Happiness is a Rare Bird Read online

  They are also unconscionable nesting box invaders. The Purple Martin housing complex at FortWhyte Alive in Winnipeg is now inhabited by House Sparrows. Bluebirds, wrens, and Tree Swallows have also been ousted from their nest boxes by hostile House Sparrow takeovers.

  Wherever they call home, House Sparrows usually make big, ugly nests that are agglomerations of convenient materials—grass, straw, twigs, pieces of plastic bags and wrappers, string, whatever. That’s because they are misnamed (part of their charm, perhaps). They’re not sparrows at all, but finches. It used to be thought that they were directly related to the Weaver Finches of Africa. That seems unlikely. Weaver Finches construct careful and elaborate nests; House Sparrows can’t or aren’t interested in painstakingly weaving together sticks and grasses into neat, symmetrical, gourd-like homes. They are messy, careless (or carefree) finches—distant relatives of their African weavers. (A special bone in their tongue, used to make seed-shucking easier and not present in Weaver Finches, rules out a close kinship.)

  If you don’t like PDA (Public Displays of Affection), you’ll not like House Sparrows; they are the birds you are most likely to see copulating. Prepare for it: your young daughter or your grandson will ask about their behaviour at the most inopportune time. What are those birdies doing, Daddy/Grandpa?

  Years ago, I met an old Scotsman who maintained a well-stocked bird feeder in his yard in the riparian area of Winnipeg along the Seine River. I recruited him as a feeder observer in my zone of the Christmas bird count. When I delivered the forms for the count, he’d invite me in for a dram of scotch and then regale me with stories of his days in the merchant marine. He was a “wee laddie,” maybe five foot four, but his wrists and forearms were the size of two-by-fours. And he smoked a corncob pipe that gave his Scottish burr a gruff edge. I always came away from his house humming, “I’m Popeye the Birding Man.”

  It always struck me as odd that “Popeye” never had any House Sparrows at his feeders. Everybody else did. So I asked him one year: “Don’t you ever get any House Sparrows?” “Aye,” he said, “but I shoot ’em!”

  Thus the fate of the lowly House Sparrow. Scorned even by supposed bird-lovers.

  Popeye the Birding Man soon went on to the great steamship in the sky, but he must be happy up there, knowing that House Sparrow populations are declining here in Winnipeg and across North America.

  Twenty years ago we regularly got about 20,000 House Sparrows on our Winnipeg Christmas counts, give or take the two or three or ten that Popeye shot. Our high was 1989 when Winnipeg had the largest count ever recorded in Canada—23,761. Now we’re lucky to get five or six thousand.

  Lots of factors can account for the decline, or the apparent decline, diseases and far less spillage of grain in the CN railyards east of Winnipeg being the main factors. All I know is that I’ll miss them if they go the way of the Passenger Pigeon—from the most numerous to the ranks of the extirpated.

  Their “cheep, cheep, cheep” song may be shrill, monotonous, and noisy, but there is something cheery in that chirping, especially on a bitterly cold Manitoba day. It’s heartening to know that this hardy bird, the king of the LBJs (little brown jobbies), can maintain a seemingly positive attitude under the worst of winter conditions.

  Because they are such hardy birds (they can live to the ripe old age of twenty-five), House Sparrows have managed to gain a foothold on every continent of the world except Antarctica. Everywhere they’re found, they’ve become what Kim Todd, author of the book Sparrow, calls “the basic bird, the stripped-down, super-efficiency model.”

  They may be ubiquitous and common, but they are not ordinary. With their black bibs, grey cheeks, and brown and black feathering, the males are actually quite handsome birds. Maybe if there were far, far fewer of them, if they were much less numerous and as difficult to find as, say, Scarlet Tanagers, those elusive and brilliant red and black birds of the forest, we’d appreciate them more.

  Black-capped Chickadees

  Cheerful, Little Fluffballs

  Chickadees have been my constant companions for the past several winters. On my hour-long dog walks through the southern suburbs of Winnipeg every morning, I’ve rarely been out of earshot of these little, black-capped, grey and white birds. Even when the wind-chill is minus fifty degrees Celsius, I can hear the familiar arpeggios of these cheery, jittery, little fluffballs.

