A Visit From Beyond

DooDah is a mess

Ever since Studley Windowson faded out of our lives, I have become a backyard nuisance. I am a pest. I need another personal bird. Every bird out there can sense it and most find it alarming.

The crows are coming along nicely. Dickens and DooDah, along with their occasional companions Auxiliary Dickens and Ancillary DooDah, are accustomed to us and, I'd like to think, well-disposed. They're still a little skittish, but they're no longer so skedaddlish. Without question they show up when we do and project thought-images of peanuts in our direction. That's not the same as landing on us with delicate chickadee teeny-feety perfection and a pure heart, but crows are larger and stabbier, so it's probably for the best. Anyway, we're working it out.

But I can hear a single chickadee chip-note from anywhere in the house. I'll pop right up and run outside with mealworms. My mealworms are getting senile. I've had them for well over a year in the refrigerator and the ones that are still alive might very well be stringy or tough or morose, but they still move around a little. The chickadees hang out in the hibiscus. I approach them like a total creeper. And they don't exactly fly away. They sit in the shrubbery as I approach, and until I get my hand all the way in there they'll stay put and look at me.

Out of pity.

They think about it for a minute, and the first one says to the other, You know, that's getting a little aggressive, and the second one goes Oh, that one's okay, she used to be friends with my dad, and the first one says Kind of stalkerish, though, and the second one is all What's the matter, you scairt? and they discuss it among themselves, and then the first one says Suit yourself, I'm outa here, and the second one, who has held out just a little longer than he really wanted to anyway, says Oh, okay, if you're going, I'll come with you and make sure you're all right.

 

I know at least one of them knows what I've got. I think he is one of Studley's more recent kids. Once last summer I was feeding Studley in the hibiscus and this kid kept getting a little closer and watching very carefully. When he got within a foot of my hand, Studley ran him the hell off. So I'm figuring now that he's not being supervised, he's going to go for it. Any day now.

After all, Studley took a little time at first too. It was breeding time, and he needed a boatload of grubs because of all the beaks to feed, and at first I put a few out on the windowsill. Once he spied them and started looking for them there, I put one on my hand and edged it out. He was wary and then finally went for it like the big brave buttonheaded beauty he was. After that, the clip was off the chip bag. He landed on me, he landed on Dave, and eventually he landed on everyone we knew. Any friend of ours was a friend of Studley's. The man was a total ambassador.

So what I'm thinking is if I can just get this one fellow to give it a whirl, I'll be in 'em. Or a nuthatch. I'd totally be fine with a nuthatch buddy. All of which means I am now spending an unconscionable amount of time standing under the seed feeder like a statue with a hand full of worms, waiting.

Studley was easy to tell from the others. I did get to where I could tell Studley and Marge apart from the back--one of them had a slightly wider white edge to the wings, but I could never remember which was what. Mainly, I knew Studley was the one that landed on me and had a bum foot, and that left Marge for the other.

So now I have at least two standard chickadees loitering around. They're identical. But now there's a new, third kid in town. A distinctive chickadee. It's almost all white on the back. Oh my god.

It's Ghost Studley!

Ode To Joy

The more I know, the less I know.

That's the way it's supposed to work. If you have a question that doesn't lead to way more questions, you're not doing it right.

Take this whole subject of birds. I don't feel like I know much about them, even though the average citizen knows even less. I've accumulated some knowledge. But even the birds I know on a personal level, the ones I've observed closely and avidly, are mysterious.

So I don't know what's been going on with Studley Windowson this year. But it hasn't been a normal year. Just as I think I've got him all figured out, he changes it up. Since I started keeping records a few years back, I've discovered he and Marge start flirting, building the mattress, and sending baby Windowsons down the production line on pretty much the exact same days each year, or they don't miss by much. And whatever I don't observe directly (their front door is inches from my window) I can intuit by the interest level Studley shows in mealworms. That is one fine hard-working bird and provider, and although he will happily consume three or so mealworms himself at a time all fall and winter, there comes a day he flies off with them instead, and that's when you know wooing has begun. The mealworm intake ramps up when Marge is on the nest and he brings her lunch. And when the little Windowson goobers poink out of their shells, he grabs a ride on the Mealworm Express. He's zippeting back and forth all day long from wherever we are to the nest, and even later on he waits to grab three at a whack before he takes off. He looks like a dang puffin, fully herringed.

