aug 3
HOW THE STUPID GET THEMSELVES MAIMED OR KILLED, part 1:
This little mohawk-sporting guy looks like he’s about thirty seconds from the great beyond, but in fact was just having a little nap in my hand, after falling eighteen or so feet out of its nest and landing with a very sincere splat on our driveway.
I have been watching a House Finch nest in our carport since arriving a couple of weeks ago, mostly thinking of the mess they were making up in the rafters. They seem to nest three out of four seasons here. We are riddled with them. They are more ubiquitous in our neighborhood than Rock Pigeons, European Starlings, and House Sparrows combined. They mess with my peripheral vision when I am birding in the canyon, drawing me away from more interesting things, and insist on being the only visitors to the recently resurrected bird feeder on the back patio.
So I was just cruising past the nest on my way into the air-conditioning (the morning was, weather-wise, fantastic, but by the afternoon the heat and haze and smog had settled in), when I noticed a chick for the first time. It craned its tiny neck and looked at me, mostly bald, with spiky down on top of its head, and almost fluorescent-yellow baby lips (what’s the anatomical term for that?). In other words, it looked like a baby bird, and it looked ridiculous. So I went inside and got the binoculars.
The baby bird was obviously hot, its mom over-heated as well, both occupying that little nest and vying for some room, panting. Unwisely, it moved over to the edge of the nest. Simultaneously mom decided she had had enough of me watching her chick, and, panicking, fled the scene, knocking the little one into a nose-first death dive. The noise it made when it hit the pavement was surprisingly loud for something that only weighs a couple of ounces. Murderer, I silently called myself, and walked over apprehensively. The chick was stunned, looking half naked mole-rat, half tiny chicken, probably birdlouse-ridden, but very much alive. As soon as I set it into my palm, it went straight to sleep. It probably has internal injuries and will be dead in five minutes, I thought. Might as well take some photos.
The bird didn’t expire, though, so I went about looking for a way up to the nest. I hate heights. I also don’t like physical contact with spiders. The nest had a number of webs around it, contributing to the general nastiness up there: bird droppings and feathers caught in the webs, decorating the rafters. I can’t quite figure out how I forgot that California is so overrun with spiders. “California is so great,” I repeatedly tell friends, “because there are so few biting bugs. It’s not like HERE, where mosquitoes eat you alive, even in the city…” But the spiders are everywhere. The junipers look like cheesy Halloween bushes. There are wolf spiders trawling every surface in the house. There are an awful lot of variants in the basement that could never survive the light of day, and occasionally black widows. Everything left untouched for more than a week develops cobwebs of one sort or the other. In late summer, there are enormous orb weavers that make large pretty, spiral webs just outside doorways, at face level. They sit right in the middle, about where your mouth hits the web. I swear I have received static shocks from these webs when the weather was really dry, which reminds me, I have always wanted to ask a scientist about that.
So, bird in hand, I navigated the storeroom for ladders, brushing away sticky webs and some interesting translucent arachnids with a piece of cardboard from the recycling bin, which I will probably refuse to touch tomorrow and which will have to be dealt with by someone else, at some unknown time in the future. I felt very brave as I dragged a six-foot wooden ladder out of the darkness and set it up under the nest. It was about eight feet too short. Feeling silly, I was lucky to find another ladder in the garage, a nice red extension ladder that, though encrusted with webs, looked sturdy. It was too heavy for me to lift, so I started dragging it. I should point out that there was no one else around.
I put the bird into a loose coil of twine, which was inexplicably sitting out looking like a pristine bird nest, and it looked so preposterous that I took a photo of the bird sleeping in it. Then I got the hose and washed the ladder down because I was not touching that thing until the webs were off of it. This turned out to be pretty useless; webs are surprisingly water-resistant. So out came the cardboard, and ten minutes later I was wrestling the thing up against the wall. I got mud and webs all over me, of course. Because I couldn’t actually lift the thing, I had to walk it up the wall from underneath, and I found that the ladder was too tall, even when not extended. It sat there at a dangerous angle, the kind of angle that you only do if there’s someone with you, someone who can hold the feet and prevent it from sliding out from under you. Someone not too safety-conscious who wouldn’t tell you that it was too dangerous and that whatever, it was just a baby bird, they die all the time, etc.
