The Nature of the Beast (according to Susan McCarthy)

Ugh, paparazzi

Sometimes you see a barn and you know it has owls. 

This one is airy, with many escape  routes. As we walked to the door, a barn owl (Tyto alba) silently flew out.

A helpful person had put up an owl box. Owls had accepted it. Not recently, judging by the size of the charnel scatter of debris below, full of fragile white bones of rodents.

An owlet looked out. I think it was worried, maybe horrified. But it wasn't too frightened to stare.

Not all barns are suitable for owl nesting. When a barn is otherwise good but has no owl box, owls may nest on a corner between rafters.

This old barn is so great that I think it would have an owl nest even without the box. It's made of solid beams and planks, strongly joined.

Before there were barns, these owls nested in natural places like holes in trees. Humans have reduced the number of trees (and many humans object to trees with holes in them, with the notion that such trees are diseased, unsound, and liable to drop heavy limbs onto humans including small beloved children running through the park to raise awareness for kidney disease).
 

However, we have put up barns which can be nested in. Barns attract rodents, useful to barn owls, since an owl family may eat more than a thousand in a year.

Barn owls evolved hunting in meadows and along forest edges and nesting in trees. Some still do so, but others hunt on agricultural land and nest in agricultural buildings. We're not completely useless to owls.
  

Even if we give them the creeps. 

About a primate

A certain member of the minor Scottish nobility has accused me of being “a bird person.”

I deny it. Just as I refuse to choose between being “a cat person” or “a dog person,” I refuse to limit my interest in animals to, say, Class Aves (birds), Class Mammalia, or Class Actinopterygii (ray-finned fishes).

I do mention birds more often than, say, primates. But that's because my circumstances are so sadly limited that I wake to bird song, not chimpanzee pant-hooting. The creature atop the nearest power pole may be a raven or a starling (or twice, a merlin), but so far hasn't been a colobus. And when something hurtles across my path it might be a squirrel or a lizard, but it is more likely to be a bird. Never a gibbon. Damn it.

I gladly mention apes and monkeys when I have an excuse.

Right here I have a passage from Ludwig Koch-Isenburg's 1963 work, Through the Jungle Very Softly, about Koko, a white-handed gibbon (Hylobates lar) he raised in his Frankfurt home. Koch-Isenburg had tons of exotic pets, toward whom Koko took a lordly attitude. Koko liked to release the African skink from the terrarium, but would drag it out if it tried to sneak under a cupboard.

One of Koko's favorite companions was a male golden pheasant (Chrysolophus pictus). Koko found the pheasant fascinating and often  grabbed its tail and dragged it along with him. The pheasant, reluctant to quarrel with his childhood playmate, permitted this, “and resisted only feebly when Koko tried to carry him up a tree.”
 
The pheasant “would scurry away..., but Koko would catch up with him and clutch him by the tail,” Koch-Isenburg writes.


The pheasant tried to be nice. One day Koko went too far and the pheasant gouged him with the spurs on its legs. Koko screamed in outrage, but never bullied the bird again.

It can be difficult, even painful, when the interests of childhood friends diverge. One individual is increasingly involved in active sports like swinging through branches, while the other enjoys finding food items scattered on the ground and meeting like-minded ladies. I think we've all seen this happen. That doesn't mean it hurts any less.

I was hoping this effort might avert the “bird person” accusation, but now I'm afraid I've failed. I try to write about a primate, and the primate himself drags in a bird. Och, what's the use? 

Big-nosed heroes

On remote islands where they breed, some small seabirds come and go at night. Thus they evade big daytime killers like skuas and gulls. Their secret nests are in burrows or under rocks.

Leach's Storm-petrel (Oceanodroma leucorhoa) is one of these furtive little birds. They are smaller than robins, though with longer wings. It's said they don't even venture out if the moonlight is too bright.

Visiting Gull Island in Newfoundland, Franklin Russell, author of a moody 1965 book The Secret Islands: An Exploration ran across a petrel in trouble.

She had gotten snared in tangled grass as she sneaked out before dawn with the other petrels. Russell picked her up. She screamed. He untangled her and tried to get her to go back down any burrow, but she darted away. She flew at top speed, away from the island – and instantly 50-odd gulls were after her with intent to catch and eat. These would have been big Herring Gulls or Black-backed Gulls.


“The petrel was so well ringed by her enemies that to escape she would have had to run among at least ten gulls in any direction she tried to break out. This seemed impossible; but the petrel was not concerned with possibility or reason. Never for a moment was there any relaxation of the thrust and parry of the hunt. All the creatures were absorbed,” writes Russell.