2011, possibly young Studley

This year, though, I was confused. Seemed like things were going along fine, but he wasn't taking as many mealworms, and at least once I saw him take over twenty of them and stash them in a crape myrtle. Every time I thought he was on schedule, there'd be a pause.

When I trimmed Dave's hair and beard, I hung up a bag of it near the nest box. And although I thought I heard Marge hammering the mattress together at about the right time, I didn't see a lot of activity. Just as I decided they were nesting somewhere else, I'd see one or the other of them pop in and out again. Seemed like the thing was happening, but the day the babies should have pecked themselves out of their shells and started squeaking came and went.

Later I watched Studley go into the house empty-beaked and come out with a soggy worm. I saw that a few times. But well past when there should have been little Windowsons. It was almost as though he was using the nest box as a pantry.

2018, first year with bum foot

He was hanging out in the hibiscus with a younger model, but I think that was a kid from last year. The younger model is very interested in this mealworm thing, having observed Studley score plenty, but every time he got a little closer and looked like he might give it a whirl, Studley ran him off.

And he'd still come by for his own personal worms. Not every day, but pretty often. He looked skinny. He always looks like shit this time of year what with the molt and all, and skinny because he's worked his little wingies to the bone. But I finally concluded he did not have a family this year.

On August first, after a few days' absence, he stopped by the back porch for a few worms. Something made me note the date, which I'd never done before. Something was off. He came by August 2nd. And August 3rd. He hasn't been by since.

Most chickadees don't die of old age, they say. They can max out somewhere around eleven, but most make it only two or three years. Something gets them. I've seen how cautious Studley can be. He is constantly looking around. Hides from hawks. Hides from us, if he sees Tater Cat in our window. And he's got experience. Something nipped off part of his foot. Something took out his tail, last winter, although it grew back. It shows he's either good at this survival business, or just the opposite. One of the things I don't know.

And I don't know how old he is. I was checking back, and chickadees have been renting out the nest box every year since we put it up in 2011. I couldn't tell one from another until the year he hurt his foot. Which makes him at least four, and possibly eleven.

A few days ago, I took down the nest box. Didn't know what I'd find. And what I found was a complete new grass mattress, untrampled, with Dave's beard woven in, and with twelve unhatched eggs. Doesn't seem likely Studley was shooting blanks after all this time. Maybe his sweet Marge met an untimely end. I don't know if a chickadee can die of a broken heart.

I know I can't. I'm still here.

Hawk Up

Studley Windowson, my personal chickadee, and I have had a tight relationship for the past three years, and by this point I can pick out his single "chip" note in a blather of birdsong even when I'm inside and he isn't, which he mostly isn't. (That one time he hopped into the house and landed on my desk didn't work out well for anybody, although it was briefly adorable.) Yes, I can tell Studley's voice just as fast as I can find an errant apostrophe in a page of prose. I generally go to the nearest window and put my finger up for him--so he knows I'm "on it"--and fetch my mealworm container and pop outside.

 

So I was on the back porch the other day dispensing worms for Studley as usual, and as usual he takes one and zips out to the hibiscus to saw it up for himself. He tears it neatly on the perforations. While he was busy doing that I looked up in the sky, because that's what birders do, and I've given up saying I'm not a birder even though I'm not good at it. Clearly I am a birder of some description, or I'd never drive two mph on the highway with my head crammed into the windshield.

 

There was the usual traffic. Three local crows were doing a lazy circle around the Douglas fir next door, a whacket of pigeons went by, the neighbor's Katsura coughed up a spray of goldfinches. And way up high, there was a hawk. Not one of the big fat ones. This was one of the little skinny ones with the long narrow tail, either a Cooper's or a Sharp-shinned, which, for my money, are the same bird. I will never tell them apart, but I can pick out a skinny hawk from a great distance, and I personally know people who don't even recognize chickadees that land on them. I looked back at Studley. He was still sawing away at his worm.

