got a couple good working crow nests within sight of our yard. One of them has been emitting a raspy bleat brraaak brraaak brraaak every ten seconds for days now. Periodically the bleats speed up, and sure enough an adult is circling the tree, and then you see him land and you can hear something being jammed down a throat, brraaak brraaak bluph bluph blaKACK KACK KACK, and there's a fifteen-second pause, and then it's back to your regularly scheduled bleating. I get a kick out of it. I  think: this is how nature provides for the helpless babies in the world. It makes them totally obnoxious and they never shut up and all anyone can think to do is go out and find something to jam in the noise hole.

Then I read up on the crow manufacturing process. And it turns out it's not the baby up there making the racket. It's the adult female. And she does this even before laying any eggs. She doesn't shut up until the eggs pop out, at which point there's a cone of silence over the nest so as not to alert predators; or else because she finds the egg thing too astonishing for words.

And all this time I thought Dave fed me because he loves me.