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.

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.

From Loogey To Fuzzball

Dave the nuthatch finally quit coming back to the nest box, finally quit beeping from the branches, finally moved on. He'd help raise at least two babies, and at least one of them might not have been impaled on a scrub jay. There might have been more. Don't know.

Or I didn't know, until last week, when I saw Marge and Studley Windowson, our chickadee buddies, checking out the box. It seems late for them to start a brood, but I got excited. I called Dave the Man, whose job it is to clean the nest box. He took it out to the patio and uncombobulated the roof of the box and looked in. Bunch of sawdust and wood shavings. Nothing like the soft mattress the Windowsons set up every year. And what's that?

A dead baby?

Five dead babies? Five. All feathered out but smaller than the two that actually left the nest. They were probably one or two days dead by the time the successful ones took off. And now it was over a week later. They hadn't yet turned to goo, but I couldn't tell much about cause of death. Could be a lot of things, I guess. The world, it must be said, conspires against baby bird survival.

But I know who would know. Julie Zickefoose would know. There is no one on this orb who knows more about baby birds than Julie, and that happens to be fact, not hyperbole. That is why she wrote a book called Baby Birds: An Artist Looks Into The Nest. How do you learn so much about baby birds? Why, you monitor their nests, and you slip a hatchling out for a quick watercolor portrait, from nose to nubbin, once a day until they're grown. No, I wouldn't have thought of it either. And neither has anybody else. It's a first. And it happens to be true that if you've taken the trouble of painting something accurately in watercolor, you have observed the living hell out of it. You know stuff.

Julie gets in there, spirits out a little baby to paint, scrubs behind its ears, makes it a mealworm meat sandwich with the crusts cut off, picks up its poopies, checks its math homework, opens up a college fund, and snaps it back in the nest before its real mom has time to do a second count. And she does it every day until they fledge. The changes she records are jaw-dropping. It's like if you have a baby and in twenty days it's bearded, six foot tall, out the door, and already plotting to move back into the basement.

And in the course of this project, she saved the day for many of the broods. One thing I've learned from her book is that it is a sheer miracle any bird ever makes it to adulthood. I may feel real bad about Dave the nuthatch, but these tragedies are happening all the time all over the place. It's a jungle out there.

House sparrows and house wrens are a particular menace. The taxonomists say they're not closely related, but they are: they're in the Asshole Family. They'll go in a nest and spindle the eggs or even perforate the babies just for something to do of an afternoon.

Get Yours Here.

So Sheriff Julie blasts in and routs them. Relocates snakes. Thwarts raccoons. Pulls entire nests out for a quick pop in the microwave to kill mites and puts them back again. It's got to look like a miracle from the birds' standpoint: everybody's all itchy, then the Mighty Hand Of Julie reaches in and removes their bedding and puts it back all spanky clean. Basically, Julie is Bird God. She smites the mites, she visits devastation upon the enemies, and lo, she is with them always, even unto the migration. She doesn't save them all, but it's not like the Bible one has such a great record, either.

So if you want to find out exactly, and I mean exactly, how you can make an entire working bird in a few days starting with an egg the size of a Tic-Tac, and you do--you do!--check out Julie's big, beautiful book. She's got all the portraits of the birds through all the stages from loogey to fuzzball. You will be amazed. Besides, if you buy this book, maybe Julie can top up all those little college funds. And buy herself sumpin' pretty.

Schrodinger's Chickadee

I don't know what's in our chickadee box. Whatever's in there has been packed with bugs and caterpillars, and, lately, as parental exhaustion set in, fat chunks of suet from our feeder.

My friend Julie Zickefoose showed me a working chickadee nest this year; she's like a realtor with the lockbox key. Her eighty acres are maintained with the welfare of birds in mind, so the whole habitat is conducive to baby-bird manufacturing--location, location, location!--but she's also leasing a bunch of nesting boxes for bluebirds and chickadees and the like, and those subsidized birds on her property do not have as much privacy as mine. Dave screwed my chickadee box together solid. Julie's have doors, and she opens them to check on things, after knocking politely first. There was a grass mattress with a hole in the middle and four speckled eggs the size of my little fingernail, and I keep my nails short. The idea is that an entire prospective bird is supposed to come out of each of those little beans. It's pretty implausible. I guess they're all folded up, and by the time they bust out, they look marginally like birds, or at least you could tell them from mice and such, but they also look a lot like loogies. What they don't look like is a going concern.

Poopy diaper

I have seen brand new baby birds before, of course. They're not real impressive, from a survival perspective. They're not go-getters. They're barely differentiated goo in a thin sac that  has all the integrity of a spit bubble. You can make out big goobery eyeballs so you know which end is up. And the parents definitely know which end is up, because the one thing they do have going for them is their giant yellow feed-me holes. This is where the bugs and caterpillars go.

They can just about hold their heads up to get the protein shoveled in, but they're feeble. Then feather bits start piercing their skin from the inside out, and within days they're all itch and bristle and desire. Before a week is out they are actually beginning to preen their new feathers, with good reason. They've opened their eyes and they can see they need sprucing up, because they still look like shit. Fortunately, it's dark in the box, and there is no permanent psychological damage.

The thing is, the little suckers are supposed to be out of the nest in about sixteen days after hatching,

depending on this or that, but for sure they're not supposed to be in there forever, and it's been nineteen days now since we heard the first pitiful peepings of loogie-birds. Mom and Dad have hauled in about a hundred pounds of bugs and nothing's come out but diapers. I don't know if they're the sort of bird that flies okay right off the bat. If they were in a natural tree-cavity they'd have options; could poke their heads out and hop around a little, hang onto a branch or something. But this box is right out in mid-air. Do we need to string up a net?

Worse, I have no idea what's in there. Six baby chickadees? One big scary one? Paula Deen? All I know is if Mom and Dad keep bringing them their dinner every minute, they're not going anywhere. They'll be down there in the rec room with the X-Box and scratching themselves and not even working on their resumes.

Update: one evening the parents began withholding bugs and coaxing them out. I didn't see them emerge, but the next morning we saw a confusion of unkempt chickadees flying around upside down and in loops like Woodstock's friends in Peanuts, and they managed to land okay on everything they blundered into. We are all very proud.