Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Window Biology 101






Somewhere in this house there's proof that I have a biology degree, and although it is now entirely vestigial, I maintain it qualifies me to blather on about chickadees. If Glenn Beck believes having a microphone entitles him to have opinions, I think I'm on solid ground here. I've got biology all over my yard, ants and bees and pollen and slugs, and I could get all facty about any one of those, but I have a chickadee house four feet away from my writing chair and decided to train my biologist skills on that. Here is what I observed.

First thing a prospective pair of chickadees does is poke at each other a little, same as humans. They do this because they look exactly alike. If you're a chickadee and you poke at another chickadee and make it go "dee-dee-dee," you know you have another chickadee there, and not yourself. Otherwise you couldn't tell.

Mating pairs of chickadees are loyal. They stick together because if there were three of them they'd never be able to sort themselves out. We've had the same pair for two years now, and the only reason I know is that our pair have different voices; one of them is much higher pitched, "Oh, Ricky-ee-ee-ee." That's Lucy. Some boy birds court their ladies by puffing themselves up, same as humans. Ricky courts his by bringing her delicious items from the Lepidoptera order. I like Ricky.

After Lucy has consumed every proffered larva in the yard, she and Ricky start hauling in the furniture. They come up with a nice soft green mattress and set up shop in new-chickadee manufacture. After a bit the box begins peeping, and Lucy and Ricky start bringing in grubs at a rate of one a minute all day long. If they collaborated on bringing in one single grub the same mass as their daily accumulation, it would be the size of a sleeping bag. Fledging day is the day the children fly off, and I was very excited to witness this event, not knowing if the birds would appear as little balls of lint and drift to the ground, or show some athletic chops and zig off to a branch. After consulting the literature, I learned that chickadees hatch in two weeks and fledge when your sister comes to town and you have to be somewhere else.

After a certain period of inactivity around the bird box, we tossed out the mattress and scrubbed the floors and put an ad for the place on Craigslist. Before we had any applicants, some chickadees came back and went in and out of the house. I did not observe any new furniture going in. Sometimes one would go in and stay for quite a while. Sometimes one would hang out on a branch and get all fluffy and flappy and another one would pop a grub in its mouth. I was confused, and consulted my guide. Oh joy! Brand-new baby chickadees are, helpfully enough, identical to every other chickadee in every respect. I have checked this fact very thoroughly.

My friend Julie Zickefoose is so absorbent that she readily recognizes individual birds and can reel off the names of their grandchildren. They pop in every year to say howdy and thanks for the seeds, and she inquires after their health and puts a little something away for their tiny college funds. If Julie were here, she would probably point out any number of imaginary ways these chickadees do not resemble each other, and you can believe her and her fancy degree and years and years of close observation or no. I'm telling you there isn't a dime's worth of difference between them. They've got Cute nailed down and haven't seen fit to tamper with the template. It is only my rigorous scientific training, four years of it undertaken while simultaneously studying alcohol, sex and hallucinogens, that allows me to draw any conclusions about these clones.

To wit: it isn't Mom and Dad coming in to egg up. It's the kids. They've come back, they're hanging out, they've drug in a beanbag chair and a game of Twister and they're checking to see if there's anything in the fridge. They have no plans and no inkling they've worn Mom and Dad down to a nubbin and they're still asking for sandwiches. They're getting them, too. If Lucy and Ricky don't put their adorable feet down, those kids will never get a job.

22 comments:

  1. There must be some new flyers, because my sister was just in town, and I had to be somewhere else. I had no idea this was a requirement of fledgelings.

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  2. Baby violet-green swallows fledge under similar time parameters when you leave your observation post and take a quick 5 minute shower. I know they waited till they heard the water running and then made a break for it.
    Jack Sparrow, schnauzer and avid birdwatcher was the only witness. He normally specializes in robins, but these guys have been disturbing his snoozing for day, so he was on the alert.

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  3. Carolina wrens fledge from a hanging basket you've photographed at least ten times a day for two weeks, just as you are scheduled to be interviewed on WOSU and have to be on the tetherphone.

    Our bluebird chillun' do the same sort of pop in and check the old bedroom routine in the fall. It's very cute. BTW I agree with all your observations and your scientific method is pretty much exactly like mine.