  Chickadees are onomatopoetic birds. The sound of their name describes the bird. Chick-a-dee = the bird. How many birds can you think of that are named for their songs? Not enough, I’m afraid. Jays, of course. Plus Killdeers, phoebes, hummingbirds, Great Kiskadees, pewees, Willets, pipits, Dickcissels, and maybe, in general, warblers (who warble). Imagine for a minute that our forefathers had named other birds for their songs. If robins had been named after their songs, they’d be called Cheerios. Goldfinches would be called Potato Chips.

  Chickadees also have the advantage of a musical name that is, thankfully for some, different from its European moniker and one of its American nicknames. Believe it or not, South Carolina rejected the chickadee as its state bird simply because its nickname caused them embarrassment: tit.

  Chickadees, of course, don’t just sing their names. They add extra “dees” to emphasize the threat level of a situation. And they often drop the “chick” part of the song for an abbreviated, two-descending-note “dee-dee.” Sometimes this is extended to four notes: what I interpreted as a kid as “chee-eese-bur-ger.”

  All birds sing for two primary reasons: to attract a mate and to intimidate rivals. In my walks, I regularly hear what I take to be response calls picking up the lower of the two “dee” sounds, starting with it and adding a second “dee” equally lower. It’s as if they are completing a rhyme or singing a short duet. I also hear a high-pitched “dee” and a gargling noise that sounds like it’s all x’s and n’s. Neither of these sounds appear to serve the two primary functions of bird song. Chickadees seem to be “conversing” with each other in what is called “contact calling.” Like Canada Geese in flight, they seem to be saying, “I’m here. Where are you? Find anything good to eat? Me neither. See any predators? Hope not.” Etc.

  Probably more significant are the sounds I can’t hear. Much as we appreciate their songs, chickadees don’t sing for us. Our ears aren’t sophisticated enough for all their notes and tonalities.

  Experienced birders can easily distinguish a chickadee’s song from one by a White-throated Sparrow, for instance. But how many of us can recognize the difference between urban chickadees and rural ones? According to Bridget Stutchbury, ornithology professor and author of The Bird Detective: Investigating the Secret Lives of Birds, urban birds have adapted their vocalizations to cope with the ambient noise of the city. Their songs are louder and shorter. She also reveals that birds that hatch first sing better and are therefore more attractive as mates than their siblings.

  Stutchbury’s book is full of interesting details like this. She has assembled the findings of bird researchers from around the world. What she doesn’t cover and what is only now being investigated are chickadees’ other intriguing gifts.

  Several years ago, after a vicious winter snowfall, I decided that it was time to be a conscientious bird food provider again. I filled my feeders over a weekend, all six of them, with suet, peanuts, black and striped sunflower seeds, niger, and millet.

  Within minutes of stoking the feeders, chickadees began flitting in, grabbing a seed, and flitting away. Not more than ten or fifteen minutes later, all of my usual suspects had arrived: House Sparrows, of course, plus Downy and Hairy Woodpeckers, Blue Jays, House Finches, White-breasted Nuthatches, and, new for the year, Red-breasted Nuthatches.

  How did the chickadees know when to show up, and so quickly? What senses did they employ to discover this new source of food? Were there sentries around somewhere that saw me filling the feeders and remembered that I’m usually a pretty reliable prov
ider? Did they hear me noisily working at the feeders? Or did they smell the seeds and zero in on them via their olfactory senses?

  We don’t often think of birds as having a sense of smell. But recent genomic and brain studies have shown that the sense of smell is much more important in birds than previously thought. The standard wisdom now is that some bird species can use their sense of smell to navigate, forage, or even distinguish individuals. Birds as diverse as sparrows, chickens, pigeons, ducks, shearwaters, albatrosses, and vultures are able to smell. Rails, cranes, grebes, and nightjars as well.

  Chickadees are such resourceful little birds with such adaptable brains that I’m not surprised that they were the first to show up. Smell may have lured them in. I’m just glad they showed up.

  As for the others, I’m left to wonder: is there a “universal bird language” for food, a sort of avian Esperanto? Do birds communicate with one another to share food info, not just chickadee to fellow chickadees, but chickadee to nuthatches, and finches, and woodpeckers?

