A good day at the feeders

When I woke to snow this morning, one of my first thoughts was "The juncos left too soon." I'd not seen any of the slate-gray charmers for several days and had assumed that our warm spell had driven them back to the frozen north. Then, barely in my peripheral vision, a junco hopped under a rhododendron. They're still around--somewhere.

The usual suspects were present in their usual numbers: mourning doves, sparrows, house finches, starlings (of course), grackles, cardinals, and chickadees, along with a blue jay in the hemlock. But something had Mittsy the Mutant Cat crouched in the plant window, emitting the pitiful noises that seem to mean "Please let me go out and kill something." Looking over her shoulder, I saw that a chipmunk had discovered an entire ear of squirrel corn fallen onto the ground and was taking serious advantage of this (literal) windfall: it was chewing faster than I had ever seen anything chew, its little cheeks becoming fuller than I'd known was possible. Something--me, Mittsy, a hawk, who knows--startled the little rodent, so it gave the Chipmunk Alarm Tail Shake and disappeared. But it was a good day at the feeders.

Starlings

Today I want to write about starlings. I’ve never been a big fan of the birds: they’re not native (though my first husband, who was a sociologist, used to argue that point since they’re at least as native as Euro-Americans are), they’re aggressive, they’re messy, and they exist in such numbers as to have caused a decline in other cavity-nesting bird species. They’ve caused problems with airplanes flying into their huge flocks (though they would probably say that airplanes cause problems for starlings). They’re major agricultural pests, consuming quantities of grain appropriate to their numbers, estimated at more than 200 million in the US alone. Yes, starlings are easy to dislike, and our own US Department of Agriculture and certain state agricultural services gas around a million of them a year, according to the Christian Science Monitor.


Sometimes, though, I get a real surge of affection for the fat little things. In winter plumage, they’re actually quite lovely, glossy black overlaid with all those white spots, and that unmistakable bright yellow bill. They look star-spangled, fully deserving of their name. The way they walk, hunched over and jabbing their bills into the soil, makes me laugh. Even their behavior, when they show up in noisy, jostling mobs, can be endearing, reminding me of the roomfuls of seventeen-year-old boys I’ve taught at an applied technology center. Are they really any worse, or more of an ecological blight, than American teenagers?

Probably not (and I don’t want to get into a meditation on the human propensity for destructive behavior—we know all about it), and starlings have actually begun to fit positively into certain ecological niches. Their habit of mobbing hawks and other predators protects other songbird species from predation (though it doesn’t do much for the hawks). In the spirit of fair play, starlings themselves have become a favored food item for peregrine falcons, now returning from the brink of extinction, partially because of plentiful food sources. In terms of the ecology of my yard, starlings enthusiastically consume the eastern tent caterpillar, one of the few lepidoptera species I would like to see less of.

Besides, can we blame a bird for taking advantage of the situation that we created?

They're back (again)

Last year, the first grackles materialized on March 13th; this year, several of them were at the tray feeder on February 20th. I'm not sure if this means that they exhausted their regular food supply earlier (which wouldn't surprise me, given the harshness of the winter) or if they were celebrating a break in the weather.  I'm inclined to suspect the latter, as one of the males has already started his female-attracting behavior: fluffing out his handsome feathers and pointing his pointy beak straight up at the sky.  Ah, love.

The first(?) robins

When I was a girl, everyone said that robins were the first sign of spring.  If that is so, then we don't have much winter any more, and given the amount of snow we have had since early December, I have had quite enough winter, thank you very much. Still, it seems that sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the robins vanish, and inevitably, I am too busy with end-of-semester tasks to notice their departure. Suddenly, they're just gone. Or are they?

Most years, sometime in February, there is a racket in a nearby tree. I look up and discover that it's full of robins.  My first thought is usually that they've come back too soon, but I have learned that not all robins fly south for the winter.  Nearly all the females do, but many males stay north to get a head start on choosing their spring breeding territories. They're willing to risk starvation to lay claim to the best spot for attracting the returning bird babes. (No comment on the male thought process.)