 

I kept an eye on the distant hawk, a dot in the sky. The various species of birds were occupying different layers of air like a living Bird Poster and he was at the tippy top all by himself. I know that hawk can move in a hurry and I'd already decided I would go stand next to Studley in his shrub so I can bat the hawk out of the air if he gets a notion for chickadee nuggets. But then Studs finished his worm, which usually means he's coming in for seconds, only this time he stayed put, and glanced around, and made lots of little noises best represented by punctuation marks. He wasn't going anywhere. The hawk wheeled away and back again and only when he passed over the house and out of sight did Studley dip back for his snack.

What a smart Studley! What a bird! Fully operational crack raptor detection system using eyes the size of poppy seeds. I was so impressed he could pick out a silhouette of a threat from so far away! But I shouldn't be. All the proto-chickadees of yore who couldn't recognize a hawk have long since been nipped out of the gene pool. Still it amazes: I'm sure it must come with the whole original package. They can't be learning this all from personal experience. That would be dreadful. The spark of caution must be in the yolk somewhere.

I don't know if there's a parallel human experience. Most of us seem to be born wired to jump away from snakes. Spiders too. We're born afraid of heights, which is sensible for the wing-deprived. But especially in the last couple hundred years, we've thrown so many layers of comfort and convenience between us and what we need to survive that we couldn't tell a real threat from a horror flick. We poop in the water dish and kick over our kibble bowls. Extinction has to be fictional. But vaccines, antifascists, going gray, and Mercury in retrograde? Scary.

Ending Bird Homelessness

I don't know why it took me so long to think about putting up another bird house. The one Dave built for the Windowsons, for their chickadee manufacturing project, has been no end of fun. I just hauled it down to bleach it for the new rental season and it's starting to show some wear, but it'll be fine. Then I thought: how about if there's another nest box on the other side of the house? We walked down to the Backyard Bird Shop and had us a look.

(By the way, I know a lot of you want to live with lots of space around you, and that's understandable, but there's something to be said for living where you can walk to a Backyard Bird Shop. A library. A grocery store (or three). Hardware store. Brewpub. Another brewpub. Another brewpub. Where was I? So I hope all you country mice are being great stewards of the land or at least not messing it up, but let's hear it for jamming the bulk of humanity into well-planned cities, okay? We're rambunctious and destructive, as a species, so we should keep most of us away from what sustains us.)

Bird house. That's where I was. My eye was immediately drawn to a wall of small bird houses in fabulous colors, and I picked out the little red one and came home with it. I don't expect Marge and Studley to be interested. The hole is an inch in diameter. Chickadees like their holes a quarter-inch larger. Might not seem like a big deal, but chickadees, quilters, and sloppy carpenters are all about the quarter-inch.

Now, I do not know what the little princesses do in the wild when these precise measurements do not pertain to a given tree-trunk. Seems like you could be house-hunting a long time before you find a nice 1-1/4 inch hole. Chickadees aren't major excavators, but they are willing to chip away at a hole in a tree if someone else has already started it or there's a knothole in soft wood, and that's prety amazing, since their pointy parts are only the size of a fingernail clipping.

Anyway, I don't expect a chickadee to want this red house. You need at least some clearance. Seems like it's enough trouble to blast into a hole head-first and somehow apply the brakes inside before hitting the far wall, which is less than five inches away. What I'm looking for here is maybe a wren. We do have a lovely Bewick's wren hanging around. She's got her tail cranked straight up like one of those cats that's super proud of its bunghole. But I'll bet she knows how to flatten it if she's coming in hot. We stuck the house in a tree and put wood shavings in it, per the advice of the Bird Shop maven.

I've heard this before. Chickadees and wrens are cavity nesters and like to work on holes that already have wood shavings in them. The idea is maybe it indicates someone else already used it and lived to tell the tale, or got a good start going on renovations and then ran out of cash and had to bail. According to one website, it "makes the bird feel like it is doing the work of hollowing out the cavity." Awesome! I'm stocking up on gold stars to reward the bird. Maybe a trophy for Participation.

Do we really know this? Did someone put a bunch of sawdust in a nest box and conclude the birds liked it because they took it all out? Have they tried it with crumpled-up newspaper? Mac and cheese? Legos? Get back to me.