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  4. Unless one bird is red and about the size of a nectarine and another bird is blue and roughly the size of a basketball, I have a very difficult time telling them apart. They all look pretty much the same to me, having a couple of wings, a beak, two legs and some feathers. So this post is helpful to me in the sense that it explains birds in everyday language that I can understand, assuming of course that anybody really understands the family dynamic, which I doubt very much.

    Also, I think it's incredible that a woman named Murr Brewster has a friend named Julie Zickefoose. What are the odds of that happening, even in an infinite universe?

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  5. (Mike, remember the old radio show, Murr and Zick's Birding Hour? Oh. Well, that's probably because I just made it up.)

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  6. Dale, I would've believed you and Googled it if you hadn't given it away so fast. I'm just that dumb. I mean, it sounds plausible. Hi, and welcome to this edition of Murr & Zick's Birding Hour.

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  7. You all have your fun--Zick and I are going to line up sponsors.

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  8. Gosh, there is almost nothing I love more than watching birds build and fledge and reading your blog at the end of a long hot day of gardening, and Julie's blog before a long hot day of gardening.

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  9. I'm afraid Lucy and Ricky's little love nest is done for now. Those kids aren't leaving.

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  10. I have a lady gold finch and her gent come feed from my sunflowers outside my studio window everyday. This is their second year. What with the clear wing moths and errant hummers feeding at the butterfly bush just outside as well I have never-ending distractions. If they nested I'd be worthless for a month. They do give me the courtesy of dressing differently, though, so I can tell them apart.

    Stefanie

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  11. It's the bush tits that cause me to stand on the sidewalk gape-mouthed. I can't quite put my finger on what's so darned fascinating about those excitable flocks of little, plain gray birds. Pretty soon it's be time for the distraction of the Vaux's swifts.

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  12. Sounds like a Portlander! Andrea, check out "Vaux Swift Poop" under my Poop Posts in the sidebar if you haven't read that already.

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  13. Murr, you're so adorable. I think you could write children's books about bird mating.

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  14. Great read with my morning coffee! Except for giggling, which occasionally delays swallowing. If you can believe this, the six chickadee babies in my nest box fledged the day after I returned from WV. (I'm sure they were waiting for me). A surprise to watch. Zip, no practice, out the peep hole they flew, one-by-one and up to a limb where mom and dad waited with grubby snacks. I couldn't have felt more satisfied if I had raised them myself!

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  15. I'm going back and forth with this in my mind. Should it be Murr & Zick's Birding Hour, or Zick & Murr's Birding Hour? You want to get it right before you start talking about the money.

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  16. MikeWJ, while we're working on sponsorship, I think it may be time for you to write a short story about Murr and Zick. For those not in the know, Mike once wrote a story about Murr and Brewster just because he liked the names. It came out real nice. If it helps, Mike, neither Zick nor I is easy to offend.

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  17. I'm actually considering using your name or some form of it in my new novel. Maybe I can work Zick in, too. Murr & Zick also sound like good names for a cop-buddy movie, now that I'm thinking about it.

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  18. Having just discovered it, I love your blog Murr! I was smiling all the way through this post. Luckily for me, my last birthday, I was able to actually watch my Western Bluebirds fledge an a few days later, some Violet-green Swallows. Yes, I did feel blessed to be able to witness what I had so many times tried to observe previously. How do they usually manage to escape while we're not watching?

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  19. Having just discovered it, I love your blog Murr! I was smiling all the way through this post. Luckily for me, my last birthday, I was able to actually watch my Western Bluebirds fledge an a few days later, some Violet-green Swallows. Yes, I did feel blessed to be able to witness what I had so many times tried to observe previously. How do they usually manage to escape while we're not watching?

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  20. I'm going back and forth with this in my mind. Should it be Murr & Zick's Birding Hour, or Zick & Murr's Birding Hour? You want to get it right before you start talking about the money.

    ReplyDelete
  21. Sounds like a Portlander! Andrea, check out "Vaux Swift Poop" under my Poop Posts in the sidebar if you haven't read that already.

    ReplyDelete
  22. It's the bush tits that cause me to stand on the sidewalk gape-mouthed. I can't quite put my finger on what's so darned fascinating about those excitable flocks of little, plain gray birds. Pretty soon it's be time for the distraction of the Vaux's swifts.

    ReplyDelete