Of course, those of us with messy, or at least densely planted, yards help these little guys with their plans.  It turns out that the diet of wintering robins turns from insects to fruit, so any of the shrubs with berries that hang on in the winter offer a smorgasbord to turdus (in this case, non-)migratorius.  Hollies, crabapples, hawthorns, and an assortment of roadside weeds (and probably, even though they're dreadfully invasive, barberries and privets) provide enough carbs and calories to keep our little signs of spring alive through the northern winters. At the same time, the robins remind us that spring is indeed on its way.  Sounds like a good deal to me.

Changes

• The military dictatorship in Egypt, one that took power before I was born, may be over.  One of the texts under discussion in my early American lit course this week was the Declaration of Independence, and students were very aware that Egypt may be going through a similar revolutionary moment.  All are hopeful that Egypt's freedom will come without the years of bloodshed that marked our revolution, and probably most others.
• At the same time that there was jubilation in Egypt and hope in the halls of WVUP, a cherished colleague finally succumbed to the cancer that he'd fought for months. The next day, our department enjoyed a baby shower for a young colleague and his wife.
• In the back yard, the downy woodpeckers have found their way to our tail-prop suet feeder.
• The robins are back.  Did they ever leave, or were they in hiding?
• Will the crocuses be next?

The Winter of Our Discontent

This is shaping up to be a winter of loss.  I just had an e-mail from a colleague with the news that another colleague who's been battling metasticized cancer now seems to be in the last stages.  This man was always a "lemons to lemonade" kind of person: a displaced worker in his forties, he landed in one of my classes, then went on to earn a doctorate and returned to the college as a faculty member and, eventually, an administrator.  The possessor of one of the best baritone voices in our area, he was a fixture of local musical theater for decades. Just sixty, he's always seemed too full of life to be leaving it so soon.

My mother seems now to have entered another stage in her dementia.  She's been in assisted living for three years now for her own protection and to try to provide her with company, but she can no longer remember the names of any of her neighbors and has made no real friends. Most days when I call, less so when I can actually visit, what she tells me is how lonely she is and how she "never thought it would be like this." The loneliness has gotten worse since  her cat had to come live with me because memory didn't extend to checking the litter box, and Miss Kitty nearly ruined the apartment's carpeting and the couch's upholstery. With the cat gone, Mother on most days has no living thing to touch.

 Paradoxically, there is a blessing to the holes in Mother's memory. She now seems to remember only the good things about the past, totally oblivious to much of what I recall: the episodes of violence in our household caused by a combination of poverty and mental illness, the stories of sexism and grinding poverty she told me about her own childhood. She also doesn't realize the speed and degree of my sister's deterioration as she spirals toward a death that may well come before Mother's.

This is a winter of professional loss as well.  A project that was the focus of much of my work life for the last few years seems to have died, disappointing some very fine students and leaving me questioning my ability to be useful.  Retreating into an exclusive focus on the classroom is at least partially salvaging this stage of my career.

Spring can't come too soon.

What they're eating these days

There are always new things to learn about animals' food preferences, it seems.  Not until this week did I know that juncos will go for suet but can't hang onto suet cages.  The suet cake I put on the tray feeder drew its share of slate-gray-and-white visitors for a few days--until the starlings discovered it, wrestled the cake to the ground, attacked it in hordes, and pooped on it for good measure. While I am as fond of the plays of Shakespeare as the next English teacher, bringing every bird mentioned by the Bard to North America was a really stupid idea.

Wrens are visiting the tray feeder (when it's not overwhelmed by starlings), and while I would have expected the little insectivores to go for the high-protein sunflower seeds, ours seem to prefer the cracked corn.  Speaking of corn, the squirrel feeder hasn't seen much action this winter; our two enormous oaks have dropped so many acorns that the squirrels haven't been able to bury them all but are still feasting.  We also have deer regularly browsing the acorn piles, allowing for some beautiful moonlight wildlife-watching.

I am probably violating some unwritten law of birdfeeding, but cat food can be a bird attractant.  Ending up with a bag of something rejected by our finicky felines, I moistened some of the offending kibble and put a pan of it on a pile of blocks.  Thus far, it's been a big hit with the blue jays (and keeps them off the tray feeder so that the smaller birds can have a chance there).

And on the subject of finicky felines: the one-eyed, fourteen-year-old cat that we inherited last fall has begun climbing onto my lap and attempting the theft of breakfast breads.  Cinnamon raisin bagels as cat food?  Sounds pretty weird to me.