  Of course, birds hear each other’s songs and calls. Catbirds and mockingbirds imitate the notes and melodies of many other species. And recently in Kildonan Park, a Yellow Warbler was heard imitating an Indigo Bunting, or at least altering its own song enough to respond to it. But can birds interpret other species’ songs and calls? That’s the question. Can a nuthatch tell when a chickadee is saying “food?”

  If so, chickadees are pretty altruistic, sharing little creatures. They don’t seem to have that “selfish gene” we’re hearing so much about in humans and other animals. They are avian socialists.

  We should not be at all surprised at this. Chickadees, after all, can change their brains physically every fall to prepare themselves for the different rigors of surviving the cold northern winter. They are remarkable little birds.

  Mallards

  and Other Tippy Ducks

  Every morning at eleven o’clock, five Mallards march out of an elevator at the luxury Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, waddle inelegantly across the lobby on a red carpet, hop up three steps, and plunk themselves into a black marble fountain. Their procession is accompanied by the “King Cotton” march by John Philip Sousa. Hundreds of curious tourists watch and giggle. It has to be the funniest march since the March Hare.

  At five o’clock in the afternoon, they tumble obediently out of the fountain, trundle back across the red carpet, and take the elevator up to their $200,000 rooftop penthouse, the Duck Palace.

  Every time I think about this odd ritual, I laugh. Then again, I laugh at all ducks. To me, ducks are a source of endless amusement. Ducks make me laugh out loud. Of course, cartoon ducks like Daffy (see Duck Amuck) or Donald (see The Band Concert) um … quack me up. But real ducks do too. All ducks, not just “odd ducks”—because all ducks are odd. Maybe it’s their French name: canard. Definition of canard—“a groundless rumour.” Of course they’re groundless. They’re usually in the water! (I’ve always thought that the name for a group of Mallards should be “a rumour of ducks.”)

  Sometimes in the winter—after most of them have sensibly departed for the south—I forget just how funny ducks are. (Hundreds of them stick around the open spots on our rivers or in the unfrozen areas of the Charleswood Sewage Lagoons.) When they migrate back to Manitoba in April and May, they bring back to my iced-over mind temporarily forgotten amusements. Ducks are especially funny if they come back early and try to land on frozen ponds. Poor things. They glide in towards the ice and then: Bam. Slide. Flail! They resuscitate deep-down duck laughter.

  Especially amusing are the puddle ducks (because they hang out in puddles and small ponds) also called dabblers (because they nibble and dabble on algae and weeds). These dabbling or puddle ducks—Mallards and wigeons and teal and the like—don’t walk or run, they waddle, and when they waddle, they wag their stumpy, little duck tails behind them.

  When they’re hungry, they plunk their heads under water and stick those same duck tails straight up in the air—to show us why Elvis Presley’s haircut was called a DA. When he was four, this move made my grandson Torsten laugh, and there’s nothing more contagious than a four-year-old’s giggles.

  Torsten called them tippy ducks—because they tip over and show their bums. (Bums are especially fascinating and amusing to pre-schoolers.) In my neck of the woods there are eight species of tippy ducks: the Northern Pintail (Anas acuta), Gadwall (Anas strepera), American Wigeon (Anas americana), Northern Shoveler (Anas clypeata), Black Duck (Anas rubripes), Green-winged Teal (Anas crecca), Blue-winged Teal (Anas discors), and, of course, the most familiar of them all, the Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos). In the pond at St. Vital Park we have watched Gadwalls gad about, wigeons wige, shovelers shovel, and Mallards waddle and paddle for breadcrumbs tossed by kids and misguided grandparents.

  This group of ducks only rarely dives. Compared to diving ducks, which have large feet and smaller wings to facilitate underwater swimming, dabblers have larger wings and small feet more centrally located on their bellies. These features allow dabblers to spring straight up from the water and fly strongly away from danger. Diving ducks need to scamper across the water for a short distance to gain momentum for takeoff.

  Dabblers are great ducks for initiating pre-schoolers into the practice of recognizing and identifying birds. With their distinctive colours and shapes, they are not too much of a challenge to identify. They’re also gregarious, they frequent shallow waters in parks and marshes, and their ability to shoot up and out of the water makes them easier to approach. Other ducks that must run along the water to get airborne spook much more easily and don’t allow a person to get too close.