The chase hurtled through the air above a raft of thousands of puffins floating on the sea. Suddenly the puffins rose off the water. “...something alarmed them. Perhaps it was the intensity of the gull attacks; perhaps the petrel screamed her anguish.” Russell saw the petrel veer toward the cloud of flying puffins and vanish into their midst.

Huh? The gulls hung around where the puffin had been before giving up.

Russell writes that he watched the departing flock of puffins with binoculars and “saw, finally, a tiny shape twist away from their mass.”

A happy ending for the petrel. Russell says puffins (Fratercula arctica) aren't afraid of gulls. Puffins go to and from their nest burrows in daylight. But gulls are serious predators on puffins, though not when the puffins are going around in crowds thousands strong.

Probably the puffins weren't deliberately rescuing the petrel. Probably some of the puffins were freaked out by the gulls pursuing the frantic out-of-place petrel, and decided to leave and go some place less creepy, right now. The other thousands of puffins didn't intend to be left behind if something was wrong, so they all took off, forming a screen into which the petrel shook her pursuers. Good deal.

Cool hammer. Too bad I'm not a nail.

A 2008 New Yorker story by Margaret Talbot on Irene Pepperberg's work with parrots and language made brief mention of unsuccessful work with mynahs and language. This was to explain why Pepperberg didn't train her eloquent parrot Alex with classic behaviorist methods of operant conditioning. I recognized the reference.

While reading about animal communication for Becoming A Tiger I ran across a long article called “Verbal Behavior and the Mynah Bird.” (1967.) Experimental psychologists Joseph Grosslight and Wesley Zaynor had a theory that babies talk earlier if you pick them up when they cry. They speculated that by thus rewarding babies, you create a “noisy organism.” The noisy baby learns to attach meaning to noises later – but sooner than a quiet baby.

They couldn't experiment with babies. They went with talking birds. Mynahs – great choice! (Gracula species.) Easy to buy (then), easy to feed, can't bite your finger off, cheap. Definitely noisy organisms. They started the Mynah Bird Project. They scheduled a report called “Verbal Behavior and the Mynah Bird and Implications for Man.”

The paper makes it clear that they understood that babies eventually learn language and mynahs don't. They say it several ways so no one thinks they're stupid or anthropomorphic. My favorite way they say it: “there is a complete absence of zoosemiotic considerations.” We get it, guys. You're not zoosemiotes.

(Zoosemiotics seems to be the study of signs or symbols in animal communication. You know, meaning. Can't have that.)

In the 1960s operant conditioning was new. It seemed as if, using this powerful system of rewards and punishments – you could get any animal to do anything. You could teach a rat to push a lever, a pigeon to peck when it saw the word “PECK,” a chicken to dance. (Okay, teach a chicken to “dance.” These are academics. It's a chicken. How well did you expect it to dance?)

Grosslight and Zaynor would use operant conditioning to create a bird equivalent of noisy babies. They viewed a mynah saying “Hello!” as “motor behavior not wholly unlike the classical operant bar-press of the rat in a Skinner box.” But, they reported in the plaintive 1967, “Verbal Behavior and the Mynah Bird,” that they had taken “and Implications for Man” out of the title due to “adversity.”

What adversity? Uncooperative mynahs. The researchers expected great results by putting each mynah in a sound-proof chamber and playing a recorded phrase which the bird would get food rewards for repeating. Isolation in sound-proof chamber = no chance of hearing other noises. Recording = identical stimulus each time. Rewards for repeating = according to operant conditioning principles, rewarding behavior increases the frequency of the behavior. Voila! Superior talking birds!

But instead of repeating the phrase, the mynah would stay mute, beak shut. Finally the researchers would give up and put the bird back in the aviary – and then the mynah would say it. Or the bird in the chamber would say the phrase once and never again.

The researchers were also bewildered by the daily “jungle hour,” when mynahs vocalized without food rewards. They screeched, cackled, hooted, whistled, clicked, and hollered—why?

Their failure to produce talkers led Grosslight and Zaynor to confess “we do not know the motivational or controlling stimuli for the emission of vocal or verbal behavior in the mynah.” They could not answer the question, “why does the mynah bother to talk at all?” (Some scientists complain researchers don't publish negative results often enough. Maybe they're afraid people like me would mock them. At least I didn't call them zoosemiotes.)

This doesn't mean operant conditioning doesn't work. It means the researchers didn't understand  mynahs. It didn't occur to them that being trapped in a soundproof chamber hearing repetitive tapes is already punishment for a mynah. They assumed that food is the only reward an animal cares for.