A Bad Feather Day

One thing that brings us together in a time we're all supposed to stay apart is we have something in common. We all look like shit. I had finally figured out exactly what length hair I should have, after all these years, and now it's galloping away again and I'm on track for being one of those old stringy-haired hippie ladies. That's okay. I've had decades of practice looking like shit and this sort of thing doesn't ruffle my feathers much anymore. And nothing is going to be done about Dave's hair until we fix the string in the weed-whacker. Also, we need to wait until we're sure nobody's nesting in there.

For a number of people who are not accustomed to looking unkempt (or, gasp, gray) it's an eye-opener. But we're not alone in this. You should see the birds.

Lots of folks are seeing the birds now, and wondering where they all came from. They've been here all along, of course, but only now got your attention. So take a good look: because a whole lot of them are in a state of major disrepair. Which makes them even easier to relate to. The scrub jays aren't used to humility and seem to have lost a little of their verve. Their screeches of menace have gotten a sour lilt to them, more bad attitude than triumph. It used to be Tremble before me! Prepare for thy doom! and now it's more Oh yeah? Something-something your mother, you'll be hearing from my lawyer. The chickadees are too busy to get worked up about how they look. But let me break it to you gently. They look bad.

Really bad.

Feathers are super important for a bird. Most of what they're good at would never happen if they were naked. Flying, staying warm, looking hot for the ladies, it's all about the feathers. Your feathers go to shit, you will soon follow. And feathers wear out. So once a year, or twice for some species, they have to swap out the whole outfit for fresh.

Ducks make a clean sweep of it. Waterfowl in general just drop everything at once and head into quarantine in the middle of the pond until they resprout. Ornithologists like to say they do this to stay safe since they're not able to fly for, like, a whole month. But shame and humiliation could explain it just as well.

The rest of the birds re-up their feather complement more methodically, a few at a time, so they can stay in the air. From the hummingbirds to the crows, everyone's a mess. They're rumpled and linty. If the same thing happened to my sweater, it would skip right past the Goodwill pile and go under the sink with the Lemon Pledge.

I thought I was prepared for Studley's molt. Last year he had a bald spot and patchy cheeks. But this year I was shocked. That vulnerability of baby birds in their pink-goobery stage has always frightened me, until they grow up and develop spark and substance. But it turns out that the right bird outfits, just like ours, can hide plenty. And Studley, poking his head up and around, has revealed that there's not a lot of bird there. He's still a goober with fluff, until the fluff falls out. Please, please, Studdles, feather out! I need the illusion of solidity. I need to imagine you can't be clotheslined by a strand of spider silk. Lordy, dude.

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.

Great Tits!

Social media have allowed us to be so familiar with each other that I sometimes get the same link sent to me by numerous people. "Salamander poop," thirty different individuals might say. "I know who would like a picture of that!"

Recently I was multiply blessed with a link to an article featuring what at first glance appeared to be a jaundiced chickadee standing astride a wombat.

The bird in question was not, however, a chickadee, but a great tit, and it was not so much a wombat as a vole. This does not mean a great tit cannot take down a wombat but they are never in the same continent at the same time, so we have yet to observe it.

Black-capped chickadees like Marge and Studley Windowson are great tits also, maybe the greatest in many ways, but we are not to call them great tits, because that title is taken. Great tits live in Europe and are related to Cinereous Tits and Japanese Tits but not so much Turkestan Tits, although there is controversy. Ornithologists can come to blows over such things.

Coming to blows, however, is not what many people think of when they think of songbirds, preferring to consider them passive packages of good will. They are adorable, sweet-singing, and swell-hearted, we think, and not capable of the sort of predatory violence that will net them a dinner of vole brains.

That is because people generally aren't paying attention to birds at all. Birds are not all confining themselves to striking terror in the sunflower patch. 

Studley Windowson, one of the greatest birds of all time, is no vegetarian. He's delicate with seeds, withdrawing them one at a time and neatly cutting them up for himself before going in for seconds, but hand him a mealworm and he will pin the unfortunate larva down with one foot and tear off segments at the dotted line until he reaches the end.

It's not actually known if the great tit in the photograph took down the vole by itself or if it just happened upon the carcass, but it is known that it pecked into its head for the brains. Brains are the creamy filling in the corpse Twinkie. And they're not even that particular about whether the brain donor is dead or not. It is known that the great tit will prey on hibernating bats, always drilling through to their brains. Evidently bats sleep hard.

