If any of the missing birds had come back I would have recognized them instantly, not as individuals but as former freeloaders who knew their way around the premises. Newcomers arriving at the feeding station were easy to spot.
A very small minority of these were stragglers too hungry, too exhausted or too sick to act in their normally cautious manner. The rose-breasted grosbeak which appeared on October 30, 1963, was a good example. This grosbeak, a bird belonging east of the Rockies, must have been somewhat flabbergasted to find himself not only west of the Rockies, but west of the Sierra Nevada as well; in fact, right at the Pacific coast on our ledge. He ate almost continuously the first day, oblivious to the other birds and to the movements of people on the other side of the window, including a flock of birdwatchers who’d responded to the Rare Bird Alert I had put out as soon as the grosbeak arrived. On the second day he was considerably more skittish and his appearances on the ledge were so sporadic that one determined out-of-town birder had to wait two hours for a glimpse of him. By the fourth day, rested, well fed and in good health again, he was completely wild and independent, and that afternoon he was on his way.
The rose-breasted grosbeak had reversed the usual behavior pattern. Normally a new bird arrives shy and wild and gradually becomes tamer. The first Brewer blackbird, for instance, approached the feeding station quietly and by himself. From an unobtrusive perch in the loquat tree he studied the proceedings for more than a week before he flew down with the other birds, at first on the lower terrace, eventually on the ledge.
The most extreme case of wariness was the crow. He spent an entire winter watching the place from the tops of the eucalyptus trees and the Monterey pines. The opening of a door or window, the turning on of a sprinkler, the slightest movement that was unexpected would send him flying off, squawking invectives at us and warnings to his friends. Only when there were babies to be fed did he come down for food. He was so quick and quiet about it that I didn’t even suspect he was responsible for the whole doughnuts disappearing as soon as I put them out in the wooden dish outside my office window. Though I had no evidence against the scrub jays, I blamed them, on general principles. Then one morning when I went into my office to begin work, a black flash crossed the corner of my vision and the thief was identified. I duly apologized to the jays, who are blamed by nearly everybody for nearly everything.
The crow and the rose-breasted grosbeak provided good examples of the two types of behavior which made newcomers to the feeding station easily recognizable.
The first band-tailed pigeon to arrive after the fire showed no signs of familiarity with the place. He perched, just as our initial bandtail had done years previously, on a eucalyptus limb over the drip birdbath. When I went over to the window and raised my binoculars he flew away. Shadows on windows couldn’t be trusted and binoculars were weapons that might be used against him. He was a stranger. So, too, was the first scrub jay after the fire, and the first mourning dove. No white-winged dove, turtle dove or house wren appeared again at the feeding station.
What had happened? We can never be completely sure, but there seems little doubt that the missing birds were destroyed while they were asleep. Once birds are settled for the night they are hard to disturb. Eyes closed, heartbeat slowed, head tucked under wing and claws locked in position, the sleeping bird is practically oblivious to noise, light and movement: airplanes, sirens, searchlights, high winds, cloudbursts, auto horns, band concerts — and fire. The odor of smoke, a cogent warning of danger to so many furred creatures, is lost on the feathered ones. Sense of smell is poorly developed in birds since there is little need for it in their atmospheric environment.
The band-tailed pigeons, I had learned, used an old Monterey cypress at the head of the canyon as their favorite roost. It seems likely that when the sun set the first evening of the fire, some of the doves and pigeons were roosting in the same cypress, or in the oaks and pines nearby. At nine o’clock the santana began, and in the course of the night the entire area was overrun by flames. The oak leaves burned like paper, the cypress and pine needles like oil-soaked toothpicks.
There were no reports of scorched doves or pigeons, or of smoke-blackened jays. I would like to believe that the birds were lost only to us, that they fled the fire in safety and found food and water and shelter in someone else’s yard. Perhaps they did.
It is difficult to tell what events were the direct result of the fire and what might have happened anyway. In the case of the house wrens, for instance, many of these birds desert the inhabited areas in early fall and spend the next six months in the brush-covered hills preferred by the Bewick wrens and wrentits. Their disappearance on the day the fire started, September 22, may simply have been a coincidence. Perhaps the palm warbler which came on September 25 would have come, fire or no fire; it provided us, however, with the first record of this species in Santa Barbara.
Members of the Audubon Society were asked to be on the lookout for unusual birds, and for noticeable increases or decreases in the number of the ordinary birds. Those who expected disastrous changes were pleasantly surprised by the normal pattern of the migrations:
The white-crowned sparrows arrived for the winter on schedule, on September 24, while the fire was still raging.
The Audubon warblers appeared the next day.
On the 28th, the hooded orioles left for Mexico, the Nashville warblers passed through on their way south and the last of the yellow warblers of the season were observed. On that day, too, the Oregon junco returned.
On October 3, our pair of Lincoln sparrows came back at the same time as the first dozen golden-crowned sparrows, always a week or two later than the white-crowns.
On October 8, the yellow-breasted chat concluded his yearly late-summer stay with us. I don’t know where he went but I’m willing to wager it was a banana-growing region. He was the only wild bird at the feeding station who always showed a distinct preference for bananas.
October 24 marked the return of two myrtle warblers a month later, as usual, than their look-alike cousins, the Audubons.
On November 17, a slaty fox sparrow arrived, followed three days later by one of the rusty subspecies. This was exactly on schedule as far as the feeding station was concerned. Fox sparrows are reported to reach southern California in mid-September and have been seen in Santa Barbara as early as September the 1st, but my records show only one arrival even close to that, on September 28, in 1961; the others have all been in November.
November also brought a burrowing owl, the first of this species to visit us, and he was duly recorded as home visitor No. 106. It’s possible that his appearance was indirectly caused by the fire since this species is not normally seen in canyon areas like ours. However, these birds aren’t always predictable. According to a report in Audubon Field Notes (Volume 19, No. 1), a burrowing owl had, during the previous month, come aboard a ship about sixty miles south of San Clemente Island.
What, then, were some actual results of the fire and what birds were affected?