Nowhere do Grosslight and Zaynor say a harsh word about mynahs. They never blame the birds for the failure of their experimental vision. Which would be easy, because mynahs can be jerks.

I knew a pet store mynah who spoke dozens of phrases, which were scrawled on a card on the front of his cage. New customers would try the top few phrases on the card. “Hi there!” they would read, “I’m a  pretty bird!” The mynah would put its head on one side and stare out of one eye. “Hello! I’m a pretty bird! How are you?” the visitors would try. The mynah would stare out of the other eye. “Hello! Pretty bird! What’s your name?”

Silence.

As they turned away, the mynah would sneer, “You're stupid!”

He rolled the r – 'Yerrrrrr stupid!”-- in a way that suggested he had once lived around a ten-year-old boy.

So one of Grosslight and Zaynor's few successes makes sense. With food rewards they could increase the frequency with which the mynah Charlie said “I talk!” They could decrease the frequency with which Charlie said, “Ah shut up!” But they could not decrease it to zero.

It's enough to make you zoosemiotic.

Dinosaur sins

It was morning. My spouse was dressing for the day. I was reading in bed, working through Kenneth Miller's Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution. “This is an interesting bar graph,” I said. “It shows a bunch of major living groups through time, and the only group that doesn't make it into the present is the dinosaurs.”

“Oh?” said my spouse, not really seeming fascinated.

“And I've been reading all these books about religion, and so the idea naturally occurs to me that if the dinosaurs were the only group wiped out, it must be because God punished them. I wonder if anyone has advanced that idea.”

“Uh huh,” my spouse said.

“The dinosaurs must have really sinned to be singled out that way,” I said.

“The dinosaurs were sluts!” my spouse shouted as he rifled through his sock drawer. “Sluts and gonifs!"

I don't know where that came from. I had no idea that he harbored resentment about the moral character of dinosaurs.

 

I don't want anyone to think I take Miller's graph too seriously. He calls it “elementary.” But I've been thinking off and on, when I have something else to do, about the sins of the dinosaurs. Some Biblical literalists say the dinosaurs drowned because they weren't taken onto Noah's ark. Well, why weren't they? Not because they were too big, for there were many small dinosaurs – they weren't saved.

It can't be that they were unclean, because Genesis has Noah loading both clean and unclean animals.

So some dinosaur did something awful? For a second, I thought maybe it was a dinosaur who suggested frugivory to Eve, but then I remembered that Genesis not only fingers the snake, but says the snake is punished by having to crawl on its belly thereafter. All the dinosaurs I know about had legs.

A dinosaur did something even worse than abetting the Fall? Not necessarily. Peoples in holy writ are often obliterated for things that I, personally, might pass over with a glare and a sniff. Maybe something trivial got the dinosaurs killed, whether you believe it was done by barring them from the Ark, or by something mechanistic like having an asteroid flung at them.

Maybe a pteranodon laughed at a prophet's bald head, or a stegosaurus danced naked on an altar, or a velociraptor worshipped a golden calf. Could have been anything, really. Being a slut or gonif might be enough.

But let's think about the biology. What sins are dinosaurs likely to have committed? Let's look at birds, their closest living relatives. What really annoying things do birds do? Often they make a lot of noise. I've heard many complaints about trees full of grackles or starlings shrieking their heads off. A lot of self-proclaimed tree-huggers become enraged when describing a mockingbird singing at night when said nature lovers are trying to sleep, damn it. One dark secret about penguins is how incredibly noisy their colonies are. (The other is how badly those colonies stink.)

Maybe dinosaurs were noisy. There were a lot of them, and some were huge. Imagine a bunch of forty-ton tubas having an argument with a colony of ten thousand furious piccolos. (Maybe a few swooping pterosaurs – imagine angry fiddles with 11-meter wingspans.)

Fans of the Gilgamesh epic will know that the Babylonians also wrote of a Great Flood. It happened because humans, who had become numerous, were noisy and made so much racket that Enlil, greatest of the gods, couldn't sleep. Plagues didn't shut them up. Droughts didn't shut them up. So, flood.

Thus the possibility that the dinosaurs roared and chirped and screamed so incessantly that they were destroyed by divine wrath has theological precedent as well as biological plausibility.

Sluts, gonifs, loudmouths, who knows what got the dinosaurs in trouble? Whatever it was, they clearly threw amazing parties.

You wouldn't find them sitting around reading about reconciling evolution and religion.

Sometimes I really miss the dinosaurs.