  Tippy ducks also make funny, easy to imitate noises. I taught my grandson how to say “rant” through his nose and in the back of his mouth. It’s the perfect duck sound (unlike the simple “quack” that ordinary folks use, or Mel Blanc’s Daffy Duck voice, or Clarence Nash’s Donald Duck voice). Coming from a four-year-old with a falsetto voice, the “rant” sounded like a cross between a rubber squeaky toy and an actual duck. Nothing funnier than that!

  Only nine now, I’ll wait a while until I surprise Torsten with another funny thing about ducks. Male ducks have external penises. Most birds don’t. Of the 10,000 species of birds in the world, only three percent have penises: ducks, geese, swans, ostriches, and emus. And some ducks have weirdly shaped penises as long as their bodies. Funny thing is, it’s only recently that people have noticed.

  Nuthatches and Woodpeckers

  Birds with Sticky Feet

  Young eyes and young minds can bring entirely fresh perspectives to any endeavor.

  A babysitting grandma recently brought her five-year-old granddaughter to an early-May bird outing. As we walked along a woody path, a Brown Creeper landed at the base of a bare Manitoba maple tree not more than five feet away from us. The little girl marvelled as the aptly named bird slowly crept up one side of the tree trunk. Rather than blending in with the bark, it presented a distinctive puffball silhouette, its white belly a perfect contrast to the dull brown background.

  It was so close and so deliberate in its movements, we could all see its slightly de-curved bill. The girl’s grandma softly noted that it was probing for insects to eat. And she mentioned that it was using its stiff tail feathers to keep it from toppling over backwards. Finally the girl whispered, “It’s got sticky feet!”

  That childlike description reminded me of my grandson when he saw his first White-breasted Nuthatch, another bird with sticky feet. Circling downward on a tree trunk, the grey and white nuthatch was hard to miss, even by young, inexperienced eyes. I told him it was called a nuthatch, thinking he’d be as amused by the word as I was when I was his age. On the spot he made up his own name: Upside-down Bird. Perfect.

  Nuthatches probably got him hooked on birds. Often they came to my bird feeders, quickly grabbed a sunflower seed, and flitted off to eat it in solitude or cach
e it for later. After a while he started to recognize their peculiar call: a soft, nasal “wank” or “nert.” (A friend’s grandchildren call them “nert-nerts.”) Whenever he heard it, he’d head for the spot where he thought the call came from.

  From nuthatches, he moved on to woodpeckers. Unlike nuthatches, they sit upright on tree trunks and branches. But they too seem to have sticky feet. Tapping and calling from higher up in trees, they’re usually harder to find—unless there’s a suet or peanut feeder handy. When they attack a suet ball, they can be even more acrobatic than nuthatches. One Downy Woodpecker regularly visits my feeders, hanging from the bottom and tapping upward to get each morsel of suet or peanut shard.

  Once, I was lucky enough to spot a Hairy Woodpecker within a couple of feet of a Downy. The distinctions between the two—the Hairy is larger with a bigger bill and a sharper, louder call—were lost on my grandson, but he quickly learned to identify two other members of the woodpecker family—a Yellow-shafted Flicker (bigger and tawnier than the black and white Downies and often found on the ground hunting for ants) and a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker (a little harder to distinguish unless it’s near a series of small holes it drills for sap).

  I’ve resisted the urge to instruct my grandson in the finer points of bird-talon anatomy. He doesn’t need to know the differences between three-toed and four-toed woodpeckers or the remarkable way they can lock their talons into tree bark and sleep away an entire night without letting go. TMI, as they say: Too Much Information for a kid.

  Years ago I helped produce an instructional birding video for kids. I now realize how misguided that video is. We went at it backwards; we did it from an adult’s point of view. If I were allowed a do-over, I’d present it from a kid’s perspective, with categories like Lawn Birds (robins, crows, flickers, et al.), Floaters (ducks and geese), Hyper Birds (warblers and hummingbirds), Rainbow Birds (red ones, blue ones, yellows, and greens), Little Brown Jobbies (sparrows, wrens, et al.), Hunters (raptors and owls), and Sticky Feet Birds. And I’d encourage kids to make up their own bird names, taxonomies, and stories.