Marge, the "little woman"

None of this violence should be any surprise to anyone with access to a jay. Our local scrub jays are not remotely afraid of me or anything else. They ought to lose a fight with their larger cousins the crows, but crows give them a wide berth also. They may be bigger, but they're not psychopaths like the jays. The jays have their shivs out all the time and they'll come at you screeching like the shower scene in Psycho. (Thanks to reader Mary Jansen, who first pointed this out, I can never hear them any other way.) They land right next to me when I'm gardening in case I turn up a larva and I always flip it to them, because I do not like the way they size up my eyeballs.

And of course you have your shrikes that not only kill frogs and mice and whatnot but spear them on a thorn to eat later and also to let the general population know who's in charge. A rodent will never vote to impeach a shrike no matter how much evidence you pile up.

And then, Lord. The bushtits. The bushtits are very tiny members of the Tit family and plenty murderous in their own right. They may be no bigger than a fuzzy ping pong ball but they always, always travel in gangs and they will work together to flush a herd of aphids and pick off the old and lame ones. You only think they're cute because you're not a bug and don't go to their meetings.

Then you have your vampire finches. They land on boobies and peck on them and drink their blood. Presumably this all started when the finches were going for mites in the boobies' feathers and then they sort of evolutionarily got carried away. And the boobies don't even mind. That's how itchy they are.

Meanwhile, great tits have been known to attack the tissues of recently hanged people. This has caused me to revise my wishes for the disposal of my body. I would like to be strung up in the woods somewhere and nibbled on by chickadees. See that it happens, people.

The Resplendence Of Studley

What with the ravages of extreme capitalism and the collapse of ecosystems and the rise of fascism and the complete surrender of the masses to the plutocracy, I know visitors to this site have one overriding question: How is Studley Windowson doing?

Studley is, of course, the primary chickadee in the Price-Brewster domain, who, in spite of missing some toes, has worked his fuzzy buns off year after year to produce successful progeny. He and his wife Marge both are models of industry but their efforts have never been assured. Last year they gave it a couple good tries and either gave up or moved on, but the favored nesting box outside our window produced neither chicks nor dees. The year before was also a wash, and not for lack of effort. It's not that easy to turn an egg the size of a Tic-Tac into an operable bird.

So this spring we decided to help out by offering live mealworms. One of the things climate change has affected is the availability of insects and other food at the proper time for feeding bird chilluns, so it was possible we really were improving prospects, but mainly we were hoping we could get them to land on our hands, and in that we succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. Marge never went over to Team Mealworm but Studley was all over it, and right now. The day after he made his first dodgy feint at our hands out the window, he saw me in the garden and got right in my face. Hey. Mealworm Lady.

June Studley

For weeks, as the peeping in the nest box grew sturdier, we kept the mealworm train going. It was a fair transaction: Studley got quality groceries for his kids, and in return he healed the human heart, one and a half tiny feet at a time. Then what?

I am proud to announce that Studley and Marge created at least one new chickadee out of nothing but bird schmutz and valor. We didn't see it fledge. We came home to discover Studley all excited as  hell and one short-tailed chickadee blundering into the wisteria upside-down like Woodstock. For weeks, proffered mealworms went directly from Studley to the new hire, who says her name is Dee Dee. He and Marge flew into a nearby fir tree and lots of cheeping came out, so we assume more than one chick made it into the world, but later all we saw was Studley and the one kid. If the rest survived, they might be following Marge around. I hope that's what happened.

Eventually, Studley quit visiting every two minutes at beer thirty, but was perfectly happy to request mealworms by the bird feeder, or out the original window. The kid kept hopefully flapping at him but after a while Studley started eating them himself. He earned them. And you should see his new suit!

New Studley

Breeding and providing take a lot out of a bird. Once things settle down, they have to refurbish their outfits. Studley was recognizable not just because of his mashed left foot, but because he had a bald spot, and a mottled face, and the beginnings of a hound's-tooth check in the ascot region, and was kind of skinny, but given enough personal mealworms and a talent for the molt, he's a brand new bird. He's shiny and round and pink around the edges and ready for anything including Marge and winter. And Mama's got a new tub of mealworms.

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.

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.