Easy birding

Ten thirty at night, driving through Oakland's Chinatown, we glimpsed a large bird perched on a sign. We went around the block and there was a black-crowned night heron (Nycticorax nycticorax) on the LEFT TURN ONLY sign, two more on a jewelry store awning, and another on a pho restaurant awning. We knew that night herons scavenged fish parts in local dumpsters, but no dumpsters were in view.

We pulled over and watched from the car. A heron might fly from an awning to the top of a NO PARKING sign, or shuffle along an awning. They weren't alarmed when cars drove by, or when waiters from the restaurant on the corner came out for a smoke. They flew to more distant spots once when a pedestrian appeared. (Clearly they found him suspicious – what's he doing here at this hour? Our presence in the car didn't bother the herons, though the waiters seemed to find it strange.)

Mostly they stared intently down toward the sidewalk. Odd. Night herons spend much of their working life staring intently into water looking for swimming prey. I could not see the sidewalk from where we were, because parked cars were in the way, but nothing seemed likely to be swimming there. If the restaurant had kindly put fish offal out, why wouldn't herons just go down and get it?

I speculated that the night herons were waiting until dumpsters got put out, and staring intently just because staring intently is their habit.

A heron suddenly popped into view, flapping up from the sidewalk, as if fleeing a kerfuffle of some kind. We realized there were more night herons on the sidewalk, either consuming or awaiting some fishy bonanza. The ones we saw peering intently were envious bystanders. Perhaps they were low-status birds – young birds? – wondering when it would be their turn.

The scene was one of social complexity, awaiting its naturalist, a Goodall of the dumpsters, a Schaller of the streets.

                                                                       Frankyboy5, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

Smarter than the average bear

The Monterey county inn offered a special rate. The deal included a “breakfast basket.” Around 8:30 am someone would knock. On the step they would leave a basket with packaged  pastries, juice, fruit, yogurt, and hardboiled eggs, which you could draw inside and consume at leisure.

They warned that birds might steal from your basket if you left it out too long. True.

The first morning I didn't retrieve the basket for several minutes. I came out to find that a crow had seized an egg, and was attacking it  with powerful blows of its large black beak. I rescued the egg. The crow had barely started, cracking the shell, exposing the yolk, but eating only a teaspoon's worth.

The second morning I lurked. I had angled the shutter slats so I could see without being seen. At the knock, I rushed to peer. Already a crow was striding up the path with long confident steps of its shiny black legs.

I think not. I opened the door and the crow wheeled and fled. I enjoyed that. I refrained from shouting a lecture after the crow about how it should be foraging on wild foods. Or asking how it would like it if someone ate its egg.

Once I stayed at a place in Mendocino County, in much wilder country, with fancier breakfasts (frittata! cobbler!), where the competition was so severe that they enclosed the baskets in heavy lidded wooden boxes. That time I didn't have to fight wildlife to eat.

If I go again, maybe I'll wait and see who tries for the food, and how. I could leave tools around and see if they select any. Perhaps that's entrapment, legally, but since I have no plans to prosecute, evidence doesn't have to be admissible. No plans at present – if they get the cobbler, that could change.

DDWESQ
 

Names omitted to protect the affectionate

Killdeer are marvelous birds. They wear a handsome double necklace for easy identification by eye. They fly around shouting their name – KillDEER! KillDEER! -- for easy identification by ear. (It would be impressive if they shouted their Latin name – ChaRAdrius voCIFerus! -- but harder to remember.)

ShutterGlow.com

Famously, when any worrisome creature comes near their nest or chicks, they go into an elaborate act to entice the intruder away. They stumble along the ground dragging a wing, shrieking. “Look over here! I have a broken wing! Look! I can't fly! You'll catch me easily! Oh no! C'mon!” They keep stumbling and wing-dragging, and if you don't rush after them, they will circle to give you another chance. “Dude! I'm crippled here! Fresh meat! C'mon!”

I fell for this the first time I saw it and ran after the injured bird, planning to rescue it and subject it to life-saving treatment. Somehow, dreadfully hurt as it was, it managed to stay out of my grasp. As soon as I was far from where the killdeer didn't want me to be, it suddenly turned out not to have a broken wing and flew off. I stood astonished. “What? ...Oh. Wow, I read about that.”

It seems as if such splendid birds would be rare, not as easily seen as they are.

It's a good thing killdeer (it's also okay to say killdeers) have such a clever trick for protecting their nests and chicks, because their nests are on the ground, and their chicks scamper around for a few weeks before they can fly. Lots of killdeer chicks end up in the hands of wildlife rehabilitators.

Now, one difficult thing wildlife rehabilitators learn is not to form loving relationships with the wildlife. If an animal learns to love and trust people while it's in rehab, it might trust people it meets after it's been released. A bobcat can get killed that way. Or a duck.

A baby animal may also imprint on human caretakers, and never mate with its own species.

So wildlife rehabbers go to a lot of trouble to keep their animal charges at an emotional distance, no matter how adorable they find them. This is a hard lesson for animal lovers to learn, and many professionals take pride in having learned it, enforce it rigorously, and are quick to criticize those who don't seem to take it seriously enough.

That's why I won't tell you who I'm quoting, or what organization they work with. This person understands the need not to cuddle up, and puts that into practice most of the time. But not all species are alike, and killdeer, this person says, killdeer are great! No matter what you do, they'll never love you. “You can kiss them, but they never get tame.”

Salvez Dodd

Do I Have to Stab Somebody Around Here to Get a Drink?

The Brooks Park community garden sits on a knobby, windy hilltop with near views of San Francisco and Daly City, and a far view of the Pacific. With a plastic watering can left for the use of gardeners, I was dreamily watering lettuce seedlings in our nano-ranch when a high-energy individual sped up and gave me a once-over. It was an hummingbird, in immature plumage, and it seemed intent, hovering a few feet away. What was on its mind?

Before the current drought, when we still ran a sprinkler in the back yard, I have seen hummingbirds  catching drops, so perhaps this bird was interested in the water. I held the can out at arm's length and tilted it so water ran from the nozzle in arcs of spray. The hummingbird zipped over, buzzing in and out of the spray. Once it opened its beak wide, maybe fifty degrees, but at other moments I guessed it was just getting water with its tongue.

We were both happy until a slightly larger hummingbird zoomed up and drove the drinking bird away. They raced off at high speed. I turned back to the lettuces until the second hummingbird, returning, also positioned itself in front of me, moving up and down. It had just a beginning fleck of an iridescent gorget at its throat, so it suppose it was a young male. Again the bird seemed to make eye contact.

Another thirsty customer? I tilted the watering can. A pause as the hummingbird hung in the air. It beelined up to the nozzle and inserted its beak into one of the holes. That seems like drinking from a hose with your mouth right on it, and you get a big drink pretty quickly that way, so I wasn't surprised when the hummingbird left a few moments later.

I'm still pondering what was on those young hummingbirds' minds. I wasn't wearing anything floral-patterned or brightly colored, so I wasn't attracting them that way. Most likely they were thirsty, saw that water was around, and came to study the situation. Perhaps as they surveyed me they wondered, “Where does the water come out of this thing?” I would bet other gardeners have been approached – maybe there's a custom of watering the hummers that I'm just finding out about.

It had the casual feel of a routine transaction. Like bumming a cigarette. “Lady. Yeah, you. Human lady. Got a drop to spare?”

Sparrow, Butterfly, Butterfly, Tomato

In late summer successful gardeners become superbly generous, even pushy. The fields of California burst with extra tomatoes. All over the Central Valley, tomato trucks bomb along blazing hot roads. You know they are tomato trucks because they have open tops and spill tomatoes, especially on bumps and curves. Roads with tomato-spangled corners mean the end of summer.

                                                              you can spot summer[Carl McCabe http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/]

These tomatoes aren't meant to be sold by the each. They'll be pounded, concentrated, and purified into sauce and catsup, so if they get smashed on the ride to the plant or a few hundred get lost, it doesn't matter. Abundance brings carelessness.

Last weekend we were driving through the Valley. It was hot, hot, hot. On a back road we slowed when a flight of sparrows rose from a scatter of spilled tomatoes. Suddenly the air was full of yellow butterflies.

They were Orange Sulphur butterflies (Colias eurytheme). As butterflies they drink nectar, but when they're children (caterpillars), they eat plants in the pea family, especially alfalfa. They're a native species that hit a bonanza when humans started planting alfalfa. In a paper about exotic crops that please local butterflies, Graves & Shapiro write that you can spot summer alfalfa fields from a long way away by the yellow clouds of butterflies.

Singly and in revolving pairs, they fluttered across the road, heedless of cars and trucks. We expected this to be a passing thing, but as we kept driving, they kept swooping over the road, through the burning air, crashing against windshields and grilles.

With so many butterflies, the number killed by cars is unimportant to the species. But we couldn't bear the havoc, so we turned back to another road, more traveled by people, less traveled by butterflies.

Red and yellow scatters, on the ground, in the air. An explosion of abundance and abandon, and summer's over.