After a conference call, I parked the car against the ladder, resting the front right tire against the ladder feet. And prepared to die (mental image: me on the pavement, prone, head cracked open, arm extended, small dead bird fetus-thing a foot away, bright red ladder all akimbo, across the car, which had the door still open. Spiders are in there somewhere, too. And people shaking their heads at how the stupid get themselves killed.).
Keeping the ladder from shifting side to side wasn’t easy while holding the baby bird, but I did make it up, and managed to get the bird into the nest without damage, and without getting the webs from the rafters in my hair (priorities). As of this evening, the mother had returned, and the chick was vocal and begging for food, so I think it might make it. If it pulls another Darwin award maneuver, it’s on its own, however.
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Next evening update: sadly, the baby finch must have fallen again, and I found it dead on the driveway this morning.
Posted a few photos @ http://flickr.com/photos/mydogoscar/
Catherine:
Amazing story. I want to encourage all readers of this blog to be sure to check out the photos linked above and look at how high this damned nest was and how unsure the lay of the ladder.
The end is not surprising. Birds typically do not fall out of the nest, otherwise, there would be no birds, but are ejected by the parents for a number of reasons. Parent birds certainly can detect unhealthy, non-hardy birds and especially in Passerines, eject those. Outbreaks of lice and other parasites may cause the chicks to move about un-naturally or cause the parents to abandon the nest. One of the adults may be missing. Facing the impossibility of tending a nest by itself, the adult may have abandoned the nest, causing the chick to move around crazily as it starved. Finally: Once you put the bird back after so much to-do, it may be the adult the found the nest location not great, too much going on, and decided to re-nest elsewhere. I can also say from personal experience that House Finches, which nest year round where you are, seem to have more young fall out of the nest than any other common passerine I know of. Perhaps it’s shoddy nest construction. After all, they are invasives. At least here in MA.
I cannot criticize you one whit, as I do the same stupid stuff all the time. My biggest most repeated gamble with wildlife, is helping huge Snapping Turtle cross major highways. I do wonder though, when doing stupid things to help creatures out, supposedly I got hit by a car or, in your case, you fell. Even if you (or I) did not die, think of all the consternation and trouble we would cause our loved ones. Is that worth it? Of course, that does not stop me for a second, nor does the attitude that we should do nothing, because it is happening in nature and we should just coldly stand back. I have a bundle of rationalizations, none of them satisfying, to counter that argument in my mind. In the end, I take a Buddhist attitude: anything we can do to relieve suffering, and to be compassionate to life, is worth doing.
Question: but would you go through all that if it was a COWBIRD chick? IE: where do you draw the line?
Sorry to hear about your arachnophobia. Whatever you do, do NOT take night hikes in the tropics. I help spiders out all the time. Love the whole arachnid family. I interviewed a chemical entomologist once, who discovered that the function of that big blob of webbing hanging down in the middle of orb weavers webs is so that birds can see the web and not fly into it.
Mark
Re: cowbird: I probably wouldn’t risk my neck for a cowbird.
Re: arachnophobia: I actually love spiders, but get all creeped out when I touch them or the webs. Used to feed the ones in the yard when I was a kid. And I always move them safely outside when I find them in the house. Cause I think they’ll get me if I squash em. OK, well, maybe I am little phobic.
Your drawing of the baby finch bird is beautiful. I see a collection emerging from your ‘dying and/or dead bird’ encounters.
I’m an arachnophobe-partly becuase my friend Martha was recently bitten by a brown recluse in AZ while gardening in her parents garden. She has the meanest scar to proove it. The scar looks like she was shot in battle. I’d never seen anything like it. And it was no small scar either! The nerve pain she describes was no picnic.
I really wish I didn’t fear them. I think it is also because I grew up with black widows everywhere & now in the PNW it’s the Hobo spider.
The cowbird question: interesting. Would you go one step further and kill it outright? The line between “good” House Finch and “bad” Cowbird here in MA is a narrow one: House Finches are invasives that have seriously displaced the native Purple Finch. It’s always interesting where one draws the line. I have walked away from a cowbird that has fallen out of a nest. The trouble is, the adult host always seems ready to still feed it. But I have never killed one outright.
