One morning as I was gathering together all the bird food, I came across a tin of salted cashews no longer fresh enough for people to eat. Thinking the woodpeckers would be delighted at such a treat I put ten or twelve cashews in the wooden dish instead of grapes. The male sentry flew down and ate as usual, paying no attention to the nuts. The next two woodpeckers, both females, hesitated a few moments over the new item of food, like very good shoppers. Then one took a nut and flew off, the other departed carrying a piece of bread after several pecks at the doughnut.
Then came B.T. Crouching low over the wooden dish he let out a “Jacob?” whose meaning couldn’t have been clearer if he’d spoken it in Harvard English: “What’s this?”
He turned his head to the right and studied the cashews with his left eye, he turned his head to the left and studied them with his right eye. Both eyes agreed: the new stuff was bad.
He told me all about it, me and everyone else in the canyon, shouting at the top of his lungs and moving his body violently up and down and from side to side like a drunken sailor trying madly to compensate for the pitch and toss of the ship under him. His performance lasted nearly five minutes. It didn’t earn him an Academy Award or even a new name. It simply changed the meaning of his old one. B.T. no longer stood for Bread Tosser but for Bad Temper.
Everyone who has watched birds has seen and heard them express anger at the intrusion of people or animals or other birds. B.T.’s anger — rage might be a better word — was different. No other creatures were present: he was reacting entirely to an unfamiliar food. One of our scrub jays reacted in a similar way to a comparable situation involving food. Since the acorn woodpeckers had ganged up to drive him away from the wooden dish on the porch railing, he had taken to eating off the ledge. Every now and then he was unable to resist the sight of a nice fresh doughnut practically asking to be buried and he would attempt to pick it up in his beak and make off with it. Since a whole doughnut weighed almost as much as he did, it simply dropped out of his beak and rolled across the ledge and down onto the patio below.
When food disappears off the ledge, by accident or design, some birds, the house finches for example, adopt an easy-come, easy-go attitude and show no curiosity or further interest in it. Our friend the scrub jay was much too intelligent to believe that doughnuts can disappear into thin air and he immediately hopped to the edge to investigate. When he saw the doughnut lying on the patio he launched into a violent tirade against the offender, and when that failed to evoke a response he dropped down and pecked at it furiously between squawks. It was very much like watching a man curse a hammer that had struck his thumb or break a golf club that had missed a putt or shake his fist at a bowling ball that had zigged instead of zagged. If a bowling ball, a golf club or a hammer can be considered culprits, we can hardly wonder at the jay assigning this role to a doughnut which had escaped from his beak and “flown” off the ledge onto the patio.
Jays are adept at vocal self-expression and their tirades were often triggered by other things. I could expect a brisk tongue-lashing when I was half an hour late putting out breakfast or if I turned on a certain sprinkler that interfered with their foraging or if I let the dogs out at an inconvenient time. The only occasion when it really snowed in our area, a pair of jays sat in one of the Monterey pine trees and squawked from the first snowflake to the last.
Among zoologists there is a tendency not to allow for individual differences of temperament and mentality among members of a species. Yet anyone who runs a feeding station for birds and animals becomes keenly aware of many such differences even if the explanations for them aren’t apparent. Why did one acorn woodpecker readily accept a new food which caused another to throw a fit? Why did some woodpeckers put useless things like stones and eucalyptus pods in the holes that had been drilled for acorns? Why did most of the rats eat the grapes on the spot while one hoarded them to start a winery?
Why, after a dozen Bewick wrens furnished their nests without incident, did the thirteenth wren attempt repeatedly to push into the nesting hole material that was too bulky, and fly into a fury when his efforts were unsuccessful? Why, of all the California thrashers who’ve passed our windows and eaten our food, should there have been one who habitually talked to himself?
These thrasher monologues bore no resemblance to the frenetic protests of B.T. and the scrub jays, and little to the normal voice of the thrasher which is loud and droll and vivacious. They consisted of a series of soft notes, a kind of gentle, absent-minded mumbling that sounded oddly human. I heard it a number of times before I found out who was responsible. When I finally caught him in my binoculars he looked oddly human, too. He was an older bird, as indicated by the curvature and great length of the bill which, some ornithologists suggest, may keep growing throughout a thrasher’s lifetime. He reminded me of an elderly uncle, fussy but benign, making some well-chosen remarks as he went about the complicated business of terrestrial living. He would take a few little running steps — he resorted to flying infrequently and for short distances only — and then he would pause to glance around him, probe a clump of earth, examine a patch of grass, peer under a dead leaf. All this time his throat was vibrating and his beak was opening and closing as he rambled on to himself. Am I sure it was to himself? Well, there was no one there but me, and I prefer to think that thrashers talk to themselves rather than to people. If people overhear, that’s their problem.
During April no psychic powers were needed to make us aware that among the acorn woodpeckers more was going on than met the eye and that it was going on inside the hole in the telephone pole. We had no way of determining whether one or two females laid their eggs in the nest, but on the basis of numbers of different woodpeckers seen entering and leaving we suspected the presence of a double clutch of eggs, and a couple of weeks later, a double batch of young.
These were certainly well attended and fed frequently, though not the kind of diet considered ideal for baby woodpeckers since it was made up entirely of doughnuts and bread, grapes being out of season and unobtainable. The female bushtit had brought up both her broods on doughnuts, but the male had supplemented their diet with insects. On the few occasions that our woodpeckers flew from the pole to catch an insect in midair, the maneuver seemed more like a game than serious foraging; what’s more, the insect was eaten on the spot, not carried into the nest cavity.
I began to worry that the baby woodpeckers, stuffed with carbohydrates but starved for protein, would fail to develop properly and that the parents would abandon them the way the Hylands’ pigeons, Morgan and Dapplegray, had abandoned their ailing offspring. I decided to improve their diet by adding peanuts which I shelled myself. Theoretically, and from the human point of view, this was a great idea: peanuts were close enough to their natural food to be acceptable, as well as richer in oils and protein, so the babies would grow up strong of leg, clear of eye and sleek of plumage. It would probably have worked out fine if the woodpeckers hadn’t had their own idea of how to treat a peanut.