ARACHNOPHOBIA: I understand it, but don’t have it. Brown Recluse bites are terrible. They ulcerate and take forever to heal, but still they are but one of hundreds of otherwise harmless spiders (though a number do bite). There are some wild looking spiders even around here: like big fishing spiders and huge lynx spiders. The fear of touching the web sounds like a Sartrean existential fear right out of Nausea. Fear of contamination; of foreign substances sticking to you and not being able to get them off. How do both of you feel about other inverts like large centipedes or scorpions? Big Insects like mantids? Slugs? I freaked like you would not believe the first time I was covered with terrestrial leeches. But I got over it.
Mark
Methinks it’s time to knock that nest down (somehow). It’s a good sturdy one that’s been used for multiple broods over at least the last three years, and this will have been the third brood in it this year. Good location, safe from marauding scrub jays. It’s getting pretty poopy – no surprise. Before this episode we had the occasional egg splat; this is the first whole bird.
About the spiders: Back when I could walk down the driveway hill to pick up the newspaper I had this big thick stick, gnarly and about six feet long. The neighbors must have thought I’d lost it, ’cause when I went for the paper I’d walk down the driveway waving that stick up and down in empty air. Those orb weavers would put their nightly webs in the trees and bushes but would often string their traveling silk across the driveway, right at face level. That stuff is STRONG! A lighter person could have been slung right back up the hill.
As for arachnophobia, I’ve been known to humanely move a few stray crawlies outside, and tolerate some of the more delicate-looking ones, but I can shriek with the best of them.
Scorpions (of which I have seen a number) and slugs and such don’t bother me much. Coolest pseudo-scorpion sighting was when house-sitting for neighbors here in Altadena. I was lying on the rug, watching tv, and a windscorpion ran across in front of my nose. Thought it was a carnivorous potato bug.
Don’t know what a windscorpion is? Search it at this cool site:
http://www.whatsthatbug.com
When we were at Asa Wright in Trinidad, we got to know two of the young (teen) naturalists well, discussing our mutual enjoyment of Public Enemy. So they decided to take us out on a private night hike of the property. This obnoxious woman who was leading a Chicago Audubon group got wind of this and was incinsed we, who were not on any organized trip, were getting to do somethign she was not and INSISTED on going too. She met us sans “torch” (flshlight) as we staretd to hike. About a quarter mile out it was revealed and became quite obvious that she had for real ARACHNAPHOBIA. Like pee in your pants, screaming kind. A night walk in the Trinadadian rain forest was not the place to be and since she did not have a light and we wanted to continue, and she had insisted on foisting herself on us, we made her continue. Now, from this point on, this story reminds me in intent and tone, about Catherine’s tale of her tormentor and the Macaques. Yes, it was sadistic. But she asked for it.
Well, to being with, there are these large CRABS that walk under the leave litter (size of Blue Crabs) that suddenly scuttle or pop out raising thier claws. All sorts of spiders, scorpions, centipedes, millipedes and other invert is about on business. Perhaps the most bizarre and huge and disturbing even to me (well, at first) were the big VINEGAROONS. These are the ultimate Whip Scorpions Catherine mentions.
SEE:
this
Or for film:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o16jYGZwmyw
By this time she was close to apoplectic. We got to a gate and on the gate was sitting, no exagerration, the mother of all Tarantulas. The guys hit one end of the hollow metal pole that was the gate and the spider squeezed inside. They lifted up the gate and you heard this long sliiiiiiide down of the body of the tarantula. The Chicago Audubon woman just freaked and we had to send her back with one of the guys. She was going to need Valium plus to get through the night.
The rest of us enjoyed seeing sleeping Giant Antbirds and watchign Oilbirds actually feed on fruit.
But I learned to love those Vinegaroons.
And we were never bothered by that woman again even though we saw her many times over the next few weeks.
Mark
On a completely different subject:
I just interviewed ROBERT ADANTO, who directed THE RISING TIDE about contemporary Chinese artists like Zhang O and Yang Yong. I think you saw a lot of this work recently, but did you see this film?
There is a showing at WAM in about two weeks.
Mark
Re: The Rising Tide: haven’t seen it. Too bad I’m not in MA.
Maybe we need to do a book on unusual revenge stories? Just a thought, it’s not like I need a job or anything. Oh, wait, I do need a job. Like really really need a job